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Hardball Times: Tommy John


weams

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Only 78%, what the heck?

Seriously, this is a pretty significant career ending injury before the first surgery a few decades ago.

So it's not automatic like an ACL.

Another reason to remind the younger pitchers, not to run off and do this at the first twinge of pain.

The most recent data suggest that one out of two major league pitchers who has Tommy John surgery will throw fewer than 100 innings the rest of his big league career
Yeah, it is some significant information here.
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One thing to keep in mind when looking at this, is the older pitchers struggling with declining skills, they do TJ and they think its going to fix all of their woes.

Based on just anecdotal evidence, there aren't too many older pitchers that go down for the knife. Seems to be a much much higher percentage of prospects and 1-3

Years of Service time players.

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One thing to keep in mind when looking at this, is the older pitchers struggling with declining skills, they do TJ and they think its going to fix all of their woes.

He addresses it too. The younger guys have a better chance of pitching 100 innings in their entire career. It helps to be young. It does not chance the data plane though.

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Very scary stuff for those who assumed that Bundy will bounce back at 95-100% of what he was prior to having TJ surgery. For me, it's not the 78% success rate that's scary, it's the limited number of average innings these guys throw even if they do return to the majors. However, to really understand the data, you'd need to understand whether these guys were really good before they had their surgery or not.

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Very scary stuff for those who assumed that Bundy will bounce back at 95-100% of what he was prior to having TJ surgery. For me, it's not the 78% success rate that's scary, it's the limited number of average innings these guys throw even if they do return to the majors. However, to really understand the data, you'd need to understand whether these guys were really good before they had their surgery or not.

Absolutely true. But we must assume if we are talking folks that had pitched in the major leagues, they were among the top 1000 pitchers in the world. That would be a good start for thinking about that issue.

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I wonder about the accuracy of the data. According to data published with the article, here's a complete list of pitchers who have thrown 1,000 innings the majors after having TJ Surgery:

Tommy John 2,544

A.J. Burnett 2,043

Kerry Wood 1,475

Ryan Dempster 1,423

Odalis Perez 1,231

Kerry Ligtenberg 1,213

Randy Wolf 1,149

Steve Sparks 1,029

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gQujXQQGOVNaiuwSN680Hq-FDVsCwvN-3AazykOBON0/edit?pli=1#gid=0

However, after I typed this, I got to wondering how many innings Erik Bedard threw after his TJ surgery. According to the spreadsheet, it's zero, but in reality, it's 1,303. That's a pretty gaping error. I wonder how many other mistakes this list contains.

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I wonder about the accuracy of the data. According to data published with the article, here's a complete list of pitchers who have thrown 1,000 innings the majors after having TJ Surgery:

Tommy John 2,544

A.J. Burnett 2,043

Kerry Wood 1,475

Ryan Dempster 1,423

Odalis Perez 1,231

Kerry Ligtenberg 1,213

Randy Wolf 1,149

Steve Sparks 1,029

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gQujXQQGOVNaiuwSN680Hq-FDVsCwvN-3AazykOBON0/edit?pli=1#gid=0

However, after I typed this, I got to wondering how many innings Erik Bedard threw after his TJ surgery. According to the spreadsheet, it's zero, but in reality, it's 1,303. That's a pretty gaping error. I wonder how many other mistakes this list contains.

Did Bedard have a second TJ surgery?

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TJ surgery seems to be have become a routine procedure

presently. The attitude is you are going to need it someday, get

it done now. The need for it earlier in life may indicate that kids

are throwing too hard, too young and too many innings(and practice)

before the skeletal/muscular system are strong enough for such strong

stresses on those systems.

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TJ surgery seems to be have become a routine procedure

presently. The attitude is you are going to need it someday, get

it done now.

Of course, the whole point of this article is that this attitude is completely wrongheaded because TJ surgery is much riskier than most people realize.

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Yeah, that chart is seriously messed up. Just glancing through I found several players who had the surgery before reaching the Majors and none of them were credited with any post-surgery MLB innings. Darren Oliver, Billy Koch, Jay Payton, and Eric Gagne, Jarrod Parker, among dozens of others never reached the Majors according to the chart. There are also other players who had it during their MLB careers who are also not listed as having returned. Scott Aldred is one, as is the aforementioned Bedard.

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78% is a meaningless figure without something to compare to. At first glance I actually think 78% of pretty high because my perception is the rate of return without surgery is likely approaching 0%.

I wonder if anyone knows the rate of return for pitchers who opt not to have surgery after the doctors recommend it. Is the sample size on this even meaningful? Pretty much every pitcher I can recall going down with this injury gets the surgery.

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