Chris Tillman Needs To Get Right

[Il BuonO]

1 minute ago, weams said:

I believe there is no surgery that would give him back his former slot. 

He may have to become one of those guys who develops a different pitch and recreates himself. Maybe he leans more heavily on the two seam FB and sequentially changing pitch selection (i.e. pitching backwards). That may be better served on a team not trying to retool and has so little room for error.

[Luke-OH]

6 minutes ago, weams said:

I believe there is no surgery that would give him back his former slot. 

I don't know enough about the injury or Tillman's mechanics to speculate on that.  I just think the Orioles should thank him for his contributions and let him go.  If no one wants him, I'd be fine with a minor league deal with incentives if he makes the club.

[weams]

Just now, phillyOs119 said:

I don't know enough about the injury or Tillman's mechanics to speculate on that.  I just think the Orioles should thank him for his contributions and let him go.  If no one wants him, I'd be fine with a minor league deal with incentives if he makes the club.

He says he is not injured. So you don't cut that. 

[mdbdotcom]

5 minutes ago, Il BuonO said:

He may have to become one of those guys who develops a different pitch and recreates himself. Maybe he leans more heavily on the two seam FB and sequentially changing pitch selection (i.e. pitching backwards). That may be better served on a team not trying to retool and has so little room for error.

Sidearm knuckle-baller with occasional 90-mph fastball. Could be Buck's new pet project.

[Luke-OH]

3 minutes ago, weams said:

He says he is not injured. So you don't cut that. 

I meant the injury that caused the change, I'd imagine he'd be able to get back to the delivery he's used for the last however many years if there wasn't a physical impediment to it.  He might not consider it an active injury, but it's something that affects his performance.  He can call it whatever he wants.  It's kind of like my knee before I got surgery this year, it wasn't actively injured but it didn't have an ACL so I couldn't do things with it that I could do before I tore my ACL 3 years ago.  It didn't hurt and I could do most things, but it wasn't right.  That's how I see Tillman's shoulder.

[Luke-OH]

5 minutes ago, mdbdotcom said:

Sidearm knuckle-baller with occasional 90-mph fastball. Could be Buck's new pet project.

As long as the project takes place in Norfolk, I'm cool with it.

[Frobby]

On 10/21/2017 at 4:30 PM, Beef Supreme said:

Surgery is not just for "something seriously wrong in there structurally." Seems rotator cuffs have fallen out of vogue when talking about pitcher injuries, but something as common as scar tissue could be preventing Tillman from being able to lift his arm fully.

It's just a guess but I thought he appeared to be injured from his first start this past season. He changed his arm slot, he changed his landing spot, he lost the ability to hit the strike zone with any consistency, he was rocked when he actually threw strikes -- some people might say he is a "duck" (i.e. injured) because he is walking like a duck and quacking like a duck. Sure, they may be other reasons for his historically bad season following a known injury, but I think it is highly likely that the reason for his failure is that he is still injured.

This seems totally plausible to me, but without a doctor examining him and diagnosing that, it’s hard to know.