The Orioles’ starting rotation isn’t built for the long haul but a promising early spring from the starters and the welcomed relief of having Felix Bautista back on the bump has Luke Jones and Nestor cautiously optimistic about Mike Elias’ ability to piece together a one-year program with Tomoyuki Sugano, Charlie Morton and the remaining cast from last season.
Nestor Aparicio and Luke Jones discussed the Orioles’ spring training plans, focusing on pitching. They highlighted the significance of Charlie Morton and Felix Bautista’s performances, noting Morton’s first televised game and Bautista’s readiness for early March games. They emphasized the importance of maintaining pitching health, citing past injuries to key players like Grayson Rodriguez and Kyle Bradish. Jones stressed the need for a gradual velocity build-up for Bautista post-Tommy John surgery. They also touched on the broader issues of pitcher health, the cultural pressure to throw harder, and the potential for future advancements in injury recovery and prevention.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Orioles spring training, pitching plans, Felix Bautista, Charlie Morton, Tommy John surgery, pitching injuries, Grayson Rodriguez, pitching velocity, pitching health, pitching mechanics, pitching workload, pitching performance, pitching depth, pitching recovery, pitching management.
SPEAKERS
Luke Jones, Nestor Aparicio
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home. We are W, N, S T. Am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. We’re back on the grid here. This week, we’ll be doing the Maryland crab cake tour. On Thursday, we’ll be at fade Lee’s election to market all afternoon for lunch time, stop by. Don’t sleep on the shrimp salad or the mac and cheese. I mean, the crab cakes are delicious. And I know you’re getting one little tomatoes the whole deal, even the big French fries, little steak fries, they do down there. But we’ll see you now. To Felix. We’re gonna be doing the Maryland crab cake tour every week through the spring. We’re back at fatales on the second Oriole game, which is April 2. We’re gonna be at Cocos on April 30, and I’m still putting together this. Oh, we’re at, we’re at Pete’s John’s on the 21st of March, on a Friday, so we’re looking forward to that. So adding places, if you know places, throw me a note nest at Baltimore positive.com you know, I know the seasons are colliding here, Luke, because my hate mails up when baseball season happens, I get a lot more hate mail. So I don’t know why that is, but it is factual. The Justin Tucker thing is out there. The Combine is wrapped. We have free agency next week. Can we just do a week of baseball? Can we just do spring training this week? I mean, are they? Are they still playing down there in Sarasota? Luke,
Luke Jones 01:16
yeah, they are. And there’s going to be a game on TV, and there’s going to even be some relevance to what we watch. We’re going to get our first televised look at Charlie Morton as an Oriole, right? I mean, obviously, someone who’s been around a long time, as we’ve joked about, he’s only a month or two younger than me, at 41 years old, we’re going to,
Nestor Aparicio 01:35
I saw him pitch to Garrett. I’m telling you, back in the day
Luke Jones 01:38
you might have, I mean, he’s been around for he’s been around for a
Nestor Aparicio 01:41
few I bet he’s pitched to somebody like Julio Franco that played in the 70s or so. You know? I bet there’s something going on
Luke Jones 01:48
there, right? I don’t know if I might not be Julio Franco, but probably someone that you’d be surprised to hear, right? I mean, that’s
Nestor Aparicio 01:56
what we always find out with the veteran guys. It’s like this guy pitched to somebody that Brooks Robinson played. It’s crazy, but when 41 year old guys are still pitching, that’s that’s an anomaly. It really is.
Luke Jones 02:07
It’s something you don’t see very often, and it’s something that you hope that Grayson, Rodriguez and Dean Kramer and Cade Povich and some of these younger guys in the rotation pick up a thing or two, right? In the same way that you hope that Corbin burns instilled some lessons in some of these guys, even though he’s now pitching in Arizona. But yeah, we’re going to see Charlie Morton. We’re going to get our first televised look at Tomoyuki Sagano. I think there’s a lot of excitement there. And I think the biggest one Nestor and this, this was confirmed over the weekend, Felix Bautista, going to start getting into games. And I think that was something that we were kind of waiting to see when exactly they were going to pitch him in games. And I think there was always a sense of taking a little bit of pause and making sure, okay, if he’s only making a spring debut, say March 21 is he going to be ready for the opener? Well, if he’s pitching in early March, assuming no setbacks, assuming he’s feeling good, assuming everything is continuing to trend in the right direction, then there’s no reason to think he won’t be ready for opening day. So I thought that was good news. And obviously, depending on, you know, when we reconvene, we’ll, we’ll see what the performance is like. But some, definitely some interest. You know, the first couple televised games, you know, had a chance to see Kade povidge. He pitched well. We’ve seen Albert Suarez. He has not pitched well early in grapefruit League. What does it mean right now? I’m unmoved either way, when we’re talking about late February, in the first week of March, but business does start to pick up. As you mentioned, we’re now inside the same month that the Orioles will start playing games for real. So you think about
Nestor Aparicio 03:43
reason that anything that goes wrong now affects opening day. If you get a latch strain, to get a this or that Rodriguez is at the back issue the shoulder, like, whatever it is, you just need to keep one of these guys isn’t going to be ready to pitch in Toronto, right? Like somebody, something’s going to strain, or this or that. It’s March. It’s where it is. It’s got to make sure, I mean, season one off the rails last year because of injuries. It really did.
Luke Jones 04:06
It did, and not just the pitching. I mean, the pitching, as we talked about, I mean, the pitching kind of it was admirable, how they held the pitching staff together, really. It was really the position side, you know, whether we’re talking about westburg being out, you know, they lost Jorge Mateo, so that left them a little less flexible infield wise. Obviously, whatever was going on with Adley rutman, which I’ll still maintain that there had to be some kind of physical issue, even if that wasn’t all of it, there was something going on there for him to be that bad, but, but, yeah, I mean, and right now, I mean, they’re dealing with Westbrook’s been dealing with a little bit of a lower back soreness. He, he seems to be okay. You know, he’s he’s resuming baseball activities. Gunner Henderson, dealing with a little bit of a side issue. So, you know, we’re still three ish weeks out, right, three and a half weeks out from opening day. So nothing to sound the alarm about. But certainly, as you alluded to. But on the pitching side, if you have someone have a physical issue start to creep up, then, yeah, you’re starting to worry about opening day. You’re starting to worry about, you know, just how effective they’re going to be early on in the season. And that, to me, was why it was so positive to hear that Batista is ready to start throwing in some great fruit league games. I think the big thing for him beyond just how he feels. What’s the velocity look like, right? I mean, we’re used to a Felix Batista that throws 100 you know, typically when you see guys coming back from Tommy John, there’s a little bit of a gradual build with the Velo coming back, right? I mean, we might see a Batista that’s at 96 or 97 and look, that’s okay for right now, but you want to see that velocity continue to creep up as he gets some of these more competitive in game in you know that that environment under his belt, because he hasn’t done that since what late August of 2023 he hasn’t thrown a competitive pitch since then. So it does take a little bit of time there. But what we know from Tommy John surgery and guys working their way back, understanding, no, it’s not 100% but it is a very high return rate, much higher than it was three or four decades ago, but we know that guys typically should get back to the point where their velocity is back to where it was pre injury form. You hope, so. You hope, probably not on march 3 or March 10, but you hope at some point early in the season, we see a Felix Batista that’s once again flirting with throwing 100 101 right? I mean, you’re hoping you see that at some point as the year goes on. So you know, in the meantime, you’re not necessarily going to lean on him as hard as you did a couple years ago, but he’s certainly going to be in that mix with everyone else, and it’s good news, right? I’ll certainly, I’ll feel better about a returning Felix Bautista, much better than I did about Craig Kimbrel last July. So yeah, we’ll see how that plays out, but good to see him back on the field, getting into some real games still this early in spring training. Yeah, interesting.
Nestor Aparicio 07:04
You bring up the injury thing as a just 101 miles an hour, he’s got to hit Triple D. I mean, you almost sound like all the rest of them at this point, in regard to like, what’s expected out of these guys. If the guys throw in 96 or 97 right now, you gotta be able to get people out in the big leagues if you know, he doesn’t need to throw 103 that’s how he blew his arm out to begin with. Like there’s a part of this where 9798 ought to be plenty with command. And you know, I wonder what they want out of a guy like him, what they talk about behind closed doors and say, well, we got a year and a half. I don’t even, I don’t have a media credential. I don’t talk to these people. I don’t talk to doctors. I, you know, I read what I read. I take a lot of it with a grain of salt, because I see it with my eyes, right? If he’s back out on the field and he’s five appearances in and it’s April 23 then I judge it like, you know? I mean, like, because that’s real baseball. That’s April, that’s cold weather, that’s all of that. That’s situational, um, you know, that’s against the Yankees and the Red Sox and against big league, big league hitters. But I wonder, when they say he’s coming back from Tommy, because they have all the science, all the charts, all the die, all they want, do they really expect him to look just like he looked a year and a half ago? A little different. I mean, he got guys out. He was a great strike zone pitcher, but so much of it was predicated on he throws harder than everybody else by Alliance, the hardest anybody’s thrown in this organization and all that. I don’t know that he has to be that to be effective again. And that’s it concerns me. You know, you’re like, you put them back together again. Every time these guys throw a pitch, I think at Dave drive, I think of these, but 50% of the guys in the in the sport have had a knife, and they’re out there. You know, on any given night, if the Orioles have four guys in a game, you’d say three out of the four have had surgery of some kind at some point during their career, because that’s just kind of how pitching is at this point, once you’re 25 years old.
Luke Jones 09:05
Well, and what’s wild about that, and I don’t know what the exact percentage was, I know there was data taken several years back that kind of estimated that at least a third of professional pitchers had had Tommy John. I’m guessing it’s ticking up. But what you have to look at is not just, did they have Tommy John in the majors? Did they have it in the minors? Did they have it in college? Did they have it in high school? I mean, you hear about 13 and 14 year olds having Tommy John surgery. I’m guessing most of those never make it to the majors. But the point is, they
Nestor Aparicio 09:34
act like, it’s like a vasectomy, you just get fixed, and you’re good, yeah, and it’ll run off. And I will say the weekend, yeah. And it’s not, it’s that’s not what this
Luke Jones 09:42
is, no and that. And that’s why, if you recall a year ago, at this time, who were we talking about? We were talking about Kyle Bradish. And there was a sentiment at that point in time of, well, just have the surgery. That way you’re ready for 2025 and look, there’s, I’m not saying there’s no merit to that. If someone has a. CL injury, and there’s no practical path to just rehabbing and resting and recovering and being able to pitch again. I think when you look at a situation like that, when it’s, you know, a slight tear, and you try to go that route, and you can point to guys that have had UCL sprains. You know, Tanaka for the Yankees, famously had a UCL sprain and pitched with it the rest of his career, and pitched with it for quite a long time. And we we’ve seen others like that, but those tend to be the exceptions, not the norm. But the point is, we don’t want to be that flippant about surgery, because even though the return rate is very high, it’s not 100% and we’ve seen, you know, a case like John means, for example, I mean, John means had Tommy John surgery. It’s going to be coming up on next month, will be three years since John means had his first Tommy John surgery. Of course, we know he had to have a correction to it last year. And we’ve seen John means since then make, what, seven, eight starts in the major league since then? I mean, it’s now, and we’re talking about someone who was an all star, albeit for a really bad Orioles team, but someone who threw a no hitter four years ago, right? So it’s, you know, it is something that you want to tread carefully with. And you know, you make an interesting point talking about, well, how much velocity is enough? You know, that’s kind of, I mean, that’s a cultural question in baseball right now, right? I mean, that is systemic and and it’s not just, let’s be clear, I don’t want to sit here and just make the teams, the bad guys, the players are into it just as much, right? I mean, these were the guys that 5678, years ago, you were hearing about guys going to driveline, or some of these pitching labs on their own to say, Hey, I throw 92 I’d really like to be able to throw 95 and that would really change my career. You know, so, so a lot of these guys did it on their own. And if you talk to these players to a man, and you know, I’m not talking out of turn here. You’ve even heard guys go on the record saying this, where there have been players saying, You know what? I know that my arm probably can only take so much, and I’ll probably have to get Tommy John, and I hope, I hope my rotator cuff holds up, because returning from something like that is a way different animal. But I also know that this is my way to maximize my earnings. You know, this is my livelihood, that I have a very limited window to earn lucrative money and to carve out a major league career for myself. So I am going to exhaust every avenue. And yes, if that means that I have to get cut on at some point in time, well, that that’s the cost of doing business. I mean, that’s really the culture that’s been created. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, right, but that’s also, they’ll fix it. They’ll still fix they say they can make me better. They can. It’s like, but it’s like, $6 million bionic, right? Yeah, it really is. I mean, it really is that. And, you know, again, I’m not saying that’s good. I’m not, I don’t want to celebrate that mindset, but that is the mindset that is pervasive in in not just Major League Baseball, but minor league baseball, college baseball. I mean, you see these kids that are 16 years old going to these showcase events, and it’s all about how hard can you throw if you’re a pitcher? So, you know, we have analytics, we have sports science, we have all this tracking data. We have these, these super slow mo HD cameras that can break down your mechanics in a way that only the finest pitching coaches could do 30 years ago. Right? It is so scientific now, but that said the UCL, you know, the ulnar collateral ligament, or talking about these lat strains that guys like Grayson Rodriguez have had. You know, your body can still only take so much if you’re not and some of it is genetics. You know, it’s not necessarily that you even have terrible mechanics or anything. Sometimes you just can’t take it. You know, you think about the the human arm. What did God create the human arm to to throw 102 miles per hour? And some people would argue and say, well, they found a way to throw 102 miles per hour. But you say, Okay, are you going to hold up when you’re throwing 102 but you’re also, you know, you’re torquing the arm in a way to have a nasty slider or nasty sweeper or breaking ball or whatever, and you just think about the strain that that puts on your elbow and your shoulder and what that means. So, you know, obviously we’re getting it deeper into the weeds here, you know, from a philosophical standpoint. But to go back to your question with Felix Batista, yeah, if he’s throwing 97 to begin the year, or 98 to begin the year, assuming his commands there, assuming he’s got his secondary pitches, there’s no reason to think he can’t be effective. But we also know from a physical standpoint and understanding how these pitchers train, how these teams train, how. They track release point and arm angle, all those different things that the goal is for him to get back to a point where he was now. There are pitchers who try to refine their mechanics, and that’s an that’s an ongoing process, right? That’s not something that you just have mechanics one way, and then you get hurt and, oh, you change it. You’re constantly tweaking. And, you know, with a lot of this tracking data, they can look at guys and see, you know, for example, and this wasn’t a Batista thing, but just certain pitchers. You can see that their release point, you know, start, you know, it starts to change. You know, their arm angle drops a little bit. You know, a pitcher suddenly is not dropping down to sidearm, but maybe it’s a little more three quarters motion that tends to be a sign that someone’s getting a little tired, right? So you hope that with this data, in a big picture, holistic sense, that you’re trying to keep pitchers healthy, as I’ve said to you, the next frontier, you know, if you think back to Moneyball, back in the late 90s and early 2000s and everything that’s happened since then, all the different you know breakthroughs, and you know, whether they’re truly breakthroughs or not, is certainly a lot of these things are cyclical. But I think the next great frontier for teams that you know in terms of being successful, in terms of maximizing their assets and protecting their resources, is truly Player Health, you know, is there, are there some breakthroughs here to try to, you know, and there’s been with surgery. I mean, internal brace is something that’s now used in some of these Tommy John UCL correction surgeries that they say helps, you know, expedite the recovery rate, although not as much as maybe advertised at first. But you know, are there some breakthroughs? Are there? Is there some data? Is there some information that can perhaps preserve some of these guys from a UCL standpoint, you know, from a an elbow standpoint, the team that does that and can kind of count, balance that with keeping the performance at a certain level, boy, they’ll be at a big advantage. I mean, think about the Orioles last year to go bring it back. Full circle to the Orioles, you talked about it with the injuries. Let’s just say the Orioles had Corbin burns, Kyle Bradish, kept Grayson Rodriguez healthy. You know, you have those big three. Maybe they had still gotten Zach Eflin, who knows, and they had that kind of a rotation. I mean, who knows? I mean, maybe they’re hitting would have been enough, even with the way it was struggling. I don’t know. Again, it’s tough to say that when they scored one stinking run in two games against the Royals. But my point with that is, if some of these organizations can make some breakthroughs into keeping pitchers healthy and maintenance and things of that nature a little bit more successfully than boy, you talk about an advantage that would be right up there with anything else that we’ve had in terms of discovery or proprietary information. I mean, that would be a big one. So, you know, at this point, I would say, I’m not so sure there’s any teams that are all that close, considering how many arm injuries we see across baseball, especially this time of year, when you’re talking about spring training. But you know, I think you know again, to bring it back to Batista, you just want to see health. You want to see good mechanics. You do? Yeah, you do want to see the velocities tick back up. But does it need to be 102, on opening day? No, of course not. In fact, I’m guessing you’d want to see more of a gradual build up over the next couple months. I I’d say this whatever his average velocity is in July or August. I certainly hope that’s higher than it is in April, and not the other way around, right? You don’t want them to start out throwing it 100 in April, if that means he’s at 96 in August, and then you’re saying, Okay, is there something going on? Is his elbow feeling right? Is his shoulder now messed up, right? So
Nestor Aparicio 18:55
I do wonder how much they’re babying him, right? And that’s what my question is. A year and a half into this, yeah, at what point does do the wheels come off and you say, Okay, go out and do it again. And if you’re John, means you’re John means, you know what I mean, if you get hurt again, you get hurt again. I don’t know where that full strength and that full ability is, you know, I had a knee surgery in 2006 I felt it for 10 years. You mean just walking, right? So I don’t know when your mind gets right. I mean, I remember even like Tom Brady having that awful injury that he had. We don’t remember that, but in the prime of his career, he had an injury like Flacco did, where it just cost him the season and the next year. It’s ginger, and it’s, am I going to get hit? How am I going to be in the pocket of that’s football, baseball, it’s man. This can happen at two o’clock in the afternoon on a backfield. Just this can happen in grabbing laundry, you know, literally, where it’s just, um, it’s fragile. And even these big six foot seven guys that are that look like, you know, um. Adonis is, and they get in the gym, and they’re doing all the things, and they’ve had, I just, I wonder how this Humpty Dumpty is going to stay together for the whole thing, not just for him, for all of it, because we talk about all of them in real terms. We’re like, Morton, he’s 41 he’ll be fine. Sugano came over. He throws nothing but strikes. He’s going to be fine. Hey, they got Grayson’s back. He’s just going to be healthy this year, even though he’s never really been healthy for a year. So for a year. So and then it’s where’s the workload to your point? Where’s the velocity after the all star break versus before the all star break, and the ramping up part of this organization trying to get pitching, keep pitching more healthy than it has been. And I don’t know that it’s anything that’s trainable. We talk about things in the ravens and their injuries a couple of years ago, and how they kind of cut some of that out, and they got better at it. All these teams are trying to do that because these are the biggest investments they have. And they didn’t even give Corbin burns two $30 million and be worried about is a UCLA or UCL, or, you know, anything going on with his arm, but that’s always the biggest concern with all these guys. Is, right now it feels like the water’s calm. It’s early March. We can talk about all these pitchers, and we certainly have the bats. We haven’t even talked about offense at all. I mean, Gunner Anderson came off the field last week, kind of gave everybody a scare on Twitter. Um, but the pitching is, 90% of the game is Earl Weaver would say, or whatever it would be, that if they don’t have the pitching we saw this last year, in addition to that, you and I would also say they don’t have enough pitching you and I would still say there are there a two or three at the trading deadline away from being what you would want them to ideally Be in October. And that’s nothing to do with attrition, or Albert Suarez doesn’t appear this year, or one of the Japanese guys a flop in some way or injured. I don’t know that they have deep depth gear in that way, and that’s why we’re going to talk so much about pitching, because any thing that shifts the tectonic plates of what they have. There’s no Bradish waiting. There’s no means waiting all the things we talked about this time last year, the only thing that’s waiting now is, oh, we’re gonna have to deal serious prospects, and Uncle David’s gonna have to get his checkbook out.
Luke Jones 22:12
Yeah, well, and I will throw out because you mentioned Bradish. I mean, maybe he’s there in August, right? I mean, that’s that’s possible. You can’t count on that then, right? I mean that to me, that the best. And I’ll just say this about Bradish, and then I’ll get back to I just
Nestor Aparicio 22:25
don’t think he’s starting game two. Oh yeah, yeah. I think, to me, the best
Luke Jones 22:30
case scenario for Kyle Bradish, if we’re working within the realm of realistic, good scenarios, right? Would be Kyle Bradish gets to the point where he is an option for you in September. And you know what? Maybe he’s a guy that is a two winning opener for you in one of these games, right? You know? And look, we saw the Dodgers throw bullpen games on the way to winning the World Series. So don’t tell me it’s not possible. But yeah, you’re certainly not expecting Kyle Bradish to be taking the ball in game one or Game Two, even if everything goes perfectly, right? I mean, keep in mind, he had surgery June of last year. So, you know, typically you’re talking 12 to 16 months. So 14 months would be August, you know, where he maybe can go on a rehab assignment. Then we’ll see, right? Right? I mean, who knows, but, you know, there’s something you mentioned, and I think this is where it’s interesting for Batista. As much as we tend to focus on velocity, because we see that every pitch on the telecast, you know, you see the the miles per hour right on every single pitch that that’s televised, at least during the regular season, spring training, we don’t get to see a whole lot of it, and that’s another issue for another day. But I think for Batista, or any of these pictures, and you mentioned it this term, you mentioned the term, and I’m glad you used this word, babying them, right? And obviously, I know you meant it in a way that was not You meant it in a way that you’re just trying to show some care for pitchers. But I think that’s what’s so fascinating about all of this, is you think about, and not just the Orioles. We’re just using the Orioles as an example here. Just about every team does these types of things, but you think about the how carefully they manage the innings of minor league pitchers as they’re coming up through the system, and you can look at it’s very systematic. I mean, Grayson Rodriguez, he wasn’t throwing 100 pitches per start in the minor leagues, not even close to that. Right? He may maybe got up to the point in Norfolk where maybe he was throwing 80 to 85 or maybe hit 90 a couple times in efforts to limit guys innings, you know what? There had always been kind of a mindset, you know, a, you know, a loose Rule of, you know, maybe you tack on 20 to 30 additional innings per year of development. But what happens when a pitcher gets hurt? Then, what’s that mean for their total innings in terms of trying to manage that? And that’s where you look at Batista. And we forget because of what happened. But I’m looking at his numbers right now. Batista his first year with the Orioles, and keep in mind he, you know, that was 2022 he kind of came out of nowhere. He threw 65 and two thirds innings, right? I mean, that that’s a pretty good workload for a for a reliever. How many innings? Did he throw in? 23 when he got hurt in late August. Keep it in mind, there were five and a half weeks to go, six weeks to go somewhere in that neighborhood, he was already up to 61 innings. So he had almost matched his his, you know, his total for the previous year. So how much did that have to do with the injury? It might have had something to do with it, or it might have had nothing to do with it, right? I mean, and that’s where I kind of get back to these teams. As much as they try to quantify, as much as they try to use data, there’s still so much unknown here. As much as you try to make it science, there’s still an art element to this that some pitchers just stay durable. I mean, look at someone like Charlie Morton. He’s 41 right? Go. Look at his career. I mean, not saying he hasn’t had injuries, but he’s done it for a very long time. You know, you talk about someone like Max Scherzer, who I realize, the last couple years has been hurt, but did it for a very long time. Justin Verlander, I get it, yeah, Tommy John? Like, yeah, it’s like what we said. I mean, it’s rare now to find pitchers who haven’t had Tommy John at some point. But the point is, you have guys like that who, you know, they throw until, until the the arm falls off in their early 40s, right? And they do it for a really, really long time. But then you see pitchers who have Tommy John and at age 23 and you know, even though they might have been a hot shot prospect at some point, they never make it then. So as much as these teams try to have these, I don’t know if you call it systems, because I don’t know if it’s a perfect, exact science. Because, you know, in some ways, it feels like they’re just throwing, you know what, at the wall and hoping that it sticks. But as much as you’ve seen these teams try to manage innings, I’ll go back to Grayson Rodriguez as an example. This, as much as they tried to manage his innings in the minor leagues, he still had a couple lat strains here, right, and no catastrophic injuries, but he still has had issues staying healthy, even though they’ve managed his innings. So that’s where you do look at it and say, All right, artificially, you know, limit, deliberately, limiting, arbitrarily, limiting someone’s in innings to 150 or 130 or 160 because the guy threw 135 the year before. Is that really the results would tell you we’re not keeping pitchers any healthier than we ever did, right? Because it’s it’s worse, because of the velocity and and the spin they’re trying to put on the ball and the movement they’re trying to get out of the baseball. So that’s a long winded way of saying, I still don’t know how much these teams really know what they’re doing in terms of keeping pitchers healthy in terms of maximizing performance when they’re out on the on the mound. Yeah, guys are throwing harder with more break and more spin than ever, but at what cost? And that’s where it goes back to your original Batista query, and saying, Well, if he’s only throwing 98 can he still be effective, and who knows? Does that help keep them healthier for the long run? And you know what? That’s a completely fair question. The problem, however, is when you have this arms race from team to team, someone is always going to be willing to try to throw harder and spin the ball more and get more break, and that, in turn, makes it tougher on your hitters, and it’s going to make it more difficult for you to win games. So it’s that whole, you know, it’s basically peer pressure, right? Everyone else is doing it. So in a way, it’s almost the new ped dilemma here, not that these guys are doing anything illegal or against the rules, but is it what’s best for the game long term, when you’re just seeing these teams just run through pitchers, right? I mean, that’s why I said the great the next great frontier, is someone that and maybe, maybe it’s not a training technique or a workload management tool, maybe it’s the next version of Tommy John that makes a pitcher only have to miss four months compared to 13 months. You know, I don’t think, I’m not necessarily saying that’s ever going to happen, but, you know, that would certainly be a game changer in terms of protecting your investments. If you could have a UCL corrective surgery that only kept you out for, say, half a season, or, you know, 345, months, and you could have it in the off season and still be able to pitch the following year. So is that happening anytime soon? I have not come across any studies that that would theorize that. But, you know, these teams are trying to figure it out and to bring it back to on the field from an entertainment standpoint, you know, you kind of go back to and this. Isn’t a Batista thing, but starting pitching. We’ve all talked about desiring to see starting pitchers maybe go deeper in the games and not having baseball, you know, kind of revert to this bullpen game, you know, bullpening that we’ve seen where, you know, the starting pitchers only go on four or five innings, and then you have six arms that come behind from a performance standpoint, that might be the most efficient way to do it. You know, in some circumstances, is that the most entertaining way to present your game, though, in the same way that we decided to ban the shift, not because teams weren’t smart doing it, but because it made for a worse game. It made for a less esthetically pleasing game. So I don’t, you know, you hear all these different, you know, the double hook and people say, Okay, well, maybe you have the starting pitcher if he doesn’t go five, a team loses their DH. You know, all these different pie in the sky rule change ideas to try to promote more stamina for starting pitching. Well, if you’re going to do that, then it has to go back to what we talked about. Well, are you willing to sacrifice some velocity? Are you willing to sacrifice some of the these other performance metrics in the name of keeping pitchers healthier and able to pitch deeper in the games? You know, it’s, let’s, let’s, let’s be clear, this is not something that you and I are going to solve in a 45 minute conversation. I mean, these are systemic issues that don’t just concern Major League Baseball. You have to go back to the youth level and try to prioritize different elements of pitching than what we’re seeing here in 2025
Nestor Aparicio 31:40
Well, starting with you can’t throw a curveball to your 12 or like something like that, right? So 16 or Well, what? Yeah, I mean, whatever. My dad the problem whether throwing it at 12, yeah, you’ll hurt your arm. Yeah, you will absolutely. 50 years later, my dad’s been dead. 3233 years. He was right. Dad was right. Um, Luke Jones is here. I am here. He is Baltimore, Luke. You can find him out on the interwebs anywhere. We’re gonna do some football around here this week, non Justin Tucker related football, although we’re gonna have plenty of Justin Tucker related football around here this week, as he is still on the team. So Orioles coming north in a couple of weeks. Luke and I will be in Toronto. Passports out. Gonna spend a little bit more on the beer, but we’re going to drink it with Getty, so it’s going to be worth it. Rick Emmett is going to be here later on this week from triumph, as well as John Palumbo from crack the sky. We also had a long chat with Julie sharper of the Baltimore banner regarding all of her amazing reporting and journalism on 16 ladies coming forward in the Justin Tucker scandal. I’ll be writing a letter to Roger Goodell. Rogers investigating things here this week, so I want to make sure that he knows that I have some information for him. So if you see Roger Goodell, anybody sees any of these investigators, let them know that that I’m looking to talk to the NFL. I have an investigation of my own. I am Nestor. He is Luke. Plenty of baseball ahead. We are Baltimore positive, W N, S T A and 1570 Towson, Baltimore, and we never stop talking Orioles baseball, because tis the season you.
