The Futility Infielder

My travels have delayed these two pieces, each long enough to be one of my normal blog entries. Since they share something in common -- writer pals of mine working on their first books -- and since I'm not sure when I'll next be online (I'm currently in Austin, Texas for a wedding), I've combined them into one longer piece.

Part I: The Fruits of My Labrum
OK, I'll admit it. My shoulder injury -- a torn labrum suffered last June in a swimming pool mishap and arthroscopic surgery in November -- was little more than an excuse to milk sympathy and gain fodder and publicity for this column while taking a walk on the wild side of the health care system. A dabble in shoulder injury chic, if you will.

That's not really true, of course, but if I've learned anything over the past year, it's that a labrum tear is baseball's most devastating injury, a virtual death sentence for pitchers in an age where rotator cuff (shoulder) and ulnar collateral ligament (elbow) surgeries are routine, their recoveries predictable. As Baseball Prospectus injury expert Will Carroll summarizes in a recent Slate article (amusingly titled "Labrum, It Nearly Killed Him"):

The leading minds in baseball medicine are flummoxed by the labrum. Doctors can't agree on how to detect a tear, don't know the best way to fix one, and aren't sure why, almost without fail, a torn labrum will destroy a pitcher's career.

The numbers don't lie. Carroll contrasts leading orthopedic surgeon Dr. James Andrews' estimate that 85 percent of pitchers fully recover from ulnar collateral ligament replacment, a/k/a Tommy John surgery, with this bleak assessment:

[I]f pitchers with torn labrums were horses, they'd be destroyed. Of the 36 major-league hurlers diagnosed with labrum tears in the last five years, only midlevel reliever Rocky Biddle has returned to his previous level. Think about that when your favorite pitcher comes down with labrum trouble: He has a 3 percent chance of becoming Rocky Biddle.

Ouch. For those unfamiliar with shoulder anatomy -- and if you're a baseball fan, you might as well learn your way around this crucial joint -- Carroll explains that the labrum, located between the head of the humerus (upper arm bone) and the glenoid fossa (the socket where it attaches) functions as both a shock absorber and as part of the joint's connective structure. The most common labrum injury is a SLAP tear (superior lesion, anterior to posterior), which is what I suffered -- a tear in the tissue from front to back, disrupting normal overhand motion with a slight click or pop. It's a relatively subtle injury in that it's not terribly painful or debilitating unless you're exerting at a moderate level. My own experience felt like my shoulder had somehow had the wind knocked out of it, and I was unable to summon much force when it came to exercise.

The labrum's position between the shoulder bones makes injury to it difficult to detect even with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and multiple orthopedists might disagree on the same MRI. The current state of the art in repairing the damage is an arthroscopic procedure to reattach the labrum to the scapula by inserting plastic anchors for the sutures; in my case two were required, each leaving a scar about 1 cm in diameter.

Carroll runs down a few recent high-profile pitchers whose careers have been derailed by labral tears:

• Giants closer Robb Nen, one of the game's hardest throwers, has undergone three surgeries in 18 months and hasn't pitched since 2002.

• White Sox starter Mike Sirotka was traded to Toronto for David Wells in 2000 before his torn labrum was discovered. He hasn't thrown a pitch in the majors since.

• 6-foot-10 Seattle Mariners prospect Ryan Anderson, known as "The Space Needle," has missed all of 2001, 2002, 2003 and this year. Fellow Mariner pitcher Gil Meche missed 2001 due to labrum ailments and couldn't pitch well enough to make the big club in '02. His 15 wins in '03 made for a minor success story, but the attached 4.59 ERA isn't worth all that much in the Safeco environs. And it gets worse: thus far he's 1-5 with a 6.96 ERA this year and showing some ominous signs. Wrote Carroll recently:

The labrum curse may be biting Gil Meche. His continued ineffectiveness in the Mariners rotation is pushing him to the bullpen, but there are open questions about his shoulder's health. Not only is his stamina down, there have been reports of him wincing after pitches and altering his mechanics in ways that indicate some shoulder pain or weakness. I'm unsure how Meche will adjust to the pen as well, making him risky in multiple ways.

Not good. Position players, of course, aren't exempt from the dreaded injury. Troy Glaus, the Angels fine third baseman, missed much of last season with a tear but elected not to have surgery. After a hot start in which he was leading the league in homers with 11, Glaus reinjured the shoulder and finally went under the knife in the past week. He's almost certainly done for the year. Dodger outfielder Shawn Green's power outage last season was due to a severely torn labrum; his offseason surgery was more drastic, requiring the removal rather than repair of the cartilage, resulting in an unappetizing bone-on-bone scenario which Carroll covered last fall.

As Carroll explained to me last fall, another problem besides detecting the injury is the lack of an established rehabilitation protocol. Whereas Tommy John surgery timetables have become quite predictable (one year, with new-wave techniques pioneered by Yankee secret weapon Mark Littlefield cutting that time down to ten months), and rotator cuff surgery is, if not nearly as successful, at least somewhat moreso than its shoulder counterpart, there's no model of success for a baseball player to emulate. My own rehab consisted of a month wearing a sling and then four months of arduous physical therapy; only recently have I taken up my mitt again to chuck the ol' horsehide around, and though my comfort zone is increasing with each game of catch, I'm not sure I could break glass with my tosses yet.

If there's been a silver lining to my torn shoulder lining, it's that the work I put into writing about it impressed Carroll so much that he included it in his excellent new book, Saving the Pitcher. The recently-published volume combines vital, well-researched information about the anatomy and mechanics of throwing a ball with cutting-edge expert advice on how to treat -- and more importantly prevent -- injuries to the most fragile segment of the baseball population. The fruits of my labrum (sorry, I've been waiting six months to use that line), an adaptation of my November 11 entry, take up pages 49-51 of STP. Carroll also told me that Dr. Andrews -- the leading surgeon in sports medicine -- was quite impressed with my writing on the topic. All of this somewhat dampens the blow that my injury caused, but I still wouldn't recommend it as anything more than a painful learning experience.

• • •

Part II: Chasing Casey
Carroll isn't the only author I've had the opportunity to assist recently. This past weekend I headed up to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in the company of Steven Goldman, who writes both for Baseball Prospectus and YES (the oft-referenced "Pinstriped Bible") to assist with some photo research he was doing for his forthcoming book about Casey Stengel, Forging Genius (due this fall). I'd already taken a trip to the Brooklyn Public Library in the service of the project with Goldman, and while the returns on that investment weren't so high, the chance to bond with a writer whose work I greatly admire was unsurpassed, and so I willingly volunteered for the whirlwind roadtrip to Cooperstown.

We departed on Sunday evening, cruising to upstate New York in about four-and-a-half hours. Our baseball chatter in the car was virtually nonstop, alternating a discussion of current affairs (centering around the Yankees) with Goldman's narration of an annotated Cliff Notes version of his book. Tough to beat that.

Forging Genius focuses on Stengel's "wilderness years" managing the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves, with minor-league stints at the helm of the Toledo Mud Hens, Milwaukee Brewers, and Oakland Oaks before he assumed the Yankee job in 1949. Winning seven World Championships and ten pennants in 12 years gave Stengel a reputation for genius, but Goldman's thesis is that the traits and tactics which brought him success in pinstripes were present during his earlier stops. His preference for platooning, for example, dated all the way back to his playing career, when Giants manager John McGraw (who pioneered the strategy) limited outfielder Stengel's role to hitting against righties, resulting in two excellent seasons near the end of his playing career. In his first two major-league managerial stops, Stengel's teams finished in the second division for eight years in a row, as he was primarily hampered by skinflint ownership which couldn't provide the quality and depth of his later Yankee teams.

Which isn't to say that those teams weren't interesting; on the contrary, Goldman has done exhaustive research into the stories of the clubs and their players and other attached personalities. As I've gotten to know Steve, I've been impressed to find that he's as good recounting decades-old tales of both obscure and famous incidents with as much wit and verve in person as he does in print via his weekly "Bibles" and epic BP "You Could Look It Up" columns. My favorite yarn about Casey (if I'm recalling it correctly) involved his dual role as the Mud Hens' manager and president; when he needed to get out of his contract to take the Braves' job, manager Stengel wrote a letter to president Stengel, asking to be freed from his contract, and president Stengel wrote back, granting him release. Baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis wasn't happy about this stunt, but then happiness and the judge didn't belong in the same sentence anyway, and he was apparently powerless to stop the wily Stengel.

Having finished the book's writing, Goldman is now looking for photos to augment it, and for this he desired a second pair of hands and eyes to help him root through the Hall of Fame's archives. We nestled into the Hall's library shortly after the building opened on Monday morning and donned white cotton gloves to leaf through five bins -- office-box-sized crates -- full of photos. I pre-screened folders devoted some of the book's characters, magically named obscurities (to our generation, at least) such as Van Lingle Mungo and Frenchy Bordagary, along with legends such as McGraw, Wilbert Robinson, and Billy Martin. Steve would make the final selections for one or two photos of each one, usually a head shot and an action shot, or perhaps a group shot of a couple of the book's more central characters. Often he'd regale me with an anecdote about the player. One of the more memorable ones was outfielder Len Koenecke, who attacked a pilot (or made improper advances towards him) mid-flight and was killed when the co-pilot struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher. Creepy... For each photo, I'd dutifully record the information and reference number, then photocopy it, absorbing the mundane tasks so as to allow Goldman to focus on the bigger picture(s).

Steve insisted on seeing each and every photo in the Stengel file -- a bin unto itself -- and I viewed most of those as well. Having seen several hundred examples, I can safely conclude that in addition to being a sportswriter's best friend due to his quotabilty, Stengel was also a photographer's favorite as well, his rubbery face full of expression in virtually every shot.

After about five or so hours of this -- in which we tabbed over 50 photos for a book which will likely contain about 20 -- Goldman then paged through the Hall's clipping file on Stengel, photocopies of newspaper and magazine articles, jotting down notes to augment some of the book's tales. While I wandered throughout the rest of the building, he put only a minor dent in the bin before the library closed at 5 PM, but he said he'd gleaned enough choice quotes to include in his tale to make the exercise worthwhile.

A word about the Hall of Fame: if you're planning on visiting this summer, I strongly advise you to think again. Those looking for the complete picture of the game's history are in for bitter disappointment if they're trekking to upstate New York for this sole purpose. With the exception of the bronze plaques and the writers and broadcasters' wing, the entirety of the Hall's first floor, containing the game's most ancient relics, is closed due to construction, as is much of the rest of the museum, which won't reopen until June 2005.

But a great selection of those artifacts can currently be found in the Hall's traveling road show, the "Baseball as America" exhibit which is now in Washington, DC (here's my review of the show from when it was in New York in 2002). While the Hall's current state is a bit unfortunate, the construction should give the museum a much-needed facelift. I found the Hall I visited in 2000 still somewhat mired in the Doubleday myth -- the reason for the Cooperstown site, after all -- which has been thoroughly debunked by the game's historians. "Baseball as America" reflects a more critical, historically accurate take on the national pastime, and if you're looking for an alternative to the Cooperstown parade I've just rained on, hit DC for your baseball fix.

Back to my trip, though a lot of what I did was mundane, it was a pleasure to accompany Goldman through this tour of the Hall's archives, to come off the bench and provide a small amount of assistance for what I expect will be a great book. If that isn't in a Futility Infielder's job description, then I don't know what is.

But my motives weren't entirely selfless. Someday I hope to be in the enviable position Goldman is in, looking to put the finishing touches on a baseball book I can call my own. That day is likely at least a couple of years away, but having learned a few of the ropes from one of my peers, I'll be that much better equipped when my moment arrives.