There is more to Zebby Matthews’ game than an elite strike-throwing ability, though he certainly possesses that. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen put it last summer, the 24-year-old Minnesota Twins right-hander “has barely walked anyone the last half decade.” That wasn’t an exaggeration. Matthews issued one free pass every nine innings as a collegian, and his walk rate over 205 1/3 minor league frames is a Lilliputian 2.7%. Called up to the big leagues last August, he proceeded to walk just 11 batters in 37 2/3 frames. That works out to 2.63 batters per nine innings, or nearly two more walks per nine than he had in the minors last year, but don’t get too hung up on the small-sample spike.

Besides, as I mentioned up top, there is more to Matthews than what has garnered him the most attention. Displaying better stuff than many give him credit for — his heater sits comfortably in the mid-90s — the 2022 eighth-round pick out of Western Carolina University logged a 30.5% strikeout rate last year in the minors, and in the majors that number was 27.8%. Still rookie eligible and with a chance to break camp in the Twins’ starting rotation, Matthews is the organization’s top pitching prospect.

Matthews discussed the development of his underrated arsenal prior to a recent spring training game.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with your pitches. What is your full repertoire?

Zebby Matthews: “I have a four-seam fastball that has some decent carry on it, a cutter, a gyro slider, a curveball, and a changeup.”

Laurila: How much carry do you get on your fastball? Read the rest of this entry »

Many years ago, there was a bar in Columbus, Ohio. It’s since been closed and razed after its owner, a serially corrupt lobbyist who later served time for his role in “a food service bribery scheme,” went to jail for owing some $300,000 in back taxes. When I was a young man, my friends and I would descend on this bar once a week in order to wreck house at pub trivia under our collective nom de guerre: Gorilla Bizkit.

One of the recurring theme rounds for this trivia game was called “Paxton or Pullman?” The host would give the title of a movie, and each team would have to say whether the film featured Bill Paxton, Bill Pullman, both, or neither. I remember Paxton-Pullman confusion being a minor internet meme back in humanity’s digital golden age, when we — green and callow as a budding flower — saw fit to spend our days determining whether a hot dog was a sandwich. (Among other questions of great teleological import.) Read the rest of this entry »

I got my start in baseball writing as a Cardinals blogger. That’s only natural – I’m a Cardinals fan. My dad grew up in St. Louis and passed it on to me. I’m still a fan, though certainly less than I was before I started writing about the sport as my full-time job. But whether you’re looking at it through the lens of a fan or just as an analyst, the trajectory of this always-competing, never-quite-dominant team has been fascinating to watch.

I had a strange feeling while watching the Redbirds last year. I kept wondering, “Why is this team full of old guys?” Ever since the 2011 World Series win, Albert Pujols’ first finale in St. Louis, the team always seemed full of young, devil-magicky contributors. An average Cards roster had a few recognizable stars plus a bunch of young guys you’d never heard of who were way better than you initially realized. Matt Carpenter and Michael Wacha were unexpected stars in 2013. Carlos Martínez and Kolten Wong came on strong. After a few years of missing the playoffs despite interesting young contributors (Tommy Pham, Randal Grichuk, Luke Weaver), the 2019 Cards coalesced around Jack Flaherty, Tommy Edman, and Paul DeJong.

You’ve heard of all of those players, of course, but at the time, they were young up-and-comers. The Cardinals never seemed to be old despite running out Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright year after year. Those guys were a key veteran core, helping to spread the team gospel to the young horde backing them up. But even with those old hands running things, my view of the Cards as a youthful outfit was correct. From 2013 through 2018, St. Louis’ roster was younger than average every year. Then they were ever so slightly older than league average in 2019 and again in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

There isn’t much for a baseball writer in the dull days of late February. Someone added a new pitch? The pitching nerds are all over it. Somebody else set a new career high for exit velocity? I’m not sure that merits more than a tweet and/or skeet. Statistically responsible baseball writers have long concluded that attempting to find signal in the noise of spring training stats is a futile exercise.

Thankfully, Effectively Wild came to my rescue. On Episode 2288, Ben and Meg discussed the peculiar case of Justin Verlander, who is pitching in the Cactus League for the first time in his career. After allowing a home run off a hanging slider, he sought consolation from his new teammate, Logan Webb.

“I was told not to overconcern yourself with pitch shapes here and the movement of the ball because it’s tough,” Verlander told Maria Guardado of MLB.com after his start. “It’s my first spring training in Arizona, so everyone was like, ‘Hey man, it’s a little different out here.’ I’ve heard it from everyone. But I think you still need to be honest with yourself.” Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday in Clearwater, Florida, Kyle Schwarber was spotted doing something he hadn’t done in awhile: playing first base. Not only did he work out at the position with Phillies coach Bobby Dickerson in the morning, he manned the spot for five innings during the team’s Grapefruit League game against the Yankees in the afternoon. He didn’t field any grounders, but he made three putouts on throws from second baseman Kody Clemens.

For the first time since 2021, Kyle Schwarber records a putout at First Base. pic.twitter.com/IKKeeRhq7F

— Phillies Tailgate (@PhilsTailgate) February 27, 2025

According to The Athletic’s Matt Gelb, it was the first time Schwarber played first base in a game since Game 6 of the 2021 American League Championship Series. He was a member of the Red Sox at the time, acquired from the Nationals in a July 29 trade and given a crash course at the position while rehabbing from a right hamstring injury. Up to the point of the trade, Schwarber’s post-high school first base experience consisted of two games in the Cape Cod League in 2013 and a single-batter cameo in extra innings with the Cubs in ’17. (He swapped places with Anthony Rizzo just before a game-ending wild pitch.) He went on to play 10 regular season games at first for the Red Sox, starting nine of them, and then made nine more starts at the position in the postseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Reader, I gasped.

Sorry, I’ve just always wanted to write that. I’ll tell you later on why I gasped. Let’s start here. Last Tuesday, while making his Grapefruit League debut with the Blue Jays, Max Scherzer challenged a pitch. Then he challenged the challenge system. Scherzer’s start against the Cardinals marked his first experience with the automated ball-strike system, which is being rolled out in some spring training facilities this year, continuing its inexorable, years-long creep toward implementation in regular season games. Scherzer, for one, does not welcome our new robot overlords.

On his 11th pitch, Scherzer fired a 1-0 fastball to Lars Nootbaar, just clipping the outside corner, at least according to home plate umpire Roberto Ortiz, an organic life form who uses an inefficient pair of weird, goo-filled orbs to assess pitches. Nootbaar – who, we should note, played some rehab games in Triple-A last season, and so was at least somewhat familiar with the challenge system – immediately patted his head. That’s the official way to request a challenge (though I would strongly encourage the league to require the player to rub their stomach with their other hand too). Scherzer, never a fan of waiting around when there’s pitching to do, canted his head from side to side like a racehorse in the starting gate. The machines spoke: The pitch was 2.3 inches off the plate, or as the humanoid Buck Martinez put it, “way outside.”

Just like Scherzer, this was my first experience with the challenge system, and I found the graphic adorable. That’s the point, I guess: implement an all-seeing eye that judges everything and everyone with detached, ruthless precision, then soften it with a lovable cartoon face. Scherzer recovered to strike out Nootbaar, then made his own challenge in the second inning. The right-hander, who tracks his pitches using the same goo-based technology as Ortiz, didn’t agree that he’d missed low with a 1-0 curveball to JJ Wetherholt, and he pounded the top of his cap like a bongo drum.

Reader, that’s when I gasped. Then I laughed. I gasp-laughed. According to the delightful ABS graphic, the pitch was hilariously low. It was nowhere near the strike zone. This pitch was in the Cactus League. It was so far away that Social Distortion wrote a song about it called “So Far Away.”

In fairness, we should acknowledge a few things. First, one of the consensuses that emerged during last year’s test of the challenge system was that team’s should disempower the pitcher from making them. Catchers are right there, and they have a much better sense of the actual location of the pitch. Second, Scherzer indicated after the game that the challenge was more an experiment than an expression of his certainty that the pitch had clipped the zone. “That was a rare occurrence for me, with a curveball down, to actually see if that’s actually a strike or not,” he said. You’re allowed to take that notion with a grain of salt. Part of me believes Scherzer, but, uh, he was bopping himself on the head with a lot of conviction.

We should also note that the steep shape of a curveball makes it hard for the pitcher in particular to judge the exact spot where it crosses the plate. The really interesting thing is that curveballs are actually relatively easy for umpires to judge. That’s not necessarily intuitive. Curveballs approach the plate at such a steep angle that they hit the catcher’s glove (or the dirt) far lower than they cross the plate, which might fool the umpire into thinking a pitch was lower than it was. And curveballs that come in at the very top of the zone leave the pitcher’s hand so high and possess such a loopy shape that they also might be hard to recognize as strikes. Where a fastball or cutter pushes straight through the zone cleanly, a breaking ball slices through it at an oblique angle, and it just seems logical that the more of the zone a pitch catches, the more likely it is that it will be recognized for doing so. But apparently that’s wrong. I broke down the 2024 stats for curveballs and fastballs (four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters) in three areas of the zone: the heart, the top and bottom of the shadow zone down the middle, and the top and bottom thirds of the zone down the middle. I’ve highlighted those areas in pink.

In all three areas, Curveballs had higher strike rates than fastballs. On pitches over the heart of the plate, it was a matter of a few tenths of a percent, but in the middle graph, curveballs were ahead 83% to 80%, and on the right it was 83% to 81%. Maybe it’s just that curveballs are easier to judge because they’re slower, but umpires are better at recognizing when they’re strikes, so in that sense Scherzer picked a bad pitch to challenge. However, much like Scherzer’s curveball, we’re drifting away from our main objective here. We’re focusing on how far the pitch was from the zone, and just to reiterate: It was far.

However, you might notice something about that graphic: There’s no distance measurement. When Nootbaar challenged in the first inning and earned his Nootbaal, the graphic zoomed way in to show us the exact size of the miss down to a tenth of an inch.

When Scherzer challenged, no measurement popped up, and I suspect that I know why. I think this is a deliberate decision made to avoid embarrassing a player who challenges a pitch that’s not particularly close. Nearly all challenges that end up as balls will show the miss distance. But if the pitch doesn’t even touch the shadow zone – that is, if it’s not even within one baseball-width of the strike zone – the graphic leaves off the exact distance so as to avoid blowing up the pitcher’s spot. Max Scherzer, trailblazer that he is, has showed us that although robots don’t feel, they can still be programmed to blush.

Don’t worry. We’re still going to blow up Scherzer’s spot. Because of all the cool graphics, it’s still really easy to get an exact measurement for pitches that land in the Zone of Embarrassment. We know the measurements of just about everything else on the screen. We know the strike zone is exactly 17 inches wide and the ball is approximately 2.9 inches wide, and through the magic of Statcast, we know that because Wetherholt is 5-foot-10, his strike zone is roughly 18.55 inches tall. I threw a screengrab into Photoshop, measured each of those constants, then used the ratio of pixels to inches to calculate the distance. The ball was 3.98 inches from the strike zone. It missed the shadow zone by more than an inch. It crossed the plate just over a foot off the ground.

That looks pretty damning, but allow me to blow your mind for a moment. If we’re being fair to Scherzer, we need to acknowledge that the pitch was actually much closer to the rulebook strike zone than Statcast makes it look. Let’s think about it under the rules of the current, non-computerized strike zone. Keep in mind that this was a curveball breaking downward. Now let’s look at the way that the Hawkeye cameras measure a pitch, courtesy of an MLB.com explainer by Anthony Castrovince.

Keep your eye on the diagram on the right. Statcast’s strike zone is two-dimensional, and it’s measured from the very center of home plate. That’s a perfectly reasonable way to design an ABS system – an earlier version was 3-D, so it seems safe to assume that this 2-D version is, for some tangible reason, an improvement upon it – but it’s not the way the strike zone has worked for the entirety of baseball history, including right now. The rulebook definition starts like this: “The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate…” and that’s really all we need to know. The strike zone is three-dimensional. It’s seven-sided, a pentagonal prism, and the ball just needs to clip any part of it in order to be a strike.

At The Athletic, Jayson Stark had the good fortune to be present in the clubhouse after the game, when Scherzer found out that the robo-zone didn’t match the rulebook zone: “Wait, I thought it was the whole plate,” he said. “So now we have to redefine what the strike zone is? You said it was a 3-D zone. Now we’ve got a 2-D zone? Hasn’t it always been a 3-D zone?” The answer to that question is yes. It has always been a 3-D zone and it still is, but now there’s also a 2-D zone. There are two strike zones. We’ll dig into the philosophical implications of this dichotomy later, but for now, that’s how umpires are judging pitches, so why don’t we try measuring things that way?

Let’s start with how curveballs work. Their path gets steeper and steeper as they approach the plate. There are plenty of reasons for this. Curveballs actually leave the pitcher’s hand traveling slightly upward; the classic way to recognize a curveball is seeing it jump up out of the pitcher’s hand. The magnus force created by the ball’s topspin pulls it downward, and that force compounds upon itself over the length of the pitch. Here’s where it starts. The baseball is traveling horizontally, and the topspin interacts with the air to start pulling it down.

Now it’s traveling at a steeper angle, but guess what? The topspin is still pulling it downward, so its angle is going to keep getting steeper and steeper as it goes.

Moreover, gravity amplifies this effect for a pitch that’s always breaking downward. Air resistance slows the pitch down as it nears the plate, but gravity is pulling the pitch downward at a constant rate. So say it takes a tenth of a second for the ball to travel the first 10 feet toward home plate, and in that time, gravity pulls it down five centimeters. By the time it reaches the plate, it’s going slower, so over the last tenth of a second, it only travels eight feet, but gravity is still pulling it down five centimeters. All the numbers in this example were completely made up, but you get the point; the ratio of downward movement to horizontal movement is increasing. A curveball’s approach angle keeps getting steeper. You can see it in Statcast’s 3-D pitch visualizations.

These are two actual Scherzer curveballs from last year. We’re going to focus on the bottom one, which came in a bit below the plate. The red line shows a straight line between the position of the ball when it crosses home plate and the position when it’s 50 feet away.

Now, let’s zoom in and look at the path of the pitch over the last few feet of its journey. As you can see, our new purple line is significantly steeper.

None of this should be particularly surprising if you’re familiar with Alex Chamberlain’s primer on vertical approach angle, but the point is that curveballs, with their sharp downward movement compounded by gravity, are the steepest pitches of all. According to Alex’s pitch leaderboard, Scherzer’s curveball averaged a vertical approach angle of -9.9 degrees last season. For now, let’s assume this pitch had the same VAA. With help from our friend Pythagoras, we can calculate that a pitch traveling at an angle of -9.9 degrees would be 1.48 inches higher when it crossed the front of the plate than when it crossed the middle of the plate. Here’s how that works.

OK, so measuring at the front of the plate, the pitch comes in 1.48 inches higher. It’s now missing the zone by just 2.50 inches. It’s well within the shadow zone. That certainly makes it sound a little closer, don’t you think? Here’s what that looks like in our original diagram.

You know what? It’s still pretty far away from the strike zone. Stark’s article mentioned that after the game, reporters told Scherzer that his pitch would have been a strike according to a 3-D zone. They were way off base. In order to do so, the pitch would have had to arrive at the plate with an absurd VAA of 25 degrees. That ain’t happening. This pitch is still unequivocally a ball. There’s no system – goo-based, camera-based, vibes-based, none – in which this pitch hits in the strike zone. It was so far away that Carole King wrote a different song about it, also called “So Far Away.”

That said, I do suspect that this particular curveball actually had a steeper VAA than -9.9 degrees, making it a bit closer than the graphic above indicates. Just using the old-fashioned goo-orb test, it looked sharper than the typical Scherzer curveball. Second, I was talking things over with Michael Rosen, our resident pitching genius, and he got curious and pulled data for a Scherzer curveball, just one random curve from 2023. That pitch had a VAA of -10.1 degrees over the last 10 feet.

That VAA would move Scherzer’s pitch a few hundredths of an inch closer to the zone, and this one solitary, particularly sharp curve could’ve been even closer. It’s still not a strike according to any definition of the strike zone, but it highlights the disconnect between the two current competing versions.

So far we’ve only been talking about the front of the plate, but this would also be true of both the back and the sides. A pitch with a steep horizontal approach angle can clip the corner of the plate before it reaches the midpoint. The back gets tricky because of the plate’s pentagonal shape, but it’s still possible; the closer to the center a high pitch is located, the better a chance it will have of dropping down and catching a piece of the rulebook zone. ABS would tell you that every one of the pitches illustrated below is a ball. But according to a normal three-dimensional strike zone – which is what umpires are calling – that’s not actually true. It’s smaller than the rulebook zone.

As things stand, when the league does implement an ABS challenge system for regular season play – and at this point, that seems like a virtual certainty, though which regular season is still undecided – then the game will officially have two different strike zones. It’s possible that the league could change the rulebook definition for umpires so that it matches the Statcast zone, but that strikes me as unlikely for many reasons, chief among them it would essentially turn the iconic shape of home plate into a vestigial appendage. In the two-zone world – the world that Triple-A players have been living in for a while now – a pitcher would be able to throw a strike, get robbed by the umpire, challenge that incorrect call, and lose the challenge because according to the robot umpire, the pitch really was a ball. Even crazier, the pitcher will throw a strike, the umpire will get the call right, and then the batter will challenge it and that correct call will get overturned! The umpire and the computer will make two different calls, and both will be correct because they’ll have two different zones.

As the numbers from our curveball example show, we’re not talking about a couple of unlikely edge cases. The differences in movement from the front and back of the plate to the middle aren’t minuscule. Some pitchers’ curves average above 11 degrees of VAA, and the sweepiest sweepers average more than six degrees of horizontal approach angle. We’re often going to be talking about well over an inch of difference. This is going to happen all the time. I’m not the first person to notice this. On Wednesday, Baseball Savant’s Tom Tango crunched the numbers and announced that in 2024, one percent of all takes would have fallen into this category, just for issues with the front and back of the plate.

As things look right now, baseball will soon officially have a human strike zone and a robot strike zone. The robot strike zone will be so thin as to be non-existent, while the human strike zone, as it always has, will be shaped like an infinite number of infinitely thin home plates. Honestly, I don’t know how any pitcher who’s had it fully explained to them will avoid succumbing to paralysis halfway through their windup and toppling off the mound simply because they’ve exhausted their ability to process the disjuncture of the situation.

I mentioned earlier that setting up the robo-zone in two dimensions rather than three was a perfectly reasonable choice. The more I think about it, however, the more I think it might be the only reasonable choice. Calling balls and strikes is incredibly difficult. I’ve had to do it before, and I’d approximate that I felt 100% certain on about 30% of the pitches I called. But even then, I doubt I was really thinking about the strike zone the way the rulebook demands. The rulebook zone doesn’t have four corners; it has 10 corners. And it doesn’t have an edge; it has 15 edges. The difference between a two-dimensional plane and a three-dimensional space is the difference between a topographical map and a mountain.

On the one hand, this makes me wish the robo-zone were three-dimensional, just because I’m imagining how much more fun the challenge graphics would be. We’d see in precise cartoon glory not just whether the ball nicked the corner of a box, but one particular corner of a 10-cornered pentagonal prism. It would rule. On the other hand, it’s absolutely preposterous that we ask human beings to process information with anything approaching this level of precision. Wherever you’re sitting right now, try to imagine a pentagonal prism floating in the air next to you. Now try to picture yourself deciding whether a Tarik Skubal fastball nicked one of its seven sides. Now do it again, but first squish your prism down a bit because Nick Madrigal is up next. So maybe it does make sense to have two zones; we’ve just got them reversed.

Scherzer was candid and engaging with reporters, and after processing all of this information, he closed with the takeaway that most of us saw in the headlines: “Can we just play baseball?” he asked. “We’re humans. Can we just be judged by humans? Do we really need to disrupt the game? I think humans are defined by humans.” When he puts it that way, it’s a pretty reasonable request. Right now, umpires and batters track pitches using the exact same equipment, and that makes plenty of sense. If the game is played by humans, it’s certainly not laughable to feel that human eyes and brains should be deciding what’s a strike and what’s a ball. I don’t mean to say that there’s wisdom in every mistake simply because it’s made by a human, but once a computer is making the decisions, the objective of the game becomes slightly less fun, for the same reason that playing chess against the computer isn’t particularly enjoyable. It becomes less of a game and more of a problem solving exercise.

These days, there’s no end to the ways that computer programs are judging us – CAPTCHA requests, Spotify recommendations, suspicious login emails, targeted advertising, personalized search results, automated insurance denials, the artificially indiscriminate firings going on throughout the federal government – and with vanishingly few exceptions, the people being judged would like nothing better than to smash all of these robot judges with a hammer.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to smash the computers that turned Google into such a joke with a hammer, but the difference here is that many of those systems were designed as shortcuts, either to save time, to replace human workers, or to shift accountability away from the person instituting a crappy policy and onto the circuit board that implements it. On the other hand, the challenge system is a particularly elegant solution to the problem at hand. It will introduce an extra layer of accountability into umpiring without replacing the umpires or undermining their centrality to the game. It won’t obliterate the value of pitch framing, but it will hopefully reduce the amount of shouting umpires have to bear. Now that we have the ability to know the exact location of every pitch, it’s probably not completely defensible to just ignore that knowledge. Instant replay was instituted for the same reason. “I like it when somebody screws up and somebody gets screwed over” is not exactly a winning campaign pitch.

Let me hit you with one last disconnect. The really funny thing is that depending on how you look at it, Scherzer is both the best and worst messenger for this argument. He’s a sure-fire Hall of Famer and a longtime union rep. He’s not afraid of a fight, and his standing in the game ensures that when he speaks, people will listen. His comments warrant plenty of counterarguments, but “Max Scherzer doesn’t know what he’s talking about” is not among them.

On the other hand, Scherzer has never had that much use for umpires in the first place. Since Sports Info Solution started tracking pitches in 2002, 328 pitchers have thrown at least 800 innings. Scherzer’s 14% swinging strike rate ranks ninth among them and his 27% whiff rate ranks 19th. His 17% called strike rate, however, ranks all the way down at 212th. Scherzer has always succeeded by racking up whiffs, pumping his fastball by hitters and tempting them into chasing sliders and curves. Relying on the umpire for called strikes has never remotely been his game. In fact, since 2008, Statcast says he’s had 1,262 would-be strikes stolen from him, third-most in all of baseball. Few players have relied less on human umpires or accumulated more reasons to be fed up with them than Scherzer. Maybe we should tell him that after his next start. I’m sure he’ll have something interesting to say about it.

Drake Baldwin is one of baseball’s most-promising prospects. A third-round pick in 2022 out of Missouri State University, the 23-year-old catcher in the Atlanta Braves organization is No. 11 on our Top 100. His left-handed stroke is a big reason why. Flashing plus power, Baldwin bashed 16 home runs last season while logging a 119 wRC+ between Double-A Mississippi and Triple-A Gwinnett.

He could have pursued a career in another sport. All-State in hockey as a Wisconsin prep, the sturdily-built Madison West High School product potted 43 goals as a junior, then found the back of the net 46 times as a senior.

Why did he choose the diamond, and not the ice?

“Hockey recruiting is a little later, so I didn’t actually talk to many colleges,” Baldwin said of his decision. “I think I had a chance, and the [junior hockey] route was interesting too, but being able to go right from high school to college and start working on a degree was a more straightforward path to where I wanted to be. I mean, I love both sports. I wish I could play both of them. Baseball just came first.” Read the rest of this entry »

The new year in baseball resets everyone back to zero, meaning that every team gets a chance to avenge their disappointments from 2024. Since this is a hopeful time, I asked the ZiPS projection system to crunch the numbers for the biggest bounce-back candidates for the 2025 season.

Determining what exactly constitutes a bounce-back season is a bit of a philosophical exercise, and since I can’t ask a complex bucket of algorithms to read the vibes, I narrowed down the list of candidates with a few qualifiers. I didn’t want any stone-cold sample size flukes, so I only looked at hitters who received at least 200 plate appearances in 2024, and limited the pitchers to those who threw at least 90 innings for those who started at least a third of their games, with a 30-inning threshold for relievers. I also only wanted to include players who were 2025-relevant, so I required the same minimums for projected playing time this year, based on our Depth Charts. Read the rest of this entry »

In this time of interchangeable elbow ligaments, we’ve mostly become inured to the effects of routine Tommy John surgery. Pitcher blows out, pitcher gets stitched together like a beloved sock monkey, pitcher returns in 12 to 18 months.

If that were always the case, Tommy John would be little more than an annoyance. But it’s not always that simple. Sometimes, the pitcher wears out before his UCL undergoes rapid unscheduled disassembly. Sometimes there are half-measures — rest, PRP injections, what have you — that end up having no effect other than prolonging the agony. Then there’s the timing of the injury and surgery; go under the knife in September, and you might not even miss a full season. Show up to camp with a threadbare elbow in February, blow out in late March, and you might miss two. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »