Adam Wainwright's Injury, and what it means for pitchers everywhere

It's official: Adam Wainwright, arguably one of the top 3 pitchers in all of baseball, will be shut down for the entire 2011 season following Tommy John ligament replacement surgery. This is a sad story, no matter what Jonny Gomes may think of it. Nobody likes to see young athletes in the prime of their physical careers cut down due to injury, predictable or otherwise.

A number things come to mind with this news; among them how it affects the Cardinals' chance to win the NL Central, and how that in turn affects Albert Pujols's contract status for next season. For the contemplative among us, it brings up myriad questions about Wainwright himself - how old is he? (29) What's his previous injury history? (One 2 1/2 month stint in 2008.) And what about his development could have caused this flameout after 2 absolutely dominant seasons?

We can shed some light on the last question by referring to an article by Craig Wright found in this year's Hardball Times Annual, which I picked up recently in preparation for the new season. In order to understand this piece, I need to first say a few words about how pitchers are commonly handled and Wright's radical (rational?) theories about how they should be handled.

These days, you hear a lot about pitch counts - i.e. for individual games. The agreed-upon limit for pitches a starting pitcher can throw in any given game is set somewhere around 100. Except in the case of potential no-hitters or shutouts, any pitch beyond the hundredth is carefully monitored, and any mistake can get the pitcher yanked.

Some team executives - most notably Nolan Ryan - have railed against such a strategy, and has encouraged his pitchers (those on the team he owns, the Texas Rangers) to work deeper into games and throw more pitches; just like pitchers did in Ryan's day. (Interestingly enough, starters on Ryan's 2010 Rangers averaged 98 pitches per game, exactly the league average.)

Craig Wright has a novel way of looking at pitch counts for individual games: he thinks that a) a standard, fixed pitch limit for all pitchers regardless of experience or maturity is a potentially harmful practice and b) that determining a pitcher's proper workload requires a detailed examination of not only the pitcher's aggregate work over the entire season, but also knowledge of the pitcher's developmental period.

According to Wright's research, the joints are among the last parts of the human body to develop - the extremely crucial (in life as well as in pitching) elbow and shoulder joints may not reach maturity until age 25. Thus any pitcher younger than 25 is still developing, not only as an athlete, but as a human being. Wright separates the developmental years into three stages: 1) the teenage years, 2) age 20-22, and 3) age 23 and 24.

If a pitcher can get through those crucial developmental stages without putting too much stress on his arm or showing signs of trouble, he will generally be able to enjoy a longer career and rack up more innings than if he was abused as a youngster. If a pitcher is adequately nurtured and brought along slowly enough, increasing his workload at the proper increments, he can build up enough arm strength and stamina to regularly put together 130-140 pitch outings.

In the article, Wright points out how Nolan Ryan, thanks to non-serious injuries and military obligation, was able to put together a picture-perfect developmental profile, allowing him to pitch effectively into his mid-40s. He contrasts Ryan to Bobby Witt, a star prospect whose career fell flat due to an unhealthy workload during the years before his arm was fully mature.

I don't want to repeat the whole article, but the whole theory made so much sense to me, that I vowed to pay extra close attention to pitchers in their developmental years and see which are being used correctly and which are being pushed too far. Expect that to be a common thread in this blog heading into 2011.

Oh, back to Wainwright: looking at his developmental profile, we see something like this:

His move to reliever in his first years in the majors (2005-06) helped limit his innings in his last developmental, although it looks like he missed some significant time in 2004 (my knowledge of minor league injury history is not exactly up to par). Other than that blip, it looks like he had a pretty measured workload for those formative years. Each major league player is different, and sometimes they have issues that their history cannot point out. I don't know what caused Wainwright's injury, although it seems like the Cardinals brass was expecting this to happen. I wish him the best in his recovery - he is one of the best after all.