TORONTO – Three elbows. Two obliques. Two shoulders. Two forearms. A tricep. A hip flexor. A quad. An acromioclavicular joint. An adductor. An ulnar nerve. A lat. And a glute.
That’s the body-part count for the Toronto Blue Jays five weeks into the season, a litany of woes akin to an Operation game board, with 17 injuries to 16 different players, a count still pending the status of Joe Panik, and lacking Teoscar Hernandez, who missed time with COVID-19.
Even for those hardened by baseball’s inevitable attrition, it’s been a lot to process. Yes, injuries are a part of the game and every team has them. But the steady procession of players to the injured list – highlighted by this week’s George Springer saga – has been jarring, and the public finger-pointing typical amid such hardships is on in earnest.
Still, it’s important to avoid scapegoating, or settling for the easy, surface-level answers so convenient at times like these.
The Blue Jays may be on the higher end of the spectrum when it comes to injuries this season, but they’re far from alone. While the pandemic’s aftershocks are no doubt playing a role in the current outbreak, the chasm is troublingly wide between the industry’s attempts to keep players on the field and its ability to actually do so.
Take the Blue Jays for example, boasting one of the biggest, if not the biggest high-performance department in the majors. Never have they collected, processed and mined as much medical data as they do right now, and had a resource in place for any need someone may have.
Yet, how can their attempts to create a player-health Xanadu be reconciled against the results six years into the high-performance department’s existence? Are things getting worse rather than getting better?
“We feel they are helping,” said general manager Ross Atkins. “We feel that we’re learning a great deal and the results have been mixed thus far, and right now, obviously, our results are less than ideal as it relates to health. But performance isn’t just dealing with injuries. It’s also trying to avoid them, trying to maximize guys’ ability, put them in position to be successful. We feel incredible about what we’ve learned, what we’ll continue to learn and the addition of (new medical director) Andrew Pipkin this year, what we’ve learned from him being on board and how helpful he’s been in this process.”
To be fair, sports science has its limits and healing and maintaining the human body isn’t a foolproof venture. Objective measures used to track exertion and identify warning signs – isometric testing, for instance, which isolates muscle contraction and measures it to assess strength – provide information but not always answers.
As Springer rehabbed from his first quad strain, his results in isometric strength testing and GPS speed tracking gave the Blue Jays “all the confidence to take the next step” with the star outfielder, said Atkins.
Yet in Springer’s third game back, he re-injured the quad strain that had just healed, leading to his placement back on the injured list Wednesday night.
Factor in the increasing force with which the game is played – and that athletes are trained to build and employ in more specific ways – and maintaining health is only more complicated.
“It’s a different game, different in how powerful the individuals are,” said Atkins. “The rate at which guys throw the ball exceptionally hard and hit it exceptionally far has definitely increased. And with that has come some risk that we’re trying to manage and deal with. The teams that have been more successful over the last few years have dealt with it by having depth and by managing workload. That’s a lot of our focus is how do we think about putting guys in safe positions to have healthy years and healthy careers.”
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There’s without doubt a rethink to be done on whether current training techniques are pushing too many players beyond sustainable physical capabilities. Maybe not every dude needs to throw 97 with run or launch-angle a ball 420 feet over the fence. Maybe there’s a competitive advantage to be found in trading off isolation exercises meant to build movement-specific power for a more holistic and less-demanding repeatability.
That’s not where the game is right now, and the urgency of the moment is to find ways not just to simply survive the season, but ways to thrive in it.
In Springer’s case, the Blue Jays felt that the recurrence he experienced Saturday “was a mild stretching or cramping sensation that could be occurring from some level of fatigue after playing back-to-back games,” explained Atkins.
Describing it as such after Springer came out of Sunday’s 7-2 win over the Atlanta Braves would have significantly altered the discourse this week, avoiding the grey that surrounded his status. But improving the return-to-play decision-making for gamers like the veteran isn’t as straightforward.
“We lean heavily on the feedback and we lean heavily on the comments of players, how they’re feeling,” said Atkins. “But the measurements that we’re using, whether it’s isometeric testing of strength or using Catapult to measure their GPS speed, we do have both and it is not something that we’re going on gut or entirely on their feedback. I will say this: George is exceptionally strong and exceptionally tough. His pain tolerance is exceptionally high, and we need to figure out if we’re factoring it in the appropriate way as we move forward with him.”
The question, in a broader sense, applies not just to the Blue Jays, but to the industry as a whole, too.
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