All right, major pet peeve time.
Read the following on the MLB Reds site in regards to the Reds recent DLing of Ryan Wagner.
Wagner’s injury was the biggest surprise in the slew of transactions. In fact, it was a surprise to the Reds last week in Phoenix when Wagner told the medical staff he had been experiencing shoulder pain for more than a month.
“I tried to just work through the pain on my own, hoping it would go away,” Wagner said. “I should have told the medical staff right away. It’s just one of those things you learn from.”
Once head athletic trainer Mark Mann was made aware of Wagner’s pain in Phoenix last Saturday, Wagner began receiving treatment. He was given an MRI on Thursday that revealed the inflammation.
“There’s a fine line between pain and soreness,” Mann said. “Especially for a young player, it can be hard to differentiate between what you can pitch with and what you can’t.”
Wagner, who turned 23 on Friday, hadn’t been pitching well lately. He posted a 10.19 ERA in 16 appearances since June 3.
Both he and Mann said the shoulder pain, which Wagner felt both on and off the field, affected the pitcher’s mechanics and performance.
“It was just something I really wanted to battle through to pitch good again,” Wagner said.
Wagner will continue to receive treatment to lessen the inflammation. He won’t throw again for at least a week, Mann said.
How many times are we going to hear this story from this organization before someone fixes it? I just can’t imagine that a sore armed pitcher would think that he could accomplish anything positive by heading out to the mound to face Major League hitters. How many games has this cost the Reds this season. Remove all the sore armed appearances by Wilson, Graves, and Wagner and replace them with someone who is at least throwing healthy and we might have actually won a few more games.
By trying to pitch through a sore arm that you have kept to yourself, I would think you are more likely to end your career earlier, rather than trying to lengthen your stay on the roster in the short term. This organization has to get their players to report this right away so they can evaluate them and help determine if it safe for them to pitch through it without risking something much more serious. That would also allow them to immediately evaluate whether this pitcher throwing at less than 100% is a better option than another pitcher with a healthy arm. It sounds like a lose, lose situation for both the player, the organization, and the fan to me. One that I think this organiztion needs to make known to it’s pitchers that will not be tolerated.
I think those guys have sore arms a lot of the time. Its not always easy to tell the difference between being sore and being injured. What worries me is that its obvious something is wrong, and I don’t know how hard they tried to get the truth out of him.
Do other teams have this much of an issue with sore arms? It seems like the Reds always have someone on the DL or on Dr K’s operating table.
Chris, you and I discussed this when Wilson went down. At the time I thought that Wilson was being a gutsy, do everthing you can to win type of a player. Now I’m beginning to wonder if it’s more than that and is it organization-wide? Do the Reds coaches, trainers and physicians know what they are doing? Are the players encouraged to attempt to play through serious pain, causing further damage?
I don’t know the answer to these ?’s, but I’m beginning to discount bad luck alone.