Sanchez drama ends the best way possible

The worst thing about being a young star pitcher is the fact that you’re a young star pitcher. 

On the one hand, you’ve given your team a lot of value at a low cost. You’re a source of production to build around, and a light into a foggy and shifting future — a name that puts butts in seats. And you’re controllable! 

On the other hand, you haven’t done much more than your present results, which are always fickle in baseball. The team doesn’t owe you anything yet — not guaranteed money or playing time. When you say you really want to do one role over another, the team isn’t obliged to listen. You are, after all, under contract — a cheap contract — and your lack of legacy means the team still knows more than you do.

At least that’s what they argue.

And argue the Toronto Blue Jays front office did, that they knew best and best was sticking Aaron Sanchez in the bullpen. Best not only for the Jays, but also for Sanchez’s health, happiness and career. The Jays argued that exceeding an arbitrary number of innings in a single season would be catastrophic to Sanchez’s career and increase the chance of a season-ending injury — if not this year, then the next.

You’ve heard the Sanchez four-part drama a million times by now: how the Jays were going to send Sanchez to the pen to control his remaining innings, bolster the pen and keep his arm healthy.

What a load of garbage.

For the record, this has been a load of garbage since before Sanchez started having success this season as a starter. It’s been a load of garbage for years now, since the latest crop of fireballers started breaking into the big leagues. There is no evidence anywhere to support the argument that placing a pitcher in the bullpen keeps him any safer than keeping him in the rotation. In fact, if you take a moment to really review the evidence, the only real, supported way we know in this industry to keep pitchers safe from arm injuries is to control their rest and limit their pitching.

About that limit their pitching part: If you play baseball for a living and you’re a pitcher, you’re going to pitch. That means your probability of having a throwing-related arm injury is higher by default. Call it an occupational hazard. In fact, Sanchez could blow out his arm this winter playing catch.

As I’ve said before, pitching is not an injury waiting to happen, it’s an injury happening. When I was a member of the Jays, all pitchers had mandatory MRIs on their arms and shoulders. You know what the results showed? Damage. Damage, across the board, to all our arms.

Throwing is not a matter of staying healthy, it’s more a matter of how much injury you can take. Even the young, fresh, invincible Sanchez has damage in his shoulder to some degree. It’s unavoidable.

Because throwing hurts and limiting throwing is difficult to truly control, the best option is to control recovery time from that injury. The more rest and recovery time you can provide a pitcher during the season, the lower the probability for injury.

Sending Sanchez to the bullpen makes theoretical sense in that he wouldn’t throw as much in the pen as he would in the rotation. In reality, that theory breaks down. An oft-used Sanchez would throw at least as much in the pen in a five-day period as he would in the rotation. When fans, coaches and pundits talk about wear and tear to arms, they do this silly thing where they only count pitches thrown in games — as if those pitches are the only things that affect a player’s physiology. Not so.

A bullpen pitcher may throw in back-to-back games. Or in back-to-back-to-back games: one inning one night, one batter another night and then another inning. That’s 2.1 innings pitched, which seems insubstantial compared with a starter’s seven innings.

But that doesn’t include the amount of pitches thrown in the pen, warming up, before entering the game. It ignores the fact that a reliever went from a cold start to get ready. It doesn’t account for the possibility that a reliever shadowed a starter during his last inning, waiting to see if he got out of a jam, throwing countless warmups at max velocity, adrenaline coursing through them.

Being a bullpen arm is taxing in a different, uncontrolled way. The bullpen arm goes from cold to hot at the ring of a bell, as opposed to the starter’s pregame massage and half-hour warm-up routine. And, since a reliever only threw an inning or two or maybe to just one batter, there is the assumption that they’re fresh to throw again, even though their body may be quite full of scar tissue and lactic acid.

Because throwing is unnatural, there is wear and tear on the body regardless of how many pitches are thrown. Sure, throwing more hurts more, but it doesn’t scale one to one. A reliever, especially as the season drags out, is often pitching with active pain but fighting through it because of the short, burst-like nature of their job. Thus, they medicate, they suck it up, and they pitch and try to recover as best they can before they are thrown back out there. In this sense, it’s not workload that’s hurting them but the lack of rest.

The body can only get used to the pitching process to a point. After that point it’s a gamble, with heredity, age, genetics and training all tipping the odds in one direction or another. No matter what, the odds are still high that you’ll get injured.

In a perfect world, teams would have bigger rosters with more pitchers and set rest schedules. This would cut down injury by limiting exposure to the pitching process as a whole and provide more time for rest. But this is not a perfect world; it’s one of specialization, limitation and injury. Knowing this, the best option the Jays had to keep Sanchez safe was to let him continue to do the role he’s trained to do while expanding the rotation to six men, allowing an extra full day of rest for Sanchez and his fellow starters. Or, in short, less pitching means less routine shock and more recovery time.

The Jays should have decided on this this route from the start. It would have prevented all of the media drama about Sanchez. In their defence, however, had Sanchez been mediocre this season there would have been little attention on the situation. Many teams opt for the arbitrary pitching total/bullpen demotion health route. Only winning teams with superstar pitchers ever seem to draw any ire for it. In fact, there is another pitcher in the Jays’ rotation about to exceed his innings limit and no one seems to care about his health: Marcus Stroman.

I guaranteed you that if Stroman was in contention for a Cy Young, like Sanchez is, we’d be talking about his future more. Funny what results can do to a narrative, eh?

However, even if Sanchez kicked open general manager Ross Atkins’ office door and told him that science, results and the media were on his side in the great rotation-to-pen debate, it really wouldn’t have mattered because age and experience were not. As I said, the best and worst thing about being a young star is you’re a young star. You’ve got no bargaining power. No, it was only when older stars that speak for the team (from the platform of guaranteed money) raised their voice that management listened.

Veteran catcher Russell Martin spoke up — and I’m sure he’s not the only one who did — and management listened. Older players, with their experience, money and locker room clout, can say things young players can’t. Most of the time, the old dogs bark about how youngsters need to know “how to play the game the right way.” In this case, the barking was done at management to let the young kids who knew how to do it right keep doing it.

Atkins allowing Sanchez to keep pitching now is the best of all possible worlds. It actually does help Sanchez stay healthy and will help Stroman too. It gives Marco Estrada’s back more recovery time between starts. If you don’t think keeping starters healthy is important — this year maybe more than any other — consider that the Jays have no other arm in the system to put on the mound after the current rotation. If Estrada’s back flares up and he can’t pitch, or J.A. Happ gets hurt, it could very well be the season. It’s a tight race, and while this rotation is performing well, it’s got a soft underbelly.

Make no mistake, the six-man rotation decision was a major one. It’s also a hell of a vote of confidence in Sanchez from the older pitchers. After all, Happ, who is having a phenomenal season himself, had to agree to have his rotation cycle disrupted so this could happen. The bench is a man short, and the bullpen could run an arm light at times, but this is about as unselfish a decision as you’ll ever see a baseball team make. It may be what keeps the Jays in the playoff hunt.