Petriello: Pitching through pain rarely works out well
From Mike Petriello at FanGraphs on March 17, 2014:
Diamondbacks lefty Patrick Corbin suffered a partial tear to his ulnar collateral ligament over the weekend, and will almost certainly require Tommy John surgery. Obviously, that’s a big blow to Arizona’s playoff hopes — and, as with Matt Harvey last year and Stephen Strasburg before that, just a huge downer to any baseball fan who enjoys watching talented young pitching — but we’ll get back to that in a second. What really caught my eye about Corbin’s injury was this quote from the MLB.com story:
Corbin said he had been feeling tightness in his forearm through much of the spring and during his Saturday start, but the pain went to a next level with the final three of his 91 pitches in Saturday’s game. He said he felt “a little shock” but no pop in his elbow those last few pitches, and he decided to shut it down.
“It was just the same tightness I kind of had the first three starts, but nothing out of the ordinary,” Corbin said
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When the human body is asked to do something that it’s perhaps not built to do — say, repeatedly throwing a baseball at a high velocity thousands of times — and there are already clear warning signs, continuing to perform that same activity generally only continues to add stress, until the stress reaches such a point that the body can’t take it any longer. Something breaks. Seasons end.
Read the full article here: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/pitching-through-pain-rarely-works-out-well/
Originally published: March 17, 2014. Last Updated: March 17, 2014.