With Brown, Framber and Javier you still have as good of a 1,2,3 as anyone in the league. If Lance can come back healthy, still as good of a top 4 as anyone in the league. The offense is where the problem still lies.
Imagine a marathon runner who averages a 6 minute mile or 90 seconds a lap. Then tell them they must run every lap at 70 seconds. What do you think will happen? If they can maintain a 70 second lap for 26.2 miles, they'd already be in the Olympics. It will just weed out 90% though injury or exhaustion. I fully expect the pitchers on IR list to be HUGE by September.
In terms of pitch clock, we have data from the minor leagues since they've been using it already. Last season, pitcher injuries were down 11%. Long term, players believe the extra sleep and less time on their feet will reduce injuries as well. The WBC needs more research, but it should be easy to do to compare injury rate amongst pitchers who did pitch there vs not, especially if you go back and include previous WBCs in the data set. https://www.mlb.com/news/pitch-timer-could-benefit-player-health Consider that, in the first 12 seasons of Mike Trout’s great career, the average time of an MLB game has been 3:05. So on a given day, Trout could be expected to spend 92 1/2 minutes on his feet in center field. Juxtapose that against Mickey Mantle, to whom Trout is often compared on a statistical level. The Mick played in an era in which, in his first 12 seasons, the average nine-inning game took 2:28. That’s around 16 fewer minutes in the field each day. “That stuff,” said Trout, whose playing time the past two years has been compromised by elbow, calf, hand, groin, back and foot issues, “adds up over the course of the year.” A reduction in game times would add up, too. When MiLB adopted the pitch timer across all levels last year, some expressed concern that speeding up pitchers would result in an increase in injuries. On the contrary, pitcher injury events decreased 11% from 2021 to 2022, and some players espoused the benefits of the better pace. “Just from a recovery standpoint, getting back in at a reasonable hour and getting a good night’s sleep is a game-changer,” Dodgers pitching prospect Nick Nastrini said last year. “It could be the difference between being able to play for five years and being able to play for 12. Because there’s the accumulation of getting back at 11:30 [p.m.] and 12:30 [a.m.] and getting into bed by 1 [a.m.] and having to do it all again the next day for 132 games in our season or 162 games in a big league season, it takes a big toll on your body.” Sleep is baseball’s secret X-factor. Being the only professional sport in which teams play a game with no timed ending virtually every day of the season has its charms but also its challenges. “Baseball is still somewhat unique in the sports landscape for its steady, methodical march through the year,” said Dr. Scott Kutscher, a clinical associate professor at Stanford with a focus on sleep medicine. “It’s the constant stress of a game with no clock and how to fit sleep into that puzzle of not knowing how the game is going to end.” Take the 2022 Phillies, to grab an example at random, had a stretch of 14 games in 13 days in June. On the front end, in a five-day span, they had two night games and then a four-hour day game in Milwaukee, followed by overnight travel to Philadelphia (losing an hour in the sky with the time change) for a three-hour, 24-minute night game, followed by a day game. On the back end, there was a home series against the Nationals that included four games in the span of 50 hours. Try getting 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep somewhere in there. “That is one of the challenges the baseball schedule creates for players,” Guardians president Chris Antonetti said. “A lot of sleep advice revolves around having a consistent bedtime and a consistent wake time. None of that is really possible in professional sports. So we have to find other ways to adapt to that, given some of the constraints of the schedule.” The result is the evolutionary demise of the literal “everyday” player. In each of the last two seasons, only two players punched in for all 162 games (Whit Merrifield and Marcus Semien in 2021, and Matt Olson and Dansby Swanson in '22). Last season, only 88 players appeared in 140 or more games -- the fewest in a full season since 1972, when there were six fewer teams. Cal Ripken Jr.’s record games played streak is as secure as Fort Knox.
Do you realize that McCullers and Urguidy are currently on the DL? Also, I don't think Brown's 2 starts in 2022 count as him being in last year's rotation.
The WBC should be re-retired. Absolute crap idea. Why in the hell does any MLB fan care whether the U.S. beats Japan? GMAFB.
I doubt the WBC or pitch clock had anything to do with this injury. This injury just happens. Verlander got months of extra rest due to covid and yet it happened to him in the first game of the 2020 season.
Brown wasn't in the rotation in 2022, neither was Javier (initially). Urquidy, Garcia, and McCullers are on the shelf. Verlander is gone. Only Framber remains.
Javier was more in the 2022 rotation than McCullers. Javier was starting in late April. McCullers didn't pitch until August.
Latin Players Start playing Baseball at around age 8. Young Arm and alot of workload over the Years with a Heavy Baseball.
