Article: Proactive Injured List Placement the Prudent Response for Jordan Wicks, Cubs

[Matthew Trueblood]

For far too many pitchers on MLB staffs in recent months, "forearm strain" has become as much euphemism as real diagnosis. That terminology often comes about a week before "Tommy John surgery" in the discussion of an ailing hurler. The Chicago Cubs have been an exception, and hope to remain so.

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

It's been a bad spring for forearms, and that usually means a bad spring, period. Forearm strains are one potential indicator (an imperfect but significant one) of an elbow issue, and in the modern game, most elbow issues are torn UCLs, which require some version of reconstructive surgery and anywhere from 10 to 18 months on the injured list. 

We're ahead of the pace of forearm injuries, league-wide, for any of the last four full seasons, and that's not even counting Jordan Wicks, whom the Cubs placed on the injured list with that designation Sunday. This isn't a Cubs problem; it's an MLB problem.

 

 

That the problem isn't confined to the desperately thin Cubs rotation probably won't be much comfort to Cubs fans, though. Nor will the facts about how long pitchers tend to spend on the shelf with this injury, even when they avoid the scalpel. There have been 49 trips to the injured list with either a strain or tightness in the forearm in MLB over the last three years, and it's usually more than a month. Often, it's at least two.

That's the bad news. The good news is, in some small but important ways, the Cubs might be the exception to that rule. They account for seven of the 49 data points in that sample over the previous three years, but they've returned their hurlers from this problem--especially their young hurlers--much, much sooner than the average.

In 2021, they placed Trevor Megill on the injured list with forearm trouble, but they got him back in under five weeks. More importantly, last year, both Justin Steele (June) and Adbert Alzolay (September) landed on the shelf with that problem, but they returned in 15 and 19 days, respectively. Neither has needed surgery since, which is obviously the biggest victory and the best argument for proactive handling of such cases.

Michael Fulmer (who ended up needing Tommy John surgery after the season) and Brad Boxberger are much less encouraging instances, of course, but in those cases, the Cubs were working with tired, veteran arms whom they knew had suffered major previous injuries before they acquired them. When they saw evidence or got a report from an important young pitcher that their arm wasn't responding the way they'd have liked, the team was quick to take them out of action and protect them from more severe injury, until they had a chance to recover and reset.

It's hard to overstate the importance of doing this, and it's rare to see a team get it right--as evidenced not only by the much longer lines for most of the other similar injuries above, but by the rising surgery rates throughout the league. It's not easy to protect a pitcher from themselves, especially in this day and age, when pitching is so much about velocity. Wicks added some heat to his fastball this spring, which tends to come with an increased risk of injury, so it was very important that the team be cautious if any sign of that risk becoming reality emerged. 

It sounds like that's more or less what's happening here. Wicks sure seems optimistic, although pitchers have certainly felt misplaced confidence in this area in the past. 

Jordan Wicks felt forearm soreness while warming up before last start & it went away when he got hot.

But forearm didn’t respond well post start, prompting IL move. Wicks said he’s not overly concerned: “No reason to push it … obviously extremely frustrated we had to do that.”

— Meghan Montemurro (@M_Montemurro) April 28, 2024

By no means is Wicks out of the woods yet. Importantly, he will get an MRI on his elbow soon, and that could reveal much more damage than he believes is there. We also have to thread a needle here, by saying two seemingly dissonant things at once:

1. The team deserves plenty of credit, for the way they've managed the arms of Steele, Alzolay, Wicks, and others, keeping their young hurlers healthy and amassing good organizational pitching depth. Their pitching development infrastructure, medical training staff, and sports science department (under Dr. Mike Sonne, who made huge inroads in the area of pitcher injury prediction and prevention even with deeply imperfect data during his time as a public analyst) seem to be communicating and cooperating effectively.
2. The team was also negligent and culpable in not anticipating continued injury trouble, especially as they bring in more hard-throwing pitchers and try to boost the velocity of the guys they already have, and thus doing more to bolster their pitching depth this winter. Wicks going on the injured list hurts more because the team let Jordan Montgomery sign a shockingly team-friendly deal with a rival for the NL Wild Card, for instance.

Ultimately, Item No. 1 is more important than Item No. 2, right now. It doesn't mean that they're safe; they could still suffer some major and devastating injuries almost at any moment. Right now, however, they've done right both by themselves and by Wicks.

"The Tommy John ligament matures at about age 26," Dr. James Andrews said recently, on the occasion of his retirement after decades as one of baseball's foremost arm surgeons. "In high school, the red line where the forces go beyond the tensile properties of the [ulnar collateral] ligament is about 80 miles per hour."

Jordan Wicks has been throwing harder than that since high school, and although his arm is now strong enough to withstand more force than that, he's still only 24 years old. Sitting 93 and touching 95 or 96 is almost certainly more than his arm could handle, without having some kind of reaction. That reaction has come, and the Cubs are doing their best to make sure it doesn't go from a reaction to an outright failure. 

Rest is the key. A pitcher whose arm begins to balk at the force they're using to throw can, by giving all the relevant tissues some time to recover, avoid disaster and build up their strength, so that their arm can better handle the same force in the future. That's the goal here. It's not a guaranteed outcome, but the Cubs have some recent successes to give them confidence in this approach, and it's the right way to attempt to solve the problem in front of them. Now, they just have to hope their pitching depth can withstand this stern April test.

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[Guest234]

The CTE of baseball, fortunately it does not seem to effect mental capabilities.