Quick Links: Tommy John, Lineups, Conversations

It’s been a long time since I’ve come across some items that are simply worthy of sharing without much further comment. But there have been two items to pass across my screen in the past few days that inspired such a post.

The first is a phenomenally thorough examination of the history of Tommy John surgery and some of the advanced ways in which doctors are learning about the procedure. Some of the ideas discussed, particularly a lot of the specifics regarding proper pitching mechanics, are quite interesting and thought provoking. Lindsay Berra’s article is in the MLB Preview Issue of ESPN The Magazine but can also be found online here.

One stat from her piece that I found interesting has to do with how much time (and payroll) has been lost by players missing time due to TJ surgery over the past five seasons:

14,232 total regular season days. $193,503,317 in salary.

Just this Spring we’ve seen Ryan Madson, Joakin Soria, Sergio Escalona, and Joel Zumaya go down with injury requiring TJ surgery, plus a handful of minor leaguers. This, unfortunately, seems to be a growing trend.

Elsewhere, Graham Womack has been conducting voting for his latest project over at Baseball: Past and Present. His quest is to determine what the top All Time Dream Lineup would look like. There are still two days to vote, if you’re interested. But he’s posted some other top lineups – all California born, all under 5’9”, for some examples – that are really worth a read.

Finally, there’s one last item that I need to share. And I’m overdue in getting a link to this up here at the site.

A few weeks ago I sat down and spent some time talking with Daniel Shoptaw in the latest Episode for his Conversations With C70 series. Daniel runs a St. Louis Cardinals blog and was the founder of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance. We spent roughly an hour talking baseball and blogging. You can listen to the entirety of our conversation here.