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July 24, 2007

Under The Knife

Tragedy

by Will Carroll

Baseball has always been slow to change, but quick to react. Ray Chapman's name still resonates and some say his beaning led to the end of the Deadball Era. Helmets came into the game, ordered by baseball's most visionary and pragmatic executive, Branch Rickey, after a Pirates minor leaguer was killed, and were accepted in large part because of a terrible beaning suffered by Lou Boudreau. Unfortunately, safety improvements have all but stopped, perhaps because they were good enough to prevent--or the game was lucky enough not to have--another incident.

The death of Mike Coolbaugh touches me because I met him when he was with the Indianapolis Indians. I wonder if this will bring some change. I'm not sure if coaches need helmets and chest protectors--or maybe just Ribcaps--any more than pitchers do, or whether moving the coaching box back and pulling the coaches further out of the line of fire from hard-hit line drives would make things any better. I'm not sure if a technological solution, like small headsets, wouldn't accomplish more, allowing the coach to stay in the dugout. I just know that almost every person I talk to is shaken by this, but almost to a man they say that they're surprised that something like this doesn't happen more often. Just as with pitchers getting hit with balls that come back at them, something needs to be done. Sadly, it seems to take something like the Coolbaugh incident to make the game recognize a need for change.

Powered by the hope that we can prevent this from ever happening again, on to the injuries:

• There are a lot of conspiracy theories concerning Pedro Martinez. Never mind that he threw a simulated game and is gearing up for his first rehab start sometime next week. All people want to talk about is that big gap in throwing over the All-Star break when he went back to the Dominican Republic. Many have asked me if he went back to take something--legal or illegal--to aid his comeback, just as many have insinuated he did in Boston to help him stay healthy. Martinez's continued work with Nao Presinal does raise some eyebrows here.

  While the laws and culture are different in the Dominican, I'm not sure why Martinez going home for the break to do some rehab should be treated any differently than Mark Prior being home in the San Diego area right now. Home provides a comfort level. There wasn't much, if any, coverage of Martinez in his local papers, something I'm not sure is odd, but we do know that in that gap between outings in Port St. Lucie, Martinez didn't lose anything. He threw a 50-pitch simulated game that included his full arsenal of pitches, including breaking balls. One observer said he looked "sharp" and that his velocity was "good—just good." The observer also said that Martinez's arm slot seemed "much higher, locked in."

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