By Yours Truly
https://fancredsports.com/Articles/yu-darvish-agonistes-why-a-pitcher-with-no-reaso
It's hard enough being tagged as a World Series goat one autumn without suffering an injury nobody can diagnose for months during the following season. Especially if you signed a six-year, $126 million deal in the offseason in between.
Yu Darvish can tell you, though he'd probably rather not. But within the space of nine months, Darvish has been compelled to apologise for a World Series loss for which he wasn't even close to the only culprit ... and to all but apologise for an elbow injury that put paid to his first, abbreviated season under his new deal.
The World Series disaster was easier to conjugate. The Astros caught Darvish tipping his pitches once earlier in the Series. The problem was that nobody on the Dodgers' brain trust caught and corrected it. Come Game Seven, Darvish may have been lucky to escape the first inning relatively unscathed. In the second, yet again with nobody catching and correcting, the Astros destroyed him and the Dodgers. That they were the more together team while a lot of key Dodgers elements disappeared throughout the Series wasn't half as juicy as hanging it all on Darvish's head.
After signing with the Cubs his 2018 began tentatively enough, but in May his elbow went AWOL. It took another three months and an early exit from a minor league rehab start for an MRI to reveal the issue, a stress reaction from a bone bruise. Good luck pitching major league baseball with it, if you dare.
But until that MRI even Darvish himself wondered whether those simply dismissing it as being all in his head weren't right. "Every morning when I woke up, I would pray, 'I have to throw today, please let there be no pain'," Darvish wrote in a blog post about his elbow injury last week. "Those were gloomy days. Meanwhile, the atmosphere around me had become, 'Is he faking his injury?', 'Is it a mental problem?' Those words made it extremely difficult for me to stop and rest, and it really took a toll on me emotionally."
That's the part Joe and Jane Fan forget only too readily when faced with on-field disaster. Much as we'd like to think otherwise, these aren't supermen whose bodies are immune to injuries small and massive alike. And most of us don't have to go to work, even the work of play, with fifty five thousand plus watching us right there in the office while we're televised live to a few million people.
Admit it. If Darvish had come up big in Game Seven last November he probably wouldn't have had to put up with accusations that this year's injury was all in his head. "A person can't really tell how much an injury hurts because you're not that person," he said last week. "It's natural for me to receive those kinds of comments towards me because they don't really understand where the pain is and how much the pain is."
What is it about us that we still think against all logic and sense that something other than the other guys being just that much more sharp, being that much better, is sinful and not mere defeat? Why do we still think, when a man feels compelled to apologise for having been beaten in honest competition, which is just what Darvish did when a TMZ reporter caught up to him a few days after last year's Series ended, that it's proper and maybe not enough that he should apologise? What should we expect him to do, hire his own firing squad?
"The unspoken assumption,"
The Washington Post's columnist Thomas Boswell wrote once upon a time (in 1989, as it were), "is that those who lose must do so because of some moral flaw ... It might be more honest, and healthier, to say that if you work very hard you will become excellent, and because of that excellence, you may do great deeds and win great prizes. Unless, of course, you don't. Because, sometimes, the other player is better or luckier. In which case you simply have to be satisfied with your excellence and the dignity of your effort."
Boswell wrote those words in the wake of one postseason goat's tragedy. In 1986, Angels relief pitcher Donnie Moore threw Dave Henderson a knee-high, low and away fork ball, with the Angels a strike away from their first World Series. Henderson foul tipped it away. Moore threw Henderson another, similarly unhittable pitch — and Henderson somehow sent it over the left field fence. Keeping the Red Sox alive to go to the Series and deal with their own humiliations. In 1989, Moore, whose private life was shaky enough before the Anaheim boo birds made the rest of his life as an Angel miserable, shot his wife and then committed suicide.
"Moore's wife, Tonya, once said that, after the Pitch, Moore would often come home from games at Anaheim Stadium, where he was booed, and burst into tears," Boswell wrote. Moore pitched in pain as it was in 1986, and the following year he also had to suffer his own general manager accusing him of goldbricking while he tried but often couldn't pitch through shoulder and back trouble. If Henderson had struck out or grounded out on that second fork ball and the Angels had gone to that Series, bet on it; nobody would have accused Moore of anything except trying.
In one sense, Darvish is lucky that nobody's done anything worse than accuse him of having a psychosomatic injury. Mitch Williams found assorted carpenter's nails under the tires of his family's cars after blowing one World Series save and then throwing a Series-losing home run to Joe Carter in 1993. Umpire Don Denkinger's blown call at first base in Game Six of the 1985 Series, with the Cardinals three outs from winning the rings but propelled instead toward that disaster of a Game Seven, prompted him to seek police protection after an indignant radio host gave out his address and phone number on the air.
Signing a big contract is no guarantee that the signers will go unscathed for the coming life of the deal. More of them than Joe and Jane Fan realise find themselves pressing early in the deal trying to live up to the dollars. Sometimes they plain don't play as well as they'd played to earn such contracts in the first place. But sometimes they play into injury troubles, which often compromise if not end their careers. Andy Messersmith, Bobby Grich, Don Gullett (who already had an injury history when the Yankees signed him big), Wayne Garland, the ill-fated Moore (he'd signed for three years and $3 million with the Angels prior to 1986), Johan Santana, Ryan Howard, Carl Crawford, Matt Cain, Mark Teixiera, and Albert Pujols can tell you.
In some ways the saddest was Darren Dreifort. A big, nervy righthander, he went second in the draft (behind Alex Rodriguez) out of Wichita State in 1993. After a few injury plagued seasons in which he still showed promise when pitching right, the Dodgers offered him $55 million for five years in 2001. Almost from that moment forward Dreifort remained plagued by injury after injury after injury. "The poster boy for Centinela Hospital,"
Forbes writer Howard Cole once described him.
He underwent 22 surgeries total after leaving college for the pros, including eight following his retirement in 2004. Now a coach in the Dodgers' minor league system, Dreifort could take comfort that his teammates were the only ones who knew more than he did about how hard he worked to rehabilitate each injury. So did his managers and coaches. Fans who didn't know or didn't want to know called him Bumfort and Creampuff.
What does it do to a man when his body betrays him no matter his efforts or his diligence and nobody is willing to listen? Are injuries incurred in action more honourable if you're making $55,000 instead of $55 million? Is your body supposed to be impervious because you lost a Game Seven in a World Series while it's ok for your body to be vulnerable if you didn't get to the Series in the first place?
I'm not entirely sure which needs to go the way of the floppy disk first: the goat business, or the business of determining injuries according to the injured's salary. But they need to be put out of business. Permanently.
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