Jarrod Parker surrenders to the elbow that betrayed him

[EasyAce]

By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2018/02/14/jarrod-parker-surrenders-to-the-elbow-that-betrayed-him/

Spring training isn’t even a week old and there’s already someone calling it a career because a key part of his body has not just resigned its
commission but gone AWOL thanks to injuries. Say hello and goodbye to Jarrod Parker, once a promising Athletic after moving there in a deal
with the Diamondbacks. He’s finished. Says he. At 29.

“I’m doing everything but throwing,” the now-former righthander told the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Susan Schlusser. “Your arm will tell you
when it’s done, and it did. It just sucks, being somewhat younger.”

Two Tommy John surgeries. Two fractures of the medial epichondyle bone to which the new tendon is normally attached in a Tommy John
procedure. For the guy who was supposed to be an Oakland rotation anchor in hand with Sonny Gray, who was traded to the Yankees last
mid-summer, this one doesn’t sting quite as much as it might. That’s because Parker was told by orthopedists after the second fracture in
March 2016 that his chances of pitching again were two—slim and none.

They rebuilt the elbow for everyday life. Don’t even think about taking the mound again. Parker’s not the first pitcher of great promise to get
news like that and he won’t be the last. Nor is he the first who thought he could come back sooner than sound medical opinion suggests, in his
case from the second Tommy John.

Sound medicine says you need six months to a year longer than the first time. In 2015, Parker was back on a mound thirteen months after the
second surgery. That May, the medial bone cracked the first time—while throwing a pitch. Former A’s pitcher Barry Zito says he saw visions of
Dave Dravecky and Tom Browning when Parker went down.

“It’s traumatic to be injured in such a violent way when pitching, and after all that rehab, just heartbreaking,” says A’s general manager Billy Beane.
“Really, a career interrupted.”

Did anyone tell Parker what can happen if the itch to pitch gets to you before your body’s recovery is full enough to say go? The late Mark (The Bird)
Fidrych learned the hard way, too.

At 21: Firdrych was the American League’s Rookie of the Year with 19 wins, a small truckload of strikeouts, and an unlimited future. The following
spring, the Bird dinged his knee, came back too soon, and shredded his shoulder. Then, he made the first of several premature comebacks from the
shoulder miseries. He, too, was finished at age 29, learning only around then that a frayed rotator cuff was made worse by all those undiagnosed
comeback injuries.

Fidrych went home to the farm he bought with his first and only big contract. He remained a beloved presence at Tiger functions to come, until he
died in a freak accident while repairing a heavy truck in 2009.

Another Athletics comer, Dallas Braden, discovered the hard way that his shoulder betrayed him after a 2010 that included a Mother’s Day perfect
game in front of the beloved grandmother who’d raised him. 2011—three starts, shoulder injury, career essentially over. Braden made it official in
2014. “There’s nothing left in there, it’s just a shredded mess,” he told Schlusser, as it happened. “I left my arm on the mound at the [Oakland
Alameda County] Coliseum, and I’m OK with that.”

Parker finished fifth in the American League Rookie of the Year voting that handed the award to Mike Trout. Now it’s all over for him save the “logistics”
(his word) of official retirement. He joins Braden on a sad roll of promising A’s pitchers whose bodies broke their promises before they were 33:

Jim Nash—Big kid at 6’5″. Pinpoint control, variable-speed curve ball, looked like a comer with the 1966 Kansas City A’s. Chronic shoulder issues kept
him from the greatness his rookie season suggested; seven seasons and a 68-64 record for three teams, a rotator cuff tear finished him. Retired at 27 to help
create the Kennesaw State College (Division II) baseball program, eventually became a Bell South analyst. Possibly also remembered best for being a
kind-of urban legend: he was said to be on the mound when Moe Drabowsky pranked the A’s bullpen by mimicking manager Alvin Dark’s voice and
ordering Lew Krausse to start warming up, rattling Nash into surrendering a lead. But it wasn’t Nash.

The Five Aces—The Oakland rotation of 1981-83. Mike Norris, Steve McCatty, Rick Langford, Matt Keough, Brian Kingman. April 1981: Sports
Illustrated cover boys. Three years later: Resembling an orthopedic ward waiting room. Norris—all but finished by 28. McCatty—Gone at 31.
Langford—Hung in until 34, somehow. Keough—Done at 30. Kingman (who lost 20 in extremely hard luck in 1980)—done at 28. All still can’t quite
bring themselves to blame manager Billy Martin for overworking them like a man Bill James called one “who didn’t quite believe in the existence
of the future.”

(McCatty eventually turned up as the Nationals' pitching coach, including for the Year of the Strasburg Plan, 2012. McCatty was on board with the Plan
from the outset. He knew only too well what potential overwork could do to an arm even without Tommy John surgery.)

Kirk Dressendorfer—University of Texas phenom with a 45-8 career record there. Drafted by the A’s in 1990. 1991—After only a small handful
of minor league games, made seven major league starts and gone. Injuries turned him into a minor league journeyman before he surrendered after
1997. Became a software developer and then communications director for Round Rock’s minor league Express (Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan was an owner
of the team) before returning to Dell and raising his family.

Parker would have preferred not to join that particular roll. He speaks now of going to work in the health industry (he married a dentist in October),
perhaps to consult other major league players on injury rehabilitation and, very likely, how not to do it. If experience is the great educator, Parker’s
already holding a master’s degree in athletic life. And maybe in life beyond that of the athlete.
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