Waiting for official news from injured St. Louis Cardinals starting pitcher Chris Carpenter’s return to St. Louis for further medical evaluation may take a day or so. In the interim, we can speculate a bit based on early information from the club.
Former Cardinals hurler Woody Williams (pictured in 2002) was mentioned by general manager John Mozeliak as a comparable situation to Carpenter’s left ribcage or oblique injury suffered on Tuesday night in Arizona.
The specifics are this: Williams went onto the disabled list on July 7, 2002 and remained there for 53 days, coming off on August 29. Projecting that timetable into 2009 would have Carp returning on or about June 1, missing approximately eight starts or one-quarter of the season considering a normal five-man rotation.
Looking at Williams’ game logs from 2002, he carried a 2.35 ERA into his DL stint. In his return on August 29, he was touched up for five runs on eight hits in four innings. It was his worst outing of the season by a considerable margin.
However, Woody bounced back quickly, allowing just one run over his next 18 innings and three starts, all wins. Williams finished the 2002 regular season with a 2.53 ERA.
At the time of his injury, Williams was 35 years of age, actually marking his 36th birthday while on the disabled list. Carpenter, now 33, will turn 34 on the 27th of this month, most likely also while on the shelf. In fact, 2009 will mark Carp’s third consecutive birthday “celebrated” from the vantage of the disabled list.
What does all this mean for the oft-injured Carpenter and the 2009 Cardinals? Only time will tell.
Mo pointed out the good news that the oblique twist is NOT an elbow or shoulder injury (and left unsaid a nerve injury).
As a Cardinal, Carpenter has had one occasional and rare health problem in terms of nerve system communication. This is a shadow that hangs over him, because unpredictable and not correctable. But it also seems transient. He can come back and have great seasons, as in 2005 and 2006, following the 2004 flareup.
Like many pitchers, Carpenter finally needed a new elbow ligament. This has been fixed and we saw last summer and this spring that his arm works great.
These muscle twists are annoying because of lost time, but heal with rest, as shown with Woody. Carpenter is going to be back by June and looks primed to deal quality innings. This is encouraging!
I think that it’s about time to face facts on Carpenter. The man will have only pitched 3.5 seasons over the past 7.5 years by the time he recovers from this. He’ll be 34 years old. He can’t be relied upon for anything from this point forward. His health and/or conditioning just isn’t there.
One big fact about Carp is he is under contract through 2011. Whenever able to go, he will be in rotation. Because a top talent, he will have a big influence on this and the next two seasons. The encouraging news is his arm seems great and this muscle twist will heal.
I initially missed an earlier stay of Woody on the DL, also in 2002. This one was noted as strained oblique while the later one was labeled as strained ribcage. Sounds the same to me. He apparently tried to come back too soon from this first one and was bitten again.
4/6-5/15/02 – 39 DL days
nutlaw, I don’t suspect conditioning as the issue, but it does seem like Carpenter is one of those guys who is injury-prone and he is not getting younger. As noted, he is under contract through 2011 with an option for 2012 with the Cards not having much to show for their $63.5 million commitment made in late 2006 – at least not yet.
To make up for the promotion of Boggs, Memphis started Maekawa, a reliever. The poor man threw 104 pitches. Ouch.
Maekawa took one for the team for sure. I didn’t check on when Todd had pitched last and maybe they didn’t want to disrupt his new career as a reliever, but I thought they might have asked him to do it instead.