The Arm (12 page)

On the conference table rested a blue binder, the reason I came here in the first place. The title page said: “Strasburg UCL Reconstruction (Tommy John) Timeline.” Boras's infamous binders usually teem with data meant to convince teams to drop nine figures on his top-end free agents. This one was different. It contained dozens of sheets of paper that defended the most controversial, debated decision in recent baseball history: the shutdown of Stephen Strasburg.

Before he talked about that, Boras wanted to show off the two glass cases against his office's back wall. Inside one was a signed baseball from every member of the three thousand–hit club, all the way back to Cap Anson in the 1800s. The other contained balls autographed by every three hundred–win pitcher. There's Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton and Warren Spahn, Lefty Grove and Old Hoss Radbourn. The collection is a tribute to longevity in a sport that specializes in aborted careers.

“We're in a perishable business,” Boras said. “That's why the rarity of winning is so difficult. Because you have to not only diagnose his talent, you have to diagnose his durability and you have to have good fortune to get all of that.”

Boras is the most successful sports agent ever, the driving force behind mushrooming player salaries that now average more than $4 million a year. He's brilliant and blustery, principled and self-righteous, beloved by those he helps and loathed by everyone in baseball who holds the purse strings. Nobody is better at bending people to his will, no matter how grandiose his demands may be. Every person in baseball knows Boras revels in his own hyperbole, and most of them still lap it up anyway. He walks the walk, and upward of $3 billion in contracts negotiated does the talking.

When Boras cloisters himself in his office with his three phones, in front of framed pictures of him with clients, across from a whiteboard with black and red markers, in an ergonomic chair that rolls up to a Mac with a small TV monitor, he considers the future of the game dear to him. The game is different than it was when he started advising players in the early 1980s, when the successful Tommy John surgeries numbered one.

In the seven years after the original procedure, Dr. Frank Jobe performed seven UCL reconstructions. Not one of those players made it to the major leagues after the surgery. He had waited until 1978 to try it a second time. “I wasn't sure it would hold up,” Jobe said. “When he kept winning games, I said, ‘We've got an operation here.'” Enter Brent Strom, a middling left-handed pitcher who, after going third overall in the 1970 draft, bounced from the Mets to the Indians to the Padres. He calls himself the Buzz Aldrin of Tommy John surgery. “They were very, uh, how shall I say,” Strom said. “They were very excited to do the surgery.”

Because Strom didn't have a palmaris longus in either wrist, Jobe used a tendon from his leg. The surgery itself went as well as John's, and Strom returned to the minor leagues with Houston in 1979. He pitched three more years, stagnated at Triple-A, and retired at thirty-two. It wasn't until a prospect named Tom Candiotti made it to the big leagues in 1983 that Jobe had his second success. More followed quickly. Reliever Don Aase, operated on by Jobe's colleague Lewis Yocum in 1984, returned to the major leagues. Paul Molitor, a future
Hall of Famer, was the first position player to make it back—and the first to do so in less than a year. Dr. James Andrews, the Alabama surgeon who would take Jobe's place as the most famous orthopedist in America, operated in 1985 on a twenty-two-year-old Double-A pitcher in the Toronto organization. David Wells would go on to play twenty years in the major leagues and retire with the eighth-most innings pitched among starters over the last three decades.

In 1986, twelve years after he pioneered Tommy John surgery, Jobe shared his findings in a landmark paper in the
Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery
. Orthopedists around the world marveled at the procedure's ingenuity and effectiveness. And yet over the next quarter century no obvious common thread among the postsurgery successes revealed itself, leaving Boras to wonder how he could keep Strasburg healthy the second time around.

He was a right-handed pitcher whose fastball hit triple digits in college, prompting the Washington Nationals to give him a record $15 million guarantee after taking him with the first pick in the 2009 draft. Just twelve starts into his major league career, Strasburg tore his UCL. Immediately, the organization, Dr. Lewis Yocum, and Boras began discussing how to map out the next two years. Boras's involvement wasn't surprising. He sees himself more as an attorney and advocate than an agent, and the last thing he wanted were decisions about a $100 million arm made by those without a stake in the full scope of Strasburg's future.

Boras was an early adopter of the pitch count. In Jeff Weaver's rookie season with Detroit in 1999, Boras urged the Detroit Tigers to keep him under a strict maximum of 110 per game. The Tigers obliged. During Rick Ankiel's first full season a year later, Boras asked the same of the St. Louis Cardinals. After Ankiel approached 120 pitches in three May starts, Boras called the Cardinals out in a chat on ESPN.com. Even though general manager Walt Jocketty protested to the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
—“We don't allow agents to run our organization”—Ankiel didn't exceed 111 pitches over his remaining twenty-one starts.

Almost immediately after Strasburg blew out on August 21, 2010, Boras commissioned the binder. It wasn't just a schedule of rehabilitation milestones. It explained the rationale behind what would happen two years later: the Nationals shutting down Strasburg on the cusp of the first postseason baseball in Washington since 1933. No one questioned the importance of Strasburg's long-term health. At the same time, franchises don't often put a key player's future ahead of their own long-awaited return to prominence.

Boras's binder provided the argument in favor. It looked at pitchers from 1980 to 2003, the first quarter century or so of the five-man-rotation era, and focused on those who logged heavy innings early in their careers. Forty-seven pitchers exceeded four hundred innings prior to turning twenty-four years old, and ten of those threw more than six hundred innings. Of the four hundred–inning group, only six went on to throw more than one thousand innings past their thirtieth birthdays. And just one of the six hundred–inning group survived to pass the thousand-inning mark: Greg Maddux, heralded for his clean delivery and ultraefficient innings.

Never mind that even if Strasburg did throw a full season of innings in 2012, he still would've finished the year about a hundred innings shy of four hundred. And that instead of giving Strasburg occasional rest to spread during the season that might have allowed him to pitch into October, Washington wanted to follow the plan it used when starter Jordan Zimmermann blew out his elbow a year earlier: throw every fifth day and end the season at the 160-inning mark, no matter when that came on the calendar.

Never mind that Zimmermann was a different arm, a different body type, a different delivery—that what works for Pitcher A is the furthest thing from guaranteed to work for Pitcher B. With their injury timelines almost identical, Strasburg copycatted nearly everything Zimmermann did, from the end-of-season rehab stint in the minor leagues the year after the surgery to the amount of work in the full year back to the shutdown date.

Strasburg watched the Nationals lose their first-round playoff series in 2012 after finishing with the best record in baseball. Their starting pitchers threw twenty-four innings over five games. Give two of those starts to Strasburg and maybe the outcome is different. Maybe not.

It's all a fanciful guess, the same as Strasburg's health going forward. Since 2012, he hasn't suffered another major arm injury. Perhaps the Nationals did the right thing, even if they haven't won a playoff series since. Had Strasburg abided by a different schedule—throwing a curveball July 2, 2011, instead of July 1, as the binder dictated—he might've gotten injured again. Had he pitched in October and the Nationals won the World Series, he might be healthy still. Everything is hypothetical, stuff for a counterfactual dimension, though if enough Zimmermanns and Strasburgs succeed adhering to the Nationals-Boras plan, others will adopt it soon enough.

Washington's confidence in Tommy John cases is evident. The Nationals chose high schooler Lucas Giolito—at one time the favorite for the number one pick in the amateur draft—sixteenth overall in 2012 after he needed UCL reconstruction. He entered 2016 as the best pitching prospect in baseball. In 2014, Erick Fedde of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, dropped to the Nationals after undergoing Tommy John, and they didn't hesitate to pluck him. Each received a signing bonus of more than $2.5 million.

“It may be a rite of passage for all we know,” Boras said. If he can convince an owner to spend $210 million on a pitcher, as he did in January 2015 when the Nationals signed Max Scherzer, surely he can convince himself that catastrophic elbow damage is baseball puberty. And why not, since Strasburg isn't the only hurler with a bad elbow near and dear to him.

Matt Harvey and José Fernández, two of the finest young arms in the game, are both Boras clients who blew out within a year of one another. Each got a binder; neither followed the Strasburg plan. Harvey fought his diagnosis, tried to rehab it, and
reluctantly underwent the procedure. Fernández dove right onto the surgeon's table. Harvey didn't rush back within a year like Strasburg, and because he was out of Boras's under-twenty-four danger zone there was no scheduled shutdown. He returned as good as ever, the Mets' savior.

Fernández debuted at twenty, blew out at twenty-one, and returned at twenty-two for the Miami Marlins. It gave Boras flashbacks. “What troubled us,” he said, “was I had represented Alex Fernandez, Jim Abbott, and Steve Avery. And these guys were great talents in the late eighties, and they're not pitching past thirty. What is it?”

Boras opened up the binder and pointed to a table. Before he turned twenty-four, Abbott logged 636 innings. And Alex Fernandez 714. And Avery 766. Boras's sample ends in 2003, because no pitchers these days get anywhere close to that. Only one current player, in fact, is on pace to exceed the 400-inning mark: José Fernández.

H
ALF A CENTURY REMOVED FROM
his last pitch, Sandy Koufax paused to consider the one question I felt he could answer as well as anybody. He is a generational fulcrum for baseball, someone who ties together two vital pieces of the game, not unlike the ulnar collateral ligament itself. The question: How did we get here? And by here, I meant to this place—to this evolutionary landing spot—where almost the entirety of the baseball establishment is frightened by its lack of knowledge about the one asset that costs more than anything.

“The big change is medically and the number of players,” Koufax said. “And the fact that longevity is possibly more important than winning. In those days, you didn't make any money unless you won. The whole team. If you won, everybody got a raise. Not much, but everybody got a raise. Today, if somebody is paying you that much money, don't get hurt. Don't do anything stupid.”

The money. Of course it's the money. Over his twelve seasons with the Dodgers, Sandy Koufax earned around $450,000. That's about $3.5 million in today's money—one-sixtieth of what Max Scherzer got for five fewer seasons. More than half Koufax's money came in his final two years, and to get the raise to $125,000 he earned in 1966, Koufax needed to hold out during spring training with Don Drysdale and play salary chicken.

If it took teaming up and threats to pay one of the greatest pitchers ever a salary of $900,000 in today's money after a year in which his arm was so bruised it looked like a camouflage fatigue, it's easy to imagine how affordable the rest of the pitchers were. Cheap salaries meant interchangeable players, giant margins of error, no fear of depreciation. The one salary suppressant left today is loss aversion; in what amounted to a loss-less market, teams could treat pitchers however they wanted, and the lack of a players' union left pitchers vulnerable to the whims of their managers, coaches, and owners.

When salaries started to spike in the '80s, so, too, did caution, whether it was five-man rotations or pitch counts. Money did what it can do: frighten the investor, especially when it's going toward such a volatile commodity. “People are scared,” said John Mozeliak, the GM of the St. Louis Cardinals. “They're making this huge investment in a young arm and they're not quite sure what the secret-sauce recipe looks like, so they're going tentative.”

Alex Anthopoulos and the Blue Jays weren't the only ones turning young horses into geldings. At the same time, the Baltimore Orioles were weaning nineteen-year-old Dylan Bundy on professional baseball. Baltimore chose Bundy with the number four pick in the 2011 draft and gave him a major league contract that guaranteed $6.25 million. At six feet one and two hundred pounds, Bundy did not possess the classic, long-and-lithe pitching body. He was a thick, muscled, mature, defies-his-age type—a kid who could rocket to the major leagues as a teenager.

Bundy was an Oklahoma high school legend. As a junior in
2010, he pitched twice in the same day and threw 181 pitches. His father, Denver, said: “We trained to do that.” It started when Bundy was six years old and jumping rope. He progressed to digging ditches and chopping trees before he turned ten and peaked as a teenager with weight-room pyrotechnics and three-hundred-foot-plus long-toss sessions. Denver Bundy wanted to build a machine capable of handling extreme pitch counts, no matter how foolhardy it may have been to burden a seventeen-year-old with it.

Once Bundy reached the minor leagues, Baltimore shackled him with a pitch count he hadn't seen since grade school. While throwing 181 pitches seemed ridiculous, limiting a physically mature, advanced talent to three innings a start, as Baltimore did in his first three starts, made just as little sense. He barely sniffed forty pitches in those outings, and I asked Orioles GM Dan Duquette to make sense of it.