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The Cruel Reality For Pitchers Like Nick Burdi

Nick Burdi faces yet another major surgery on his pitching arm.
Photo: Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports

I have many metaphors, analogies, and phrases that I incorporate into my daily speech patterns. One of my favorite ones is, “The things we build don’t last forever”. It was the title of an editorial I read years ago in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by a national female columnist, whose name escapes me all these years later. It told the story of her parents’ hand-crafted stone wall around their New England home and how she visited it as an adult years later and it was in disrepair.

I’m reminded of this phrase with this week’s news of both the Cardinals’ Jordan Hicks’ pending Tommy John surgery and the Pirates’ Nick Burdi’s pending Thoracic Outlet Syndrome surgery. Both of them are season ending.

We really caught Nick Burdi Fever around these here parts in April, with Alex and I being Patient Zero and Patient One. We contemplated changing the name to The Point Of Burdi. But he was exciting and represented The Next Great Thing. His K% was astronomical and his slider was something to behold. Here’s a look in happier times:

Burdi looked like a Rule 5 steal and someone that could lengthen an already strong-looking April bullpen with Vazquez, Crick, Kela, and Rodriguez. Ah…simpler times.

For Burdi this represents another impediment in his pitching career. Since being drafted in the 2nd round in 2014 by the Twins, Burdi only pitched around 104 innings between then and December 2017 when the Pirates obtained him for international bonus money after the Phillies got him in the Rule 5 draft. He missed virtually all of 2016 with a bone bruise in his pitching elbow, the Tommy John in May 2017, and he returned to action in July 2018 with the Pirates in the minors.

Tommy John surgery may seem routine, or almost as a rite of passage nowadays to some, but it’s anything but. If you haven’t read Jeff Passan’s The Arm yet, I highly recommend it. Here’s a passage from it about the surgery:

UCL reconstruction is far from foolproof, too. The procedure involves cutting through skin and muscle, drilling into bone, and tying the elbow together. It is major surgery that calls for a brutal, monotonous rehabilitation. And while the return rate is around 80 percent, a study from Jon Roegele at the Hardball Times looked at the return of every pitcher who underwent Tommy John surgery from 2000 to 2009 and found the median threw just 60 games and 100 innings for the rest of his career.

So that’s what Burdi has already done and what Jordan Hicks has to look forward to. Hicks was throwing 102-104 on the reg, with max effort, so this was as inevitable as watching a horror movie where kids decide to check out that abandoned house at the end of the dark lane.

And now Burdi has an even more challenging surgery ahead of him in Thoracic Outlet. TOS is when blood vessels and/or nerves are compressed between one’s collarbone and the first rib (thoracic outlet). The surgery typically involves the removal of a portion (or all) of the rib in order to relieve the pressure. Apparently, some places give you the rib to take home in a jar. No thank you.

The rate of success for a pitcher returning from this is pretty slim. Matt Harvey is probably the most recent TOS case to return and he’s been a shell of his former self. The surgery itself is relatively new for pitchers, as it appears that Chris Carpenter in 2012 was the first test case for it.

Nick Burdi should be ready for Spring Training next year, but his effectiveness is now an even bigger question mark than the ones on the Riddler’s costume. Humans are not meant to throw baseballs and the speeds and torques that they do. We are not machines built to do this action repetitively. Burdi is looking like a human that is just not built to withstand the pitching stresses of this game and that is a very sad thing for all parties.

Nerd engineer by day, nerd writer at night. Kevin is the co-founder of The Point of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Creating Christ, a sci-fi novel available on Amazon.

5 Comments on The Cruel Reality For Pitchers Like Nick Burdi

  1. Pirates' fans harass management for not having their pitchers throw as many sliders as other teams. Injury prevention has to be the reason.

  2. Bob Stover // June 27, 2019 at 10:08 AM // Reply

    The quote that you refer to was the title of an article by Ellen Goodman, a national columnist for the Boston Globe and a syndicated author to the Washington Post at the time. It appeared in the P-G on August 2, 2008.

    https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2008/08/08/Ellen-Goodman-Bittersweet/stories/200808080136.

  3. Bob Stover // June 27, 2019 at 10:17 AM // Reply

    It is amazing to me that so many pitchers go through an entire career without needing TJ surgery. We witness young men barely out of their teens throwing at speeds of up to 100 mph, or throwing breaking balls with tremendous torque on the elbow, and so long as he is healthy, we think nothing of it. We take it for granted. It is so sad when we see a promising young budding star like Burdi sustaining what is probably a career ending injury. We see Jameson Taillon possibly facing a second TJ surgery; another procedure from few ever successfully return. We do complain about the obscene amounts of money athletes make, but we often don’t stop to think of the tremendous risk to any long term career that young pitchers face more than any other position.

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