It's not like the Seattle Mariners are unconcerned that their biggest offseason addition, former Cy Young Award-winning starter Cliff Lee, had foot surgery Friday, just two weeks before pitchers and catchers report.They're just not going to make themselves crazy over the removal of a floating bone spur in Lee's left foot.
Manager Don Wakamatsu, for one, had been trying to figure out with pitching coach Rick Adair how they should approach the spring workload for Lee, who pitched a monstrous 272 innings last year when you combine the regular season and postseason.
Conclusion No. 1: If this injury, which the medics say is minor, knocks a few innings off Lee's spring tab, then the surgery could actually turn out being a good thing. Conclusion No. 2: Lee's still expected to be ready for his regular season pairing with Felix Hernandez atop the Seattle rotation.
"As a coaching staff, we think that in a way this is a blessing in that it slows him down a bit,'' Wakamatsu told FanHouse. "He's supposed to be moving around fine in 7-10 days, and it's already been three or four. He should be pretty good come spring training.''
And need for recovery time means that Wakamatsu and Adair have more time to talk with Lee about the approach going forward after Lee's huge number of innings with the Indians and Phillies last year.
Lee threw more innings in 2009 than any pitcher since the Diamondbacks got 305 out of Curt Schilling and 291 out of Randy Johnson in winning the 2001 World Series.
"I've had several conversations with Cliff, and he's been unbelievable,'' Wakamatsu said. "We talked about his workload, but he wants no special treatment this spring. We all thought the foot problem needed to be addressed whether the bone had broken off or not, and the recovery time isn't much, so I don't know that there will be any setback at all.''
Wakamatsu said that former manager Chuck Tanner, one of his mentors, once told him that the mistake many managers make in similar spring training situations is holding players back so much they aren't ready come April.
"I think it's dangerous to put in a player's mind the team needs to hold him back,'' Wakamatsu said. "Cliff and I have talked a lot about the innings he pitched last year. He told me that he doesn't see a problem. He feels that he's progressed in the efficiency of those innings.''
The Mariners only need to look to at Hernandez to see how that works. One of the steps that allowed Hernandez to add an
additional 38 innings to his previous career high in 2009 was controlling his pitch count. Once he could trim the occasional 40-pitch inning down to 30 and the 30-pitch inning down to 15 or so, the actual number of pitches didn't increase as radically.
Hernandez wasn't worn out at season's end. He was dragging most in an Aug. 1 start in Texas, but he bounced back from that and never allowed more than three earned runs in any start the rest of the season.
"And if we'd been in the playoffs, Felix would have been fresh; all our pitchers would have been,'' Wakamatsu said. "When you get to the playoffs, that goes away. You look at mindset at that time of the year. It's all about mindset.''
Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Man, I wish Lee was still with the Indians. We got ripped in that trade.