Kevin Hart is going to see James Andrews next week to get a second opinion on a labrum tear that the Pirates’ team doctor says will require surgery. I’m not sure what the second opinion would be for because the labrum is a shoulder ligament, essentially a piece of cartilage in your shoulder and so some type of surgery is almost always necessary to fix tears. He could be going to get a second opinion on the severity of the tear, but given that the Pirates have apparently been more evasive about this injury with the press than other injuries they’re probably pretty sure that surgery is necessary.
First, let’s talk about Hart. Labrum injuries are as serious as injuries get for pitchers. Jim McLennan wrote a good post at Arizona Snake Pit last summer discussing labrum tears and how they applied to Brandon Webb, who missed most of last year with the injury. If it’s a serious tear that requires more than a debridement of the ligament (low grade labrum tears amount to fraying of the ligament, which catches on the shoulder joint and creates a pulling sensation; a debridement is the removal of the frayed part of the labrum while the remainder of the ligament stays in the arm and in place), the surgery is essentially to bolt the labrum back into position in the shoulder so that it can heal in place. For some pitchers, it does and they can get back to pitching. For others (like Kelvim Escobar, for example) it doesn’t and when that happens, this injury can essentially end a pitcher’s career.
We’ll have to wait for Hart’s surgery for more details and even then, we probably won’t know just how bad this will turn out for him until his rehab starts and he tries to come back. On one hand, this definitely helps explain his control problems this year. On the other, this is just an incredibly bad break for a guy that was obviously working hard to try and get himself right. Obviously, I hope he makes a full recovery and we see him back on the mound next year.
This injury has some wider-ranging complications for the Pirates, though. Their trade with the Chicago Cubs last year now involved sending Tom Gorzelanny and John Grabow for Chicago for two pitchers that have ended up on the shelf with torn labrums — Hart and Jose Ascanio. So was this incredibly bad luck? Was the front office negligent in checking Hart and Ascanio’s health? We’re not ever likely to know the full truth here, but there’s no way this doesn’t reflect poorly on Neal Huntington, no matter what the truth is. I saw Ascanio pitch in person days after he was acquired and days before his injury was diagnosed, and he was electric. He hit 96 on the gun early in his start and stayed in the mid-to-low 90s all night, he kept hitters off balance with some nasty breaking stuff, he looked awesome. There wasn’t any indication that night that there was any sort of problem with his arm, but there obviously must have been by that point. And looking at Hart’s velocity and PitchFX and whatnot on his FanGraphs page I don’t see much to indicate that he was any different at any point in 2009 than he’d been in the past, which means that his ridiculous control problems this spring were probably the first real sign something was wrong.
In any case, this means that the Pirates will be playing hot potato with Jeff Karstens, Dan McCutchen, Brian Burres, and maybe Brian Bass until they decide Brad Lincoln is ready for a promotion to Pittsburgh. So hurry up, Brad.
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