The St.Louis Cardinals need Carlos Martinez pitching like Carlos Martinez. Health is the problem. But I’m not entirely sure what exactly is wrong with Martinez. It seems like maybe the Cardinals aren’t sure either.
With the Cardinals staking out the position that Martinez is not healthy enough to return to the struggling rotation and El Gallo set to rejoin the team as a reliever, the cloudiness regarding his health is all the more curious. In order to attempt to understand the approach the organization has taken, I decided to revisit the reporting on Martinez’s health to present.
May 10, 2018: Very Mild Lat Strain
The Cardinals placed Martinez on the IL with a right lat strain. At the time MLB.com reported that general manager Michael Girsch said:
“He was more sore than normal, so we did an MRI and he saw a doctor, and given that it is a very mild lat strain, and with an off-day yesterday, and off-day Monday, the right thing to do was to give him a little break . . .”
July 21, 2018: Right Oblique Strain
The Cardinals activated Martinez and added him to the rotation after minor-league rehab starts. Martinez injured himself making a play in the field in his start after the activation. MLB.com reported at the time that St. Louis placed the righty on the 10-day IL with a “right oblique strain.”
Martinez described feeling a pull in his right side when he lunged for a ground ball in the final inning of his start on Thursday. He didn’t make the play and went on to allow five runs in a 28-pitch fifth inning that turned the game. Martinez assured the Cardinals that he could continue to compete, but the Cardinals opted to go ahead and move him to the [IL] so that they could add an extra reliever for their doubleheader on Saturday.
Interim manager Mike Shildt said the club is “super optimistic” that Martinez will miss only one start.
The Cardinals activated Martinez from the IL to start ten days later.
July 31, 2018: Mild Right Shoulder Strain
The Cardinals believe they dodged a season-ending injury with Carlos Martinez, whom they hope will miss only two or three starts while on the [IL] with a right shoulder strain. The organization is characterizing Martinez’s right shoulder strain as mild, and found no evidence of any structural damage in the MRI that Martinez underwent after exiting Monday’s start in the fifth inning.
A “right shoulder strain” is vague. The Cardinals did not identify a specific muscle that is strained, unlike the previous two times Martinez was injured. In addition to the broad description of Martinez’s injury, MLB.com reported, with respect to the earlier right lat strain and right oblique strain, that:
The Cardinals will evaluate how the three injuries might be related and whether they are an indicator of a larger underlying issue. A significant velocity drop during his final inning Monday was a red flag that, once again, something was amiss.
“I think what we’ll use the next couple of weeks for is to get him in a position where hopefully we can decrease those odds of those kinds of injuries,” said president of baseball operations John Mozeliak.
In addition to opting for a general description for what ailed Martinez, this is also the first time that the organization (through Mozeliak no less) floated the idea that all of Martinez’s injuries could be related. It would not be the first time.
February 20, 2019
The Cardinals removed Martinez from the team’s throwing program Tuesday after his shoulder experienced weakness similar to what put him on the [IL] three times in 2018. A scan taken of his pitching shoulder Monday did not reveal any structural damage, officials said.
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During a disrupted and incomplete 2018, Martinez had stints on the [IL] because of a lat strain, an oblique strain and a shoulder strain. All three injuries were traced back to weakness in the muscles surrounding the right shoulder. One muscle was torn by having to compensate for another. Several times his velocity plummeted during games. . . .
A strain is a tear. So the lat strain was a tear. But there is also the general shoulder strain (tear). So it’s unclear if the initial lat strain is the injury described above or if Martinez subsequently tore another muscle.
April 24, 2019
Martinez completed another in a series of bullpen sessions Tuesday at Busch Stadium, and rather than relocated his rehab to Jupiter, Fla., to accelerate a rise back to the majors and the rotation, he’ll remain with the team this week. His focus will be on “shorter burst outings, manager Mike Shildt confirmed.
The decision was made after a conversation with Martinez during which he described what the Cardinals also saw — limits Martinez had pitching at full-throttle, for a higher pitch count, and recovering well enough to start.
“He’s in a sport, quite honestly, (where) the best road right now for Carlos is to continue to get his side work and it looks like it will be better for him in a short stint,” Shildt said. “... Right now he’s in a mindset — and we are with his feedback — about being able to move forward with shorter, shorter full-out intensity.”
So Martinez’s failure to recover sufficiently after bullpen sessions due to shoulder weakness of some undefined type has led the club to decide to bring him back into competition as a reliever.
May 10, 2019
The 100-inning reliever has faded from the game, but in an era of shrinking starts and overpopulated bullpens there has become a place for multi-inning and elastic relievers. This past season, two full-time relievers pitched at least 90 innings, three others, including Milwaukee’s lefty Josh Hader, three 80 innings. The Cardinals haven’t had a reliever log that many innings since 2014. While Martinez will be limited by the calendar, the Cardinals don’t expect him to by traditional bullpen jobs.
“I could envision that,” Shildt said when asked about the 100-inning-type reliever. “He could be on (pace) for a regular season of 100 innings out of the bullpen — would not surprise me. If you get multiple effective and efficient innings out of your bullpen and consistently out of guys — that has a ton of value. It can impact your starts. It can impact the rest of the bullpen. It can allow you to potentially carry maybe seven vs. eight (relievers), which puts you on an extra position player.”
What might Shildt have meant by his 100-inning pace comment? I see two possible explanations:
1) Shildt intends to use Martinez at a 100-IP pace over the team’s remaining 118 games, which would mean the righty would have 18 games off over the rest of the season.
2) Shildt intends to use Martinez at a rate over that would equal 100 IP if it were applied over the full 162-game schedule, which would work out to about 73 IP this year.
Either usage rate seems aggressive if not overly so. No. 1 is about as sane as Batman’s fiercest foe, The Joker. But the second interpretation is not much saner (maybe Riddler crazy?). For some context, 73 IP in 162 games would have been the twenty-third most in MLB last year among relievers. That’s far closer to the most-used reliever in the game than the least. Such a high usage rate seems to contradict the Cards’ stated rationale for removing Martinez from the rotation.
There is a credible argument that pitching in relief is as hard or harder on a pitcher’s health than starting. A reliever gets loose (“hot,” in Cardinals parlance) on days when he doesn’t pitch and sometimes does so multiple times in the same game before pitching. There is less time to rest the body. Mozeliak challenged the idea that relief work is less strenuous on the body than starting when some in the media floated it as a possible path for Michael Wacha, back when he was dealing with chronic shoulder problems.
All of this is to say that it is very odd that the Cardinals management, with the club’s terrible starting pitching this year, declared Martinez too unhealthy to pitch as a starter before then openly musing about him racking up innings in relief at a rate of usage that would be at or near the top of MLB. To be sure, a pitcher’s health is fluid. It could be that Martinez’s health has improved and such a high rate of usage is understandable given his current injury status. But if Martinez’s health has improved that much, why isn’t the club stretching out their best starting pitcher with the hopes that he can replace Michael Wacha, Dakota Hudson, or Adam Wainwright in the rotation?
All of this is to say that the Cardinals’ public statements about Martinez are increasingly curious. It will be interesting to see if Shildt’s use of Martinez as a reliever reflects an aggressive or conservative approach. Hopefully the Cardinals don't aggravate Martinez's shoulder issues with overly aggressive deployment of the right.
