MLB 2017: The Yankees are dead, Yankees burn in hell

Maddon saw that and began banging on the doors of Epstein and Hoyer's offices, demanding to know why they let Mune go to Japan when Toronto probably would have done a straight-up 1:1 trade and he could have his favorite toy back.

 

There are probably a dozen guys I'd take over Tanaka. Just off the top of my head, Kershaw, Greinke, Lester, Hendricks, Keuchel, deGrom, Bumgarner, Kluber, Cueto, Scherzer, Syndergaard, Sale, Price...

 

I think I said this a year or two ago, but it's patently clear that the Mets have a systemic issue with pitcher development. I don't know if it's the Warthen slider or the team just riding guys until they're toast, but there's a problem.

 

In fairness, it depends upon the announcer(s). One of the best examples of this was 2012 Ryan Dempster, who spent all of April and May either near or at the top of the ERA rankings, but because he didn't get his first win until June 5, on the few times the Cubs were on national television, the mouthbreathers like Joe Buck and Thom Brennaman and Tim McCarver would say something like, "Man, Dempster's really struggling out there," because they lack the basic understandings that pitcher wins tell you basically nothing, in and of themselves, about a pitcher's performance (as, much like RBI, it's a team-dependent, not player-dependent, stat).

Now, there are guys out there -- Vin Scully being the gold standard, followed by Len Kasper, Matt Vasgersian, Kuiper / Krukow, Gary Thorne, FP Santangelo, Steve Stone when he's not being cranky and miserable -- who do a masterful job of weaving the storytelling with the education of what all these numbers actually mean. On the other hand, you have guys like Chip Caray, Michael Kay, McCarver in the at least last ten years before he retired, who are all pathologically in love with the sound of their own voice and just like to talk to hear themselves talk and still think that advanced statistics are developed by nerds living in their parents' basements as they drink Mountain Dew and eat Cheetos by the fistful or whatever (Joe Morgan being the king of all of this).

 

The Mets' medical staff is so bad that pitchers would rather risk long-term injuries than let them check things out, and the Mets' medical staff is so incompetent that they are also okay with players making this decision.

Why MLB has not looked into what Ray Ramirez is doing is beyond me (well, I know why, it's just silly). He really should have been fired years ago. Also, it makes me wonder what exactly Warthen is teaching these young pitchers.

 

Well, almost every major league stadium has an X-ray machine, but all teams have contracts with radiology providers for services like MRI, CT, PET, etc. Basically, the team pays an annual retainer to the provider, be it a hospital or a specialized provider (like Main Street Radiology in Queens), to have priority access to things like a CT or MRI scanner. Even then, though, the Mets' medical staff is still the group that would make the referral out to radiology or whatever.

So this really does still fall on the Mets. (Heck, it was either deGrom or Matz maybe two years ago who complained of shoulder stiffness, the team told him to rub some dirt on it, and like a week later he needed surgery.)

Edit: Also, I believe it's required that at least the medical director of every team's medical staff has admitting privileges to a hospital within the vicinity of the home team's stadium.

 

If I'm reading the box score and the lineups correctly, Layne and Warren were unavailable after throwing their arms off yesterday, and Girardi knew he had to keep Mitchell in the game in case Chapman started getting tired. And that's how you get Bryan Mitchell, first baseman.