NOT!
In his last outing, Matt Durkin through very well, allowing limited walks while striking out seven. He’s told reporters that his fastball velocity is back, but right now it’s hitting around 93 mph, and I believe he was more around 94-95 when he was drafted.
I wrote an article on F.U. way back when saying that Durkin would be a suprise canidate. However, after reading over some of Will Carrol’s work on Baeball Prospectus, an interesting quote struck me:
“Pitchers often say they “come back stronger” after surgery. This is always false. A pitcher will feel like he’s throwing harder because he became accustomed to throwing with reduced velocity as his injury progressed. It’s quite possible that some, if not many, major league pitchers have never been at 100 percent. Much of the improvement they will see is attributable to the forced work of rehab.”
Now, I always had trouble that all pitchers came back throwing harder after TJ surgery, considering tha we would sometimes hope that they had the surgery, but Carroll does a good job hitting on the loss of development time.
The point is, I don’t know if it’s fair to start a “Free Matt Durkin” campaign, which i’ve heard about for quite some time now. After all, one of the quailification’s for doing so is that the organization has to be making questionable moves and well, not promoting Durkin is really the only questionable one. Let’s just save the “Free” thing for when we really need it.
Corey Coles anyone?
Filed under: baseball
