Johan Santana’s Shoulder Injury – Will It Ever End For Mets Fans?

by: Steve Caronia

Johan Santana, in his prime, was one of the premier pitchers in Major League Baseball.  With the Minnesota Twins, he won 2 Cy Young awards and had 3 consecutive years with a WHIP under 1(!) and was the only guy who remotely intimidated Yankee fans during their yearly playoff win over Minnesota.  After signing a 6 year, $137 million deal with the Mets, he pitched the first no-hitter in franchise history.  He’s a force to be reckoned with.

Unfortunately, injuries have plagued his tenure with the Mets.  He had back to back season ending injuries in 2009 and 2010, and now we hear he is about to have his 3rd.  His shoulder surgery it 2010 was due to a tear in the anterior capsule of the shoulder, and now it appears he has retorn it.  He is traveling to New York, I’m assuming to see Dave Altchek, one of the premier shoulder surgeons in the world.  The news, since already confirmed with an MRI, will probably not be good.

So what the hell is a capsule? Why does he need it? Why does it get torn?

You and I need this intact to scratch out head. Imagine Johan Santana?

The capsule of the shoulder is essentially a thick, fibrous covering of the ball-and-socket joint that blends in with ligaments.  Most of our joints have capsules; they provide stability and hold fluid within the joint that helps keep the structures within happy with nutrients and lubrication. In the shoulder, the capsule is especially important because, along with muscles, it makes up for the fact that the ball doesn’t fit well in the socket (this provides the shoulder with a lot of movement, but makes it prone to dislocate).  The capsule is EXTREMELY important in pitchers, because what they do with their arm thousands of times a year. You don’t want a loose or torn capsule.  Unless you want to do this:

First, pitchers move their arm faster than any other recorded movement in human history in order to throw a baseball.  They move their arm 1700 degrees/sec (or, the same speed it takes for the Mets to fall from first to last place in the division) (EDITOR’S NOTE: We apologize for that vicious and gratuitous assault on the unsuspecting Mets fans reading this.) (2nd EDITOR’s NOTE: No we don’t) In other words, fast.  You need all the help you can get stabilizing a joint that moves that fast.  Second, as the pitcher cocks his arm back all the way and accelerates the arm forward, they achieve what we call maximum external rotation (MER) of the shoulder.  What that means is that the arm is rotated as far back as humanly possible, stretching the ever-loving-shit out of the capsule that is designed to prevent that exact thing from happening.  Normal people have 90 degrees of external rotation.  Pitchers occasionally approach 180 degrees.  In sum, pitchers do things with their arm that it was never intended to do. They move faster than anything else and have excessive motion in the joint at the same time.

Yikes.

So Johan Santana tore and had surgically repaired one of the essential components to keeping his arm stable.  And now he tore it again.  In my opinion, his career may be in serious jeopardy at this point.  It’s a shame, because Santana is a phenomenal talent and a nice guy.  We’ll wait and see what happens, but this looks like another disappointment for the Mets and their fan base.  Good thing they have a Shake Shack.

Comments

comments