with guthrie being on the DL and daniel cabrera being (mercifully) shut
down for the season with elbow woes, if memory serves correctly, every
one of the people who were in the starting rotation at the beginning of
the year wound up hurt or (in Loewen's case) worse. Also, the number
of Tommy John surgeries (Baez, Ray) lead me to believe we have an
epidemic of sore-armitis here. by my count, there have been 26 pitchers
on the field this year for this team, 12 of whom started games.

So how come? Did they just have a bad run of luck with all these
guys? the team has had several pitching coaches over the past few years,
at least one of them famous for producing some very good staffs. Have
all the managers - Trembly, Perlozzo, Mazilli, Hargrove not known how to
handle a pitching staff?

How come? Did these guys get overused when they were in the minors or
college? Did they try to throw too many curve balls while growing up (in
Cabrera's case, did he just try to throw harder than his body was able
to withstand)?

The team is going nowhere without pitching, we all know that. We are
used to mostly worse than average pitching talent - but why broken-down
pitchers, too?

Cheers,

Mitch Edelman