Directors of player health and performance, Casey Stengel once said, are like skippers and weather reporters. We talk about her only when things go wrong on her watch.
(OK, you got me. Casey certainly never used the words “directors of player health and performance” in the same exact. Just plug “Track Leaders” or “Milkmen” in and a) Casey probably said it, and b) the feeling remains the same.)
We’re talking about Eric Cressey, the Yankees’ first-year director of player health and performance, because 2020 has already changed an unusual iteration of AL East defending nightmare champion in 2019. On Saturday, a day away , thanks to the Mets’ COVID problems, the Yankees worked at Yankee Stadium and made three people available to the media via Zoom calls: manager Aaron Boone and fitting, pitchers Zack Britton and James Paxton, both suffering from disabling illnesses when taking over the Rays’ Yankee Stadium.
It would be unfair above all to blame Cressey, a kind of celebrity, as his subordinates primarily for the damage done to their watch. Too many events out of her control have led to an astonishing 10 Yankees players joining the injured list with the regular season celebrating its one-year anniversary Sunday. Yet it would be journalistically appalling not to cover the ongoing agitation of Yankees injuries.
“While we were doing the revision, the update came in January,” Boone said, referring to Cressey’s arrival. “[We] have not had an offseason yet since we hosted it. It’s kind of all been on the run, coming through speed training.
“I have confidence in our team and in our strength and conditioning team to do a good job, hopefully certain things will not happen. But hopefully, if we look at … in a few years, we’ll really start to see the dividend paid. ”
Long-term optimism hardly requires the stress of the short-term, of the Yankees expecting to activate ILA’s Aaron Judge for their next game, likely Tuesday in Atlanta, and yet no one else is likely to participate again. the attempt for a few weeks beyond that. As Luke Voit said Thursday, the day the Yankees lost both Paxton (left forearm flexor strain) and Gleyber Torres (punished left hamstring and quad) as the Rays sat past Yankee Stadium, “It’s crazy to happen again. . “
Of course, this whole Major League Baseball season has been crazy. As I point out in a separate column, the 30 clubs had used the injured list 146 times for a total of 1,461 missed days through Thursday’s games, the 29th day of the regular season. Through 29 days last year, these numbers stood at 93 and 1,280.
“I find it pretty simple: short jump training,” Paxton said, referring to jump training 2.0 which lasted less than half the length of jump training 1.0. ‘We haven’t had enough time to sort at a lower speed to build up, and now you see a few weeks into the season, guys are no longer fresh. The fatigue builds up. We do not have the basis we normally have. ”
Accordingly, Paxton attributed his injury to repairing his change too quickly, something that would not have happened in a standard long jump workout.
Britton, who sits with a tight left hamstring, defends Cressey on passion, even when he took the pains not to disclose proprietary information about what Cressey introduced to the team.
“These guys do some special things in there,” Britton said, referring to the Yankees’ clubhouse. ‘Obviously they have a very short window this year to implement a lot of things we do just because of the circumstances we are in. But I think from a medical point of view, a strength training site is doing an excellent job of the new programs that are out there. … I think the injuries, it’s not a reflection of those guys though. “
The Yankees refused to make Cressey available to speak, as is their standard practice. He will get much more time to make this right. To live up to his hype. To stop people from trying to talk about him is the ultimate goal, as Casey put it, for this particular line of work.
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