Mississippi State baseball player sues coach for wrecking arm

I think it's tough to ask a 17 to 21-year-old kid to make the decision about when he's healthy, and it goes double when the school (allegedly) didn't even get an MRI for him until several weeks into the pain. I can understand the idea that you want to try to push someone beyond their limits a bit at this level, to test them and build them up a bit, but I feel like the attitude in college baseball is to use the player hard and put them away wet. It's even scarier that this attitude persists in high school, Babe Ruth, Little League and lower levels.

 

I call b.s. on the medical redshirt point. My understanding with those is you cannot apply for one until after your usual eligibility has been exhausted, and it's an NCAA-approval process rather than a school one. And it also doesn't make clear which year he was trying to call a redshirt because he had played far too many games by May for that year to be eligible.

You also can't withdraw a scholarship during a semester to my knowledge. A school can choose not to renew it for the next acadmic year, but that is a potential risk for every athlete. They're renewable one-year contracts, not four-year ones.

 

Kerry Wood should be a trillionaire then.

 

Whistling past the grave yard ...

 

Funny this just came up...just did a three-part series on youth/HS baseball injuries with Dr. Andrews as the main source.
Near the end of the interview he said "what we don't want is for these types of things to get to the courts." I think with all the injury prevention stuff he has been involved with in recent years, he has seen these types of lawsuits coming.

A couple other staggering statistics he threw out:
-In 2000, 5% of his Tommy John patients were high school age or younger. In 2010, it was 35%.
- A poll of about 190 high school pitchers showed that 51 percent believed that a Tommy John operation in the absence of an actual injury would be beneficial to their careers.

 

Pretty damning if true. They better settle.

 

Medical redshirt isn't the right term. A medical hardship scholarship allows the school to finish paying for the athlete's education without having them count against their roster limits. The catch of course is that the athlete can't play again.

 

College baseball people I know have almost nothing good to say about John Cohen. And somewhere Ron Polk is laughing his ass off.

 

Oh, for the days where it was illegal to throw a curveball in Little League ...

 

Suburbia, you mean to say that a judge might make a decision for political reasons? The hell you say!