The UCL Internal Brace Surgery Non-Study
Since both Shohei Ohtani and Drew Rasmussen got an internal brace in their elbow instead of the full Tommy John surgery, I decided to see how other pitchers who got the brace performed … and the study didn’t take long. With fewer than a dozen samples, there is no study.
Using Jon Roegele’s Tommy John surgery database, the following five major league pitchers got the surgery and returned to the majors. The surgery failed with Matt Bush and he eventually needed a full Tommy John surgery.
| Player | Surgery Date | Team | Return Date | Recovery Time (months) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nick Anderson | 10/1/2021 | TB | 4/1/2023 | 18 |
| Zach Britton | 9/8/2021 | NYY | 9/24/2022 | 13 |
| Rich Hill | 10/1/2019 | LAD | 7/29/2020 | 10 |
| Matt Bush | 9/1/2018 | TEX | 4/3/2021 | Needed TJS |
| Seth Maness | 8/16/2016 | STL | 5/13/2017 | 9 |
Again, with a sample size of just five, I’m not going to draw zero conclusions from the list.
Additionally, these four guys got the brace and never returned to the majors.
| Player | Surgery Date | Team |
|---|---|---|
| Mitch Harris | 6/15/2016 | STL |
| Yadiel Rivera | 9/1/2020 | TEX |
| Kent Emanuel | 6/3/2021 | HOU |
| Sean Doolittle | 7/1/2022 | WAS |
No analysis from me but the information is here if anyone wants to break out their Jump-to-Conclusions mat.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
Using a null hypothesis of brace is equally successful as TJS and TJS is 85% successful, my inferred P score with 5 out of 9 of the brace surgeries failing is why are surgeons doing this instead of TJS?
The guys opting for internal brace might be more likely to have a failure from full TJ. So, 85% success for them might be optimistic.
I think your denominator is too high here. Out of the “didn’t return to MLB” players, we have:
Rivera with a career wrc+ of 26…enough said
Emanuel who had a shiny 2.55era but a 5.49 FIP in a tiny sample (was bad in AAA this year, and overall minor stats are pretty mediocre)
Doolittle who was 36 at the time and nearing the end of his career anyway (plus he’s a family guy, so maybe he could have pushed it to make it back for a year or two, but wasn’t worth it to him, already rich)
Harris whose similar to Emanuel but was also 2 years older at time of surgery.
So I’d go with 1 of 5 failing, gotta P-hack to make it look closer to TJS lol