de los Santos shut down through 2009

As I mentioned in the article, I liked a lot of what I saw. De los Santos had a power pitcher’s mechanics; aggressive, using momentum and force to his advantage and we saw that in the velocity he threw with. But when you have a power pitcher’s mechanics and not necessarily the cleanest of mechanics, you are at risk for injury. In reality, any pitcher is at risk for injury, but the risk for injury is heightened when you throw with aggressive mechanics.

While we can discuss what was a likely cause of his injury (and by doing so look for ways to prevent it in the future), we need to be careful because we never actually know what causes an injury. We don’t know exactly what the individual movements of a pitcher have on the pitcher’s arm; we can only speculate. You have to deal with outside factors like pitch counts and whether a pitcher was overworked. We have to look at the strength of the individual tendons and muscles in a pitcher’s arm because they just may not have been strong enough. Most likely there are a combination of factors causing injury. ...