John Farrell Suggests Shoulder Program Is Partly To Blame For Tyler Thornburg Injury, Then Says That's 'False' Even Though It Originally Came From Him
Here we go! Just about ready to wrap up spring training, but the Red Sox chain of command is already in midseason form!
There’s a lot of moving parts to this story, so I’ll do my best to lay it all out. Back in December, the Red Sox acquired right-handed reliever Tyler Thornburg from the Milwaukee Brewers. The Red Sox have a detailed shoulder program that is not required for their pitchers to follow, but most of them follow it anyway. There’s only one problem with it — those who are unfamiliar with it experience fatigue or soreness in areas because they’re working out muscles that their body isn’t used to working out. Gym-goers know the feeling I’m talking about.
When Thornburg was acquired by Boston, the Red Sox sent him their shoulder program to follow during the offseason. Here’s Thornburg from March 12:
“I came in and my bullpens and live BP felt great,” said Thornburg. “I’ve had my own shoulder program for quite awhile, but I hadn’t done new things. New muscles were activating, muscles I wasn’t using, so they started to get fired up and with also the increased throwing in the game and increased throwing program, those muscles started getting a little tired after they started firing.”
Thornburg said that after the December trade, he was sent a list of exercises from the training staff. The message he did not receive was that all of the exercises were to be performed daily.
“I kind of figured that this is a list of the exercises they incorporated, I didn’t think this is what they do all in one day,” said Thornburg. “I thought, ‘here’s a list of exercises, learn them, pick five or six of them,’ because that was pretty much what we did in Milwaukee.”
No wonder, then, Thornburg’s body began to bark.
“As we were running through the shoulder program the first time, I was like, ‘man, this is really long,’ but my arm felt fine after the first one,” said Thornburg. “Then I think it was a combo of increased throwing and those continual shoulder programs. My arm wasn’t used to the type of exercises and the amount of them.”
So, all offseason long, Thornburg was not following the program correctly, which was no fault of his own. Once he arrived at spring training, he then realized that he wasn’t given proper instruction from the team, and then started following the program as it was intended to be followed months prior. What he’s telling us here is that he clearly believes that the shoulder program led to the fatigue that he experienced, which later led to him being shut down after making two appearances and getting shelled for nine runs in an inning and a third.
When asked about Thornburg’s status on March 10 after he hadn’t pitched in nine days, Red Sox manager John Farrell had this to say:
“He is throwing long-toss out to 120 feet today,” Farrell said that day. “He’s also been going through a strength and conditioning phase, arm-wise. What we encounter with guys coming from other organizations, and whether it’s Rick [Porcello], David [Price], guys that come in, and they go through our shoulder maintenance program, there’s a period of adaptation they go through, and Tyler’s going through that right now. We’re also going to get him on the mound and get some fundamental work with his delivery and just timing, and that’s soon to come in the coming days. Right now it’s long toss out to 120 feet.”
Farrell’s not outright blaming the shoulder program for Thornburg being shut down, but he’s certainly introducing the idea that it had something to do with it. And let me just stop the timeline right here for a second. Just because Thornburg was fatigued and sore from the program doesn’t make it a bad program. It’s clearly worked for guys like Rick Porcello, who threw a career high 223 innings last year. The problem here is the miscommunication between the Red Sox and Thornburg, and how he didn’t know when to start it and how to actually do it. That’s on the team, not the player. Had he started the program correctly back in December or January, then there’s no way he’s experiencing the same fatigue and soreness here in March.
Anyway, back to the timeline of events. So, Farrell is asked about Thornburg’s status, and suggests that the throwing program might have something to do with the right-hander’s fatigue, which is to be expected when an athlete is working out muscles that they’re not used to working out. If you’ve ever been to the gym for the first time, then you know how sore and locked up your muscles can get the next day, and this guy was expected to go out and pitch in spring training games while his body was still adjusting to these new workouts.
After suggesting that other players on the Red Sox have dealt with the same “period of adaptation” that Thornburg was dealing with at the time, Farrell was asked to expand on that a little bit.
“Rick Porcello is an example of that. Joe Kelly,” Farrell said. “And that’s not to say that our program is the end-all, be-all, or the model for which everyone should be compared. That’s just to say that what we do here might be a little more in-depth based on a conversation with the pitchers, that what they’ve experienced and what we ask them to do here. And large in part, it’s with manual resistance movements on the training table. These are things that are not maybe administered elsewhere, so the body goes through some adaptation to get to that point.
“So, in other words, a pitcher that might come in here previously, he pitched, he’s got recovery time and he goes and pitches again. There’s a lot of work and exercise in between the outings that they may feel a little fatigued early on. But once they get those patterns, and that consistent work, the body adapts to it and their recovery times become much shorter. And it’s one of the reasons we’ve had so much success keeping pitchers healthy and on the field.”
As Evan Drellich of CSNNE.com points out, the shoulder impingement that will keep Thornburg on the disabled list for at least a month to start the season is the same injury that the aforementioned Joe Kelly suffered in April of last year, placing him on the disabled list for almost exactly one month (April 19 to May 21).
We now go from this just being a fatigue situation to Thornburg being diagnosed with a shoulder impingement, which leads to the writers connecting the dots here. Farrell doesn’t like that.
“There’s been a lot written targeting our shoulder program here,” Farrell said before the Red Sox played the Pirates. “I would discount that completely. He came into camp, he was throwing the ball extremely well, makes two appearances. They were two lengthy innings in which inflammation flared up to the point of shutting him down. But in the early work in spring training, he was throwing the ball outstanding. So to suggest that his situation or his symptoms are now the result of our shoulder program, that’s false.”
Farrell doubled down, almost going as far as calling the reports fake news.
“To say it’s the root cause, that’s a little false,” he said. “That’s a lot false. And very shortsighted.”
Only one problem with that little theory ya got there, John. Thornburg basically already said that the “combo of increased throwing and those continual shoulder programs” was to blame for the fatigue he was experiencing. And not only that, but he SAID IT AGAIN TODAY.
Thornburg echoed the comments he first made three weeks ago when he said the shoulder program was a contributing factor.
“If anything, it might have fatigued my arm a little bit before the first outing,” Thornburg said. “Or it possibly could’ve pointed out some weaknesses in my shoulder or something that wasn’t working properly. That’s all stuff we were figuring out in the last couple days. Really feel like we should work on certain areas of my arm to keep those a lot stronger and should help absolutely everything else.”
Just to sum this up, I’d really like to hammer home the point that the shoulder program is not something that Red Sox fans need to get their torches and pitchforks out over. It’s the poor communication between the team and their players, which has more than become a trend in recent years. Had the Red Sox been better about communicating the shoulder program with their new player, we’re not talking about this story right now.
And it’s not just the shitty communication in the offseason, either. It’s the fact that Thornburg has now TWICE said that the shoulder program is at least partly responsible for his injury, and then Farrell comes out and says to take that notion and “discount that completely”. Simply stunning.