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Home , Chris Carpenter, Chris Sale, David Ortiz, Dick Ellsworth, Frank Jobe, Joel Hanrahan

The Red Sox Sunday, March 22, 2020

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MLB still hasn’t concluded whether 2018 Red Sox illegally stole signs

Peter Abraham

Major League has not yet reached any conclusions in its investigation into whether the 2018 Red Sox illegally stole signs, two industry sources told the Globe on Saturday.

On Friday, oral arguments in a US District Court case involving MLB, the Red Sox, and the Astros suggested that baseball had finished its investigation.

In answering a question from Judge Jed Rakoff, Red Sox attorney Lauren Moskowitz said the team did not admit to breaking any MLB rules.

“Your Honor, I think that there are distinctions between what the Red Sox believe occurred and what the commissioner found,” Moskowitz said. “And I think that certainly they’re entitled to disagree that that activity happened at the club level.”

Sources said there was confusion differentiating between the 2017 incident, when the Red Sox were fined for using a Fitbit device to relay signs to the dugout, and what may have happened in 2018.

Rakoff heard arguments as to whether a lawsuit filed by daily fantasy sports players should be dismissed. The Sox, Astros, and MLB are defendants.

Rakoff has said he will decide if the case moves forward by April 15.

MLB’s investigation into allegations about the 2018 Red Sox was once expected to be finished before the start of . But further interviews were required, setting back that timetable.

Baseball was then shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, and league officials have since been busy addressing the ramifications of that situation.

Baseball fan had some memorable days at

Peter Abraham

Sarah McKenna is the senior vice president of fan services and entertainment with the Red Sox. You may not know her name, but you’re quite familiar with her work.

One of McKenna’s responsibilities is to coordinate the pregame ceremonies at Fenway Park. If you have warm memories of seeing David Ortiz honored, rings handed out or banners raised, McKenna was orchestrating it all.

The Springfield native started with the Red Sox in 2002, coming over from the where she had worked with and Dr. Charles Steinberg.

McKenna also has something in common with : She had the authority to tell Tom Brady what to do.

In 2002, after the Patriots beat the St. Louis Rams for the first of their six championships, many of the players gathered at Fenway Park for the home opener on April 1 against the .

A large group of Patriots players popped out from behind a large American flag draped over the Green Monster. Brady, wearing a baseball glove, was among them.

With holding the Lombardi Trophy aloft, the Patriots walked across left field. The group included , , , , and .

“There was a lot of excitement because it was the first time they had won the Super Bowl,” McKenna said. “The Patriots players had not been together for a while and they were all talking and enjoying the moment. They were as excited as we were.”

But McKenna had a tight schedule to keep, so she stood on a chair and ordered the Patriots to line up and the field.

“I had to yell at them,” she said. “And they’re very big guys in real life.”

Brady and the other Patriots threw out their first pitches to Red Sox players and the ceremony was a big success.

It was the start of a strong relationship between the Red Sox and Brady, which was no surprise given his connection to baseball.

Brady was an 18th-round draft pick of the in 1995 when he was a high school senior. Brady, a lefthanded-hitting with a good arm, turned down the Expos to play football at Michigan. You know the rest of the story.

Brady returned to Fenway in 2003 and took batting practice before a game. Brady stayed in the cage until he wrapped a home around the Pesky Pole in right field.

Brady came back to Fenway following the Super Bowl championships in 2004, ’15, and ’17.

In 2015, Brady took some swings in the batting cage off Pedro Martinez, then threw a first pitch to Ortiz. The 2017 ceremony included playfully grabbing the game jersey Brady had stolen from the locker room and returned to him. Gronk ran across the field before Brady tackled him.

Brady also came to Fenway with his family for the ceremony commemorating the 100th anniversary of the park in 2012.

“He was a big baseball fan,” McKenna said.

Sox players also took part in ceremonies at Gillette Stadium after their championships. In 2018, and grabbed photos with Brady and Belichick before the Patriots played the Packers.

“It’s always fun to see our players interacting with the Patriots or the Celtics or the Bruins,” McKenna said. “There’s a lot of genuine mutual respect for what the teams have accomplished.

“It’s a special thing what has happened in Boston with all the championships, and the players support each other. I’ve always thought that was such a cool thing.”

McKenna is a Patriots fan, but she adhered to professional decorum and never asked Brady to pose for a photo or sign anything.

“That’s just not something I would do,” she said, “but I have great memories of seeing him at Fenway and I hope he does well with the Buccaneers. The Patriots have always been great for us to deal with.

“I think they’ll be fine, too. One thing about them, they want to win just like we do. The Krafts will do what it takes.”

RISKY BUSINESS Sox were too hasty with Sale

It was a year ago Monday that the Red Sox announced they had signed to a five-year, $145 million extension that would start in 2020.

How does that deal look now?

Sale will not be ready to pitch for the Sox until June 2021 at the earliest. Depending on how players are paid for this season, Sale will receive roughly $40 million from the Sox without appearing in a game.

Some of that money is deferred, but however the accounting works, it’s now a terrible contract for the Sox.

What struck me when I looked back at the story I wrote a year ago was this comment from Sale: “I made it very adamant at the very beginning of all this that I wanted to stay here.”

Dave Dombrowski said something similar, that Sale wanting to stay with the Red Sox helped the deal come together. The lefthander placed a lot of value in the idea of being able to live at home with his family during the two months of spring training.

Knowing Sale, that wasn’t just talk. He is from Lakeland, Fla., went to Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers (where he met his wife), and lives in Naples. The Red Sox were the perfect team for him.

So what was the rush to make a deal a full season ahead of free agency? The Sox should have waited until after the season to negotiate with Sale.

Instead, he went 6-11 with a 4.40 ERA and missed the final six weeks with a sore elbow.

Dombrowski said at the time the deal was advantageous to the Sox because it was structured in a way to count as $25.6 million against the luxury tax, and offered the Red Sox greater flexibility.

“There was give and take, which we appreciated,” Dombrowski said.

The Sox also wanted to avoid the mistake they made with in 2014. But Lester was healthy after the 2013 championship. Sale was dealing with a sore for much of the second half of 2018.

The better risk for the Sox would have been to wager on that same spirit of cooperation being there in October. Instead, they put their faith in Sale staying healthy and lost.

A few other observations about the Red Sox:

▪ Now that and have been traded and Sale is done for this season, the Sox should take full advantage of the situation and commit to rebuilding.

Chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom was honest Thursday when he acknowledged the loss of Sale would make it difficult to contend.

“Chris Sale is the type of player you can’t just replace,” he said. “He is an elite performer and those guys are hard to come by … that’s a big blow.

“There’s been a lot of other things on our plate. But it obviously is going to make our climb that much harder. As we’ve said and as we’ve talked about since the beginning of the spring and before, it’s never about just one season. We’re always going to make sure we’re looking to bolster our long-term outlook as well.”

Bloom went on to say the 2020 season remains their focus, and of course he should say that. The season hasn’t even started yet.

But the Sox are not good enough to win with the rotation they have. Once the season starts, they should consider trading anybody outside of , , and Eduardo Rodriguez.

Bloom’s strength as an executive should be making trades that bring back young, cost-controlled talent. That is something Tampa Bay specialized in. Give him a chance to do his thing.

▪ Trading Betts is never going to make much sense. But now that the Dodgers are going to get less than 162 games from him, the Sox could get more value in their return over the long run.

That won’t matter to the Dodgers if they win the World Series. But every game that Betts doesn’t play this season decreases his value, while the Sox have Jeter Downs and stashed in the minors.

▪ said the Sox are operating under the premise that teams will have three or four weeks of what amounts to a second spring training before the season starts.

Presumably teams will return to Florida and Arizona. But in talking to officials from , no decisions have been reached about what type of schedule teams will play or whether fans will be allowed into ballparks.

Maybe Florida is not the place to go. State officials were disturbingly lax in restricting access to public places (such as beaches) in response to the coronavirus.

▪ Need to see some baseball? Starting on Monday, NESN will broadcast games from the 2004, ’07, ’13, and ’18 postseasons over the next eight weeks every night (except Sundays) at 6 o’clock.

The series starts with Game 1 of the 2013 Division Series against Tampa Bay, and will follow the Sox on their 2013 run for two weeks. The 2004 postseason will follow.

Nobody can say for sure when the season will start, assuming it starts at all given that the United States is only in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

But here are a few thoughts on what Major League Baseball should do if there is a season in 2020:

▪ Mic up the players: The spring training games when some players wore small microphones and television viewers were able to hear what they said on the field were entertaining. The Players Association should put aside its objections to doing this during the regular season.

Baseball has historically done an abysmal job of marketing its best players. In-game audio would be a great way to change that and allow players to show their personalities.

Obviously, some kind of delay will be needed and networks will have to be trusted not to broadcast anything objectionable, but those are small hurdles to achieve the greater goal of making the game more interesting as a television product.

▪ Create a true tournament: Instead of the familiar postseason format, shake it up for a year. Play a few days of regular-season games into October, then seed the 16 best teams by record, regardless of league.

Play eight one-game playoffs over two days to get to the Final Eight. Then play four best-of-three series to reduce the field to four, followed by two best-of-five series to advance two teams to a traditional best-of- seven World Series.

The higher seed gets home-field advantage throughout, including all three games in the first round. Then use a 2-2-1 format in the third round and 2-3-2 in the third round.

Every game uses a , too. It’s going to happen anyway in a year or two, might as well get started.

Baseball could complete the postseason in 25 days and be done before November starts. Having more than half the teams in the postseason will create more interest, and eight elimination games to start will be television gold.

Going into November, even at warm-weather neutral sites, is a terrible idea. Election Day is Nov. 3, and baseball should want nothing to do with competing against a presidential race that will command all of the attention.

▪ Expand the rosters: Baseball was shifting to a 26-man roster as it was. Going to 28 and giving each team two extra for the first two months of the season seems reasonable. Plus, it would help safeguard against pitchers, more susceptible to injuries, being overused.

Extra bases For most fans, the focus is on when the major league season will start. But the state of the minor leagues will soon become perilous. Lower-level minor league teams are small businesses, and many of them operate independently from the organizations that provide them with talent. Once games aren’t played in April and May, it’s almost certain that some of them will go bankrupt, or at least need some kind of intervention to stay economically viable. At a time when Major League Baseball has put forth a plan to eliminate 42 teams, the pandemic could do some of the work for it . . . opened up a testing site for the coronavirus at Citizens Bank Park on Friday. That makes a lot of sense for other cities. Ballparks aren’t being used, and they’re usually accessible by public transportation and/or have ample parking . . . Looking for a way to occupy your time at home? The Hall of Fame put a significant number of photographs, scouting reports, audio histories, and images of artifacts on its website. Go to collection.baseballhall.org to check it out . . . Happy birthday to , who is 35. He played for the Red Sox in 2008 and ’09 before being traded to the Indians along with lefthander for Victor Martinez. Masterson returned to the Sox as a free agent in 2015, but was released in August. In all, he was 13-10 with a 4.26 ERA in 85 games for the Sox. He retired from baseball after the 2018 season. is 80. The lefthander was 16-7 with a 3.03 ERA for the Sox in 1968, but was traded early in the 1969 season along with and lefthander to get catcher , and righthanders and from the Indians. Ramon Martinez is celebrating his 52nd birthday. The righthander was 135-88 in 14 seasons in the majors and had a 3.67 ERA. Pedro’s older brother was with the Red Sox in 1999 and 2000.

Boston has said goodbye to big stars before, none bigger than

Kevin Paul Dupont

The big guy, the one with the broad , easy smile, deep voice, and expressive eyes, was surrounded by newspaper guys and passersby as he stood inside Penn Station. He and the rest of his new pals were excited as the 6:20 p.m. “Florida Flyer” prepared to take on passengers.

Penn Station was still bright and new, the city’s hub of all comings and goings then for only slightly less than 10 years. New York already had its buzz. Of course it did. Pace is a Manhattan chromosome.

Soon all the noise would be bigger, louder, grander, beyond even a New Yorker’s limitless imagination. Much of it would be because of the big guy about to board that train.

The beat writers gathered around him. He chomped on a cigar, one he carried with him from “Bostontown,” it was duly reported in the next day’s rags.

Outside, the sun already had sunk below the western sky across the Hudson River as the boys shuffled along the station platform. The big iron horse was about to rattle south. Destination: Jacksonville.

“And no less a personage,” reporter Ray McCarthy wrote the next day (Feb. 29, 1920) in Sunday’s editions of the New York Tribune, “than the mighty ‘Babe’ Ruth was on it.”

Thus began the parting. Ruth, a stash of stogies no doubt in a carry bag, walking side by side with a bunch of his new Yankee buddies, as they funneled into their appointed sleeper cabins.

None of them, perhaps not even Ruth himself, must have been fully able to grasp the years to come.

Boston has lived through some monumental, anguished partings in recent days and weeks. Mookie Betts dealt off to the Dodgers. Red Sox owner John Henry wrote of the pain himself in a club release. Tom Brady to Tampa. Patriots Nation might weep for the next 20 years and then 20 years more.

All of our games, for the time being, have gone off to a world of suspended animation. The Charles has become our river of cascading hurt, perhaps none of us fully able to grasp the years to come.

No departure, not even Bobby Orr packing up for Chicago or for Toronto, ever has proven the equal of Ruth’s farewell. He remains our longest goodbye.

Chicago appears now as but a faded, solemn asterisk on the great Orr’s resume. Clemens won big after leaving Boston, but he was 34 and, well, in the twilight of his career (162-73 post-Back Bay overall) when he tugged on that goofy Blue Jays cap.

The closest loss to Ruth may be Ken Dryden. He was drafted by the Bruins as an almost- 17-year-old in June 1964, but then promptly flipped 17 days later to the Canadiens. Dryden went on to backstop the Habs to six Stanley Cup titles in the ‘70s, swatting down the Bruins four times along the playoff trail.

Had Dryden been the Bruins’ goaltender through the ‘70s, that era’s band around the Cup would have a Boston accent so deeply engraved in it that all the r’s surely would have been chiseled in as h’s.

As a boy growing up in Baltimore, Ruth spoke German, before being sent off as a 7-year-old to reform school. Over the next 12 years at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, he learned a little discipline but a heck of a lot more baseball, and it was his gifted left arm that landed him at Fenway as a 19-year-old in July 1914.

Ruth was among the most dominating hurlers of his day, and though the Sox forever can and will be blamed for dealing him to the Yanks, they were not guilty of ignorance as to his bat. In 1919, his last year in Boston, he made only 15 starts as a pitcher, and played day-to-day in the outfield, piling up enough at- bats (543) to lead the bigs in runs (103), home runs (29), and RBIs (113). In 43 years of big league ball, no one ever had smacked 29 homers.

Yet as Ruth stood in Penn Station, it was still relevant to ask whether Yankees skip Miller Huggins would send him to the mound.

Huggins himself could not answer that day, because he remained in a local hotel, a severe case of bronchitis keeping him from the trip. The ongoing Spanish Flu epidemic, which began in January 1918, would not be considered over until December 1920.

“If Huggins wants me to shift around, that’s all right with me, too,” Ruth was quoted in the Tribune. “If I can help the boys bring in a pennant by taking a turn in the pitching box, I’ll be glad to do so.”

Huggins made it to Jacksonville within a couple of days of the boys arriving there. Cold weather delayed camp’s start, which had Ruth helping to organize a golf outing at nearby Florida Golf Club.

The diminutive Huggins (5 feet 6 inches, 140 pounds), routinely referred to in the press as the Yanks’ “midget ,” evinced no desire to put Ruth on the mound. In all his years with the Bombers, Ruth made only four starts. He won them all.

“The big fellow looked to be in a condition to go out and knock a few homers,” wrote the Tribune’s McCarthy in his account that late afternoon from Penn Station. “He stood with one hand in his pocket, shifting from foot to foot and smiling good-naturedly all the while.”

Imagine to have been standing there to see it, Ruth in his youthful and confident prime, smoking his cigar amid the cacophony of bustling crowd, belching train, inquisitive reporters. A legend about to be known. No less a personage than the mighty Babe.

The Yanks in those days shared the Polo Grounds with the Giants. , to open as “The House That Ruth Built,” did not wing wide its gates until 1923.

“I figure this is going to be my biggest year,” Ruth said before boarding. “Naturally I would say so, but honestly I feel that way about it.”

Initially irked at being traded — because he loved Boston, but also because Sox owner Harry Frazee refused to give him a cut of the $137,500 fee the Yanks paid — Ruth nonetheless was excited by the prospect of playing in the Polo Grounds. The right-field fence was a short poke, a much easier target than the far right reaches of Fenway. He literally had a target, knowing the Yanks played half of the 154-game schedule at the Grounds.

“Which means,” he calculated, “I have some 77 games at which to shoot at that short right-field stand. If I don’t knock 25 homers in there, I’ll bust.”

Think Brady in his first news conference with the Buccaneers will set a goal for, say, 25 TD passes in his first season in Tampa? No way. Not in 2020. Not in anyone’s dreams. A hundred years later, no one swings for the fences anymore, for fear the fence will come back and clobber ‘em.

“I believe I’m going to knock that record of 29 four-base clouts sky high this year,” he said.

It was Ruth being Ruth.

Big and bold then. Bigger now.

For the record, the Bambino socked 148 homers for the Yanks in the three years before their move to the Stadium, where another right-field porch would woo his swings. The breakdown: 75 at the Polo Grounds, 73 on the road.

In his 15 years in New York, the mighty Babe and the Yanks won seven pennants and four World Series titles. He delivered 2,518 hits, 659 homers, 1,978 RBIs, and drew 1,852 walks.

In a city bigger than life, he was bigger, and remains so 100 years after the train left town.

“Winning the pennant is the main thing,” Ruth reminded the beat reporters as they also lined up to board the train south. “Bagging homers is secondary.”

* The Providence Journal

Spring training’s shutdown goes beyond the field

Bob Rathgeber

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Spring training returned right on time in mid-February. The Boys of Summer were back in town.

Aahhh, the familiar smell of popcorn and hot dogs wafted through the grandstands. Fans enjoyed some Buds with their buds and talked about their favorite players. Relaxed Red Sox players signed autographs and chatted with fans.

All that changed on March 12. That’s the day the commissioner shut down our National Pastime. Current score: coronavirus 1, baseball 0.

Here in Fort Myers and from Tampa to Tempe, there is crying in baseball. The gates were locked and the players were told to go home. Those same stands at JetBlue Park are now empty and aroma free. It’s a dark day in Florida and Arizona.

Players were told they could stick around and use the Sox training facilities. A day later, though, Major League Baseball switched gears and told most players to go home.

JetBlue Park was suddenly a ghost town. It’s March. There’s supposed to be the crack of the bat, not dead silence!

Every February and March since 1993, when the Red Sox moved to Fort Myers from Winter Haven, thousands of New Englanders have come here to watch their heroes. Many bought homes here — Florida is a tax friendly state and has no state income tax.

Snowbirds fly or drive to Lee County, which is halfway between Tampa and on Florida’s west coast. It’s a place where nearly 700,000 people make their homes. About a quarter of a million of them are part-timers who escape the snow and ice for a few months.

It used to be you would rarely see a license plate from Massachusetts or Rhode Island or Maine, etc. When I first came here in 1987, most of the out-of-state plates were from Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. Not anymore.

The Red Sox are one of the most popular teams in Florida. Since moving to JetBlue in 2012, they have sold out every game — 135 in a row. Incredibly, since coming to Fort Myers in 1993, it’s been standing room only in all but one of the 249 home Grapefruit League games. They played for 18 years at City of Palms Park near downtown before moving 10 miles southeast into the new ballpark that was patterned after Fenway.

For a time it appeared that major league players might return to their spring training sites. Originally, MLB said there would be a two-week delay to opening the season. A few days later a new start date was announced — the second week of May. Realistically, no one has a clue when baseball will resume.

Spring training is a significant financial boost for Florida and Arizona. Each year fans head south and west, bringing fat wallets and families in tow. A recent study showed that baseball visitors to Fort Myers alone spent nearly $70 million on their spring training visits. In the survey, of nearly 1,200 of those questioned, 50 percent said their primary reason coming to Fort Myers was for spring training.

In other words, this area is taking a big financial hit since about half of the Grapefruit League schedule was canceled. People checked out early from their hotels, heading back to Pawtucket and Worcester and Hanover and all other parts of New England. Also gone from the area’s economy are meals eaten at restaurants, beers guzzled in pubs and all the other places vacationers spend their money.

Fort Myers is the most unique spring training city in baseball. There are actually four major league spring training parks here. The newest is JetBlue.

There is Hammond Stadium, about five miles west of JetBlue and home of the , who came to town in 1991. City of Palms was built for the Red Sox and opened in 1993. Today, it’s home to Florida Southwestern College’s baseball team.

And there is Terry Park on the east side of town. Built in the early 1920s, Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics trained there beginning in 1925. The , and also trained there. This spring, a Korean Baseball League team used the ballpark.

On the flip side of this national emergency, baseball fans have endured strikes, a canceled World Series, the Black Sox, cheating scandal, great teams, lousy teams.

Baseball will be back this year this (we hope), but probably not here at JetBlue Park.

* The Athletic

What can we learn from pitchers who’ve had surgery before Chris Sale?

Jen McCaffrey

The future is uncertain for Chris Sale as he heads for Tommy John surgery, but the good thing for him is that he’s far from the first pitcher who’s needed the surgery.

Since Dr. performed the first ulnar collateral reconstructive surgery on Tommy John in 1974, hundreds of major-league pitchers have had the same surgery, to varying degrees of success.

Jon Roegele, a writer for .com, is the curator of one of the most comprehensive lists of Tommy John surgeries among pitchers from high school through the majors. According to Rogele, 442 MLB pitchers have had Tommy John surgery over the past four decades.

There were 113 instances of the surgery for a pitcher over 30 years old, like Sale. In those cases, 86 times (76.1 percent) the pitcher returned to MLB action. The average recovery time (where accurate data are kept on surgery dates) before returning in those 113 surgeries was 17.8 months.

From that field of 113 surgeries, there were 10 examples of a pitcher making an All-Star team after his return.

The Tommy John surgery has become so commonplace in baseball, it’s often thought of as a routine procedure. But it’s far from that, especially for veteran pitchers. The fact that just 10 pitchers returned to All-Star status after surgery could be a harbinger of bad news, but there are also several success stories Sale can follow.

• Tommy John himself was 31 at the time of surgery in 1974 and famously finished in the top five in the voting in four of five seasons after he returned to the mound in 1976. John, who had a 19-month recovery period, played 13 more seasons after the surgery, posting a 3.66 ERA over 405 games and 382 starts.

• had the surgery at age 33 in 2000 and missed 14 months, but he pitched another nine seasons through age 42. Smoltz appeared out of the for the first three seasons after his surgery before re- entering the rotation at age 38 in 2005. From 2005 through 2007, he made no fewer than 32 starts, posting an average 3.22 ERA and earning two All-Star nods. He finished in the top 10 in Cy Young voting in 2006 and 2007.

• , a perennial Cy Young candidate early in his career, had Tommy John surgery at age 32 in August 2008. He returned to the mound in September 2009, and during the 2010 season he earned an All- Star nod, posting a 2.83 ERA over 34 starts and 228 2/3 . Hudson pitched for five more seasons through his age-39 season, earning another All-Star bid in 2014, making 31 starts and posting a 3.57 ERA.

• had the surgery in 2011 in the midst of his first stint with the Red Sox. After a brief period of success when he returned to the mound in 2012, Hill struggled in 2013 and spent much of 2014 in the minors before pitching for an independent league team in 2015, when he was picked up again by the Red Sox and turned his career back around. Since 2015, Hill has posted a 2.91 ERA in 87 games, 86 starts.

• Another former Red Sox starter, , had Tommy John at age 32 in November 2011 and returned in April 2013, a recovery time of 17 months. Lackey pitched at least 170 innings in each of his five seasons following surgery before retirement in 2017. In that stretch, he appeared in 153 games, 152 starts (averaging 30 per season) and posted a 3.57 ERA.

• , who won the NL Cy Young in 2005, had Tommy John surgery at age 32 in 2007 and returned after 12 months. In his first full year back in 2009, Carpenter finished second in Cy Young voting and had a league-leading 2.24 ERA, making 28 starts. He made 35 and 34 starts the next two seasons, averaging 236 innings and a 3.33 ERA at the ages of 35 and 36 before returning after the 2012 season at age 37.

On the flip side, some pitchers aren’t able to regain form following elbow surgery. Here are some of them:

• Scott Baker, a right-hander for the Twins, posted a 3.98 ERA over five seasons and 137 games, 134 starts, from 2007 to 2011 before needing surgery in 2012 at age 30. After 17 months, he returned to the majors but made only 30 more appearances, 13 starts, over the next three seasons with a 5.23 ERA before retiring.

• Joel Hanrahan appeared in just nine games out of the bullpen for the Red Sox in 2013 after his trade from Pittsburgh. Hanrahan landed on the disabled list in May 2013 with a flexor strain and subsequently had Tommy John surgery but never pitched another major-league game.

• had three Tommy John surgeries, his second one coming in August 2008 at age 35. He returned surprisingly quickly to pitch in May 2009, just nine months later, only to land back on the and needing the surgery again in June 2009. Upon returning in 2011, he did pitch 103 more relief appearances over the next two seasons before retiring in 2012.

• Similarly, had two Tommy John surgeries after the age of 30. His first, in 2011 at the age of 35, kept him out 12 months, but he returned strong and made All-Star appearances in 2012 and 2013 with 67 and 66 games. But after a second surgery in 2015, he appeared in only a handful more games.

The road ahead for Sale is unpredictable at best. History shows that elite pitchers on Sale’s level — like Smoltz and Hudson, for example — have returned strong following elbow surgery after the age of 30, but there are risks aplenty, and durability and success after the fact are not guaranteed.

* The New York Post

What Chris Sale surgery means for his fantasy baseball future

Jarad Wilk

We are living in a world of uncertainty.

We don’t know when we will be able to see friends, family, colleagues or loved ones outside of Google Hangouts, FaceTime or Zoom chats. We don’t know when we will next be able to have a meal in a restaurant, or when we’ll be able to stand within 6 feet of another person without getting a dirty look.

We also don’t know when we will see another baseball game. What we do know, though, is that if games are played in 2020, Red Sox Chris Sale, like Yankees ace , won’t be on the mound for any of them.

After his elbow didn’t respond well following some throwing earlier this week, Sale — who dealt with a flexor strain and elbow issues before spring training — was shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic. He became the second big-name AL East hurler to opt for Tommy John surgery in the past month.

Even before COVID-19 was a thing and Sale made this decision, there were too many red flags for the veteran lefty.

From 2012-17, Sale was one of the most dominant pitchers, making 181 appearances (180 starts) and pitching 1,230 innings (an average of 205 per season). He was 87-55 with a 3.01 ERA, 1,441 (10.5 strikeouts per nine innings) and just 266 walks (1.9 per nine innings).

He led the league in strikeouts twice, including in 2017 when he made 308 batters whiff, had the most (214¹/₃) in 2017 and twice led the league in complete games (2013 and 2016).

Sale was an All-Star every year from 2012-18, and finished in the top six of Cy Young voting every season during that span. He never won, but he did finish in second place in 2017 and third in 2014. The left-hander also received substantial MVP consideration from 2015-18, finishing as high as ninth in 2017 ( is the only pitcher who received more votes than him that year).

The problems started in 2018. Despite going 12-4 with a 2.11 ERA, 237 strikeouts and a career-low 0.861 WHIP, Sale was limited to 27 starts (158 innings) because of left shoulder inflammation. In 2019, left elbow inflammation ended Sale’s season after 25 starts (147¹/₃ innings). He finished 6-11 with a career- worst 4.11 ERA and 2.3 walks per nine, his highest total since his first year as a permanent fixture in the White Sox’s rotation in 2012. He did strike out 218 batters, but he never seemed right.

Though Sale was still a productive fantasy option the past two seasons, it was two straight years in which he started fewer games, pitched fewer innings and saw his velocity dip. More importantly, it was two seasons cut short by arm issues. That’s the main reason Roto Rage was not a huge fan of Sale this season, ranking him No. 17 among starting pitchers on Feb. 29 (and even that was being generous).

If you had your fantasy draft before coronavirus turned our world upside down, there’s a good chance you drafted Sale (or Severino) as a key piece for your rotation — Sale’s average draft position was 36.86 as of Feb. 19, according to Fantasy Alarm. It dropped to 38.02 by March 2, but fell to 71.30 by March 16.

Maybe your league will be open to redrafting. You never know, anything’s possible in these uncertain times. Truth is, you were drafting under the impression the season was to begin March 26. Now, who knows? Talk to your league, not because Sale, Severino or even are hurt, but because times have changed (and it’s fun to draft).

If your draft has been postponed, then you simply take Sale off your draft board. In a keeper or dynasty league, if you have an IR spot available, you can get Sale for cheap and keep him for next year, when he should be fully recovered (he does have plenty of time, at this point). As of Friday morning, his ADP had dropped to 294.46.

Will he be any good when he returns? Well, that’s about as big an unknown as what’s going on in the world right now. Roto Rage would rather have the 26-year-old Severino, but Sale cannot be ruled out. He has been a top-tier starter his entire career, so you can at least live with the hope that the comeback will be greater than the setback.