Yesterday, I questioned whether or not Joe Torre would actually stick with his promises to rest certain players. At the time, it slipped my mind that he had just used Cory Wade in back-to-back games in April against the Padres. I have posted about Wade being abused by Torre before, so I wasn't exactly thrilled that it took Torre 4 days to restart the abuse again.
If there's any question that the workload is a problem, then just take a look at how Wade was injured last year, how it affected him into Spring Training, and how his velocity is slowly decreasing this year.
After being used somewhat judiciously in Spring Training (8 Games), Wade looked good in the season opener against the Padres on April 6th.
From this, you can see that he's sitting in the 89-90 mph range and touching 92. For Wade, that's almost better than normal, as his average fastball came in at 89.1 mph last year.
Anyway, after a game off, he pitched against the Padres again on April 8th.
There's still not much to be alarmed about here. He's now sitting at 89 mph more consistently, and he's topping out at 90, but this is normal for him.
At this point, Torre makes the decision to pitch Wade on consecutive days for the first time in 2009.
Okay, this is more of what i'd rather not see from him. His average fastball has now dropped almost a 1.5 mph since his season debut, and he's topping out at lower and lower levels as well. It may not seem like much, but going through his game logs, it's rare to see Wade never throwing a fastball above 90 mph.
Now this is obviously a small sample size, but it's something to keep track of from here on out. Remember, after Wade went down with soreness last year, the Dodgers pitched him on back-to-back days only once the rest of the way. The result? He was brilliant.
Another question is whether or not Wade's woes are a matter of mechanics or genetics and not workload. Sure, that's always a possibility, but there's nothing wrong with Wade's mechanics from what i've seen. And even if it is just a genetic weakness, that problem would still need to be identified and addressed by the manager. They've finally taken precautions with Kuo, so hopefully it doesn't take 4 arm surgeries for them to get the point with Wade.
