Adam Wainwright Is Back, And That Means What It Says

This winter, I got a kick out of people who wondered how the St. Louis Cardinals would recover from losing Albert Pujols. Adding Carlos Beltran and getting Adam Wainwright back from injury isn’t a bad way to go, on account of them being phenomenal players. Even with Chris Carpenter going down with an injury and getting a mysterious timetable for his return.

Before last season, we learned that Wainwright would need Tommy John surgery. The loss seemed a devastating blow to the Cardinals ... who won the World Series anyway. Wainwright’s back, now. He started against the Milwaukee Brewers on Saturday, deploying his new elbow ligament for 88 actual pitches and who knows how many warm-up pitches. Wainwright lost, but that’s not important.

What was important was that Wainwright looked more or less like himself. Which, when you think about it, shouldn’t be surprising. He didn’t undergo some radical, experimental procedure that had never been attempted. He underwent a fairly routine procedure, in which a damaged part of the body needed to pitch is replaced with another part of the body that isn’t. Presto, like magic - where by “like magic” I mean “like science” - it works. Adam Wainwright was never going to come back with a leg for an arm and an arm for a leg. He was going to come back like Adam Wainwright, with scars.

Here’s footage from a Wainwright start in 2010 and from his start on Saturday. I mean, just look how identical they are!

That isn’t fair, because you can’t get much out of those moving images. And the moving images were specifically selected, anyway. Here’s something fair: Wainwright has always been a groundball pitcher. For his career, just about half of the balls in play he’s allowed have stayed on the ground. Saturday, Wainwright allowed 14 balls in play, and nine of them were grounders. A new elbow ligament didn’t turn Adam Wainwright into Chris Young (the one on the Mets).

There was one issue that came up. Derrick Goold:

Wainwright was able to hit 93 and 94 mph during his early starts of spring training, but as the innings mounted in March and he reached his first April start the fastball had settled in at 89 to 90 mph. He averaged 89 mph on Saturday.

That zip will return with time, Wainwright said.

This, I think, exaggerates things. In 2010, Wainwright’s fastball averaged just under 92 miles per hour. On Saturday, his fastball averaged just over 90 miles per hour, according to PITCHf/x. That’s down, but it’s not down by a lot, and pitchers tend to gain velocity as their arm strength builds. In April 2010, Wainwright’s fastball averaged just under 91 miles per hour. In the end, he’ll probably come away from his surgery having lost very little velocity, if any.

Besides, it was only Wainwright’s fastball that was missing any miles over the weekend. His cutter, his curve, and his change were right on. He didn’t experience an across-the-board velocity drop.

And here’s a neat thing: While it’s too soon to make much of this, there are indications that Wainwright might have been generating more sink on Saturday than he had before. More sink would presumably lead to more groundballs, and then Adam Wainwright could be Adam Wainwright, to the extreme.

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