Life before pitch counts

Dallas Green as Theodoric of New York:

Back in 1989, Yankees manager Dallas Green, in order to “stretch out” 23-year-old phenom Al Leiter, forced him to throw 163 pitches on a damp day at Yankee Stadium in April.

You’ll feel a lot better after a good bleeding!

[Leiter] pitched three more games that season (all losses), went on the disabled list, and pitched in a total of eight games over the next three campaigns. By the time he was a major-league regular again, he’d had three surgeries, and it was 1993.

Why, just twenty years ago, we would have thought Leiter’s inflamed elbow was brought on by weightlifting or not “stretching out.” But nowadays we know that he likely suffered from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in his stomach.