White Sox’ Jake Peavy Becomes Surgical Pioneer

Two things about Barry Bloom’s piece about Jake Peavy’s recent shoulder surgery.

One, Peavy is the very first baseball player to have undergone this surgery, which is relatively new and had previously been performed on “athletes such as wrestlers and rock climbers.”

And two, there’s probably more detail about the nitty-gritty of this particular procedure than you’ve probably seen about any other. Just a sample ...

“There’s no risk of [the anchors] coming out of the bone,” Romeo said. “It can’t happen. They have a reverse barb on them, like a fish hook. Once they go into the bone, you can’t really pull them back out. They fill the bone, so there’s not a weak spot in the bone anymore. There’s no risk that even throwing a baseball is going to lead to a crack in the bone.”

--snip--

Once that hurdle was passed, high-density polyester synthetic stitches were used to tie the tendon back to the bone using the anchors.

Romeo described those anchors as “like a molly bolt that is used for plaster, except that it has a little loop on the end of it.”

He said that six stitches were tied to the loops of those three anchors -- two stitches attached to each anchor -- which are so tiny they individually fit into three, 3-millimeter holes.

And just when you think the doctors have figured everything out ... You know, between preventing injuries and repairing them, you might guess pitchers eventually won’t have to worry much about getting hurt. But of course we’re a long, long way away from that. PItchers get hurt now as much as ever, probably because they’re always pushing the limits of performance. Still, without modern surgical techniques the hitters would be doing even better than they are.

As Ozzie Guillen said after Peavy’s first spring start, “If that happened when I was playing, ”[he’s] gone.”