It's hump day of finals week, so I'm making this one short, but I wanted to get a word in on the recently non-tendered arms before any of them get...tendered.

 

The most interesting non-tender, IMHO anyway, is Chien-Ming Wang, he of the shoulder capsule repair surgery, baserunning foot injury, release point inconsistencies, and formerly insanely fast and dominant sinker. This isn't to say he's the most valuable, most likely to be healthy, most...anything other than interesting. The connective tissue of the shoulder includes the glenoid labrum and cartilage, the tendons and muscles of the rotator cuff, and the ligaments of the shoulder capsule. It seems unlikely, to me at least, that Wang somehow was able to only injure the capsule, and the more I read about his injury, the more I think he's unlikely to recover according to the current timetable. I could easily see him recovering from this relatively minor surgery, pitching half a season, and then dropping out again for a more serious surgery in the same way Erik Bedard did in 2008-09.

 

Matt Capps is another interesting non-tender, but the questions surrounding him are less about health and more about whether he's going to reassert the same brand of dominance he had earlier in his career. He's among the few pitchers you might root for to throw less strikes, but there it is. He doesn't walk anyone, but his results are much more dependent on batted-ball luck than other pitchers. His luck will probably change, but unless his approach changes, he's unlikely to become less dependent on it. There are dozens of pitchers who have come up and dominated in relief for a single season, only to have their luck run dry or their game figured out, failing to ever deliver on early or mid-career promise. Is Capps among them? Some of them eventually turn themselves back into pretty good pitchers (Rafael Betancourt), some implode (JJ Putz), and some are Blaine Boyer (Blaine Boyer).

Mike MacDougal continues to throw very hard. I mean, just insanely fast.

via www.fangraphs.com

Velocity isn't everything, but there are often comments made about a pitcher like MacDougal that his fastball is too "straight". I've never seen any of that substantiated. If MacDougal could get his fastball into the zone, he'd be a pretty good pitcher, but it's his K/BB of 1.61 that's holding him back- not the straightness of his fastball.

 

Anyhow, time to stop procrastinating. Or at least to procrastinate elsewhere.