More photos » Mark Duncan - AP

Cleveland Indians reliever Tony Sipp can't figure out why they spent $10M on Kerry Wood instead of using him for the league minimum. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan)

Browse more photos »

Tony Sipp is a hard-throwing left-hander with the Cleveland Indians who has an excellent minor league track record (source: Baseball-Reference):

Sipp's only problem, as you can guess, has been staying healthy. As you can see above, he missed the entirety of the 2007 season with an elbow injury - UCL rupture that required "Tommy John" surgery to repair. He came back around the All-Star break in 2008 and continued to put up the same great numbers as usual, with that strikeout rate still in elite territory.

Readers of this blog (or Let's Go Tribe) will know that I'm not a fan of the signing of Kerry Wood, for both performance-related and injury concerns. $10M could have been better spent on upgrading the offense or simply pocketing it until the right time came about - spending it on a reliever when time and time again relievers have proven themselves to be fungible seems quite folly to me. Regardless, Kerry Wood has been quite good this year, but surprisingly he has been unable to score runs for the team or fill in as a starter - two of the greatest concerns for the Indians going forward, and ones we knew going into the season.

As a die-hard Indians' fan, I've come to know and love Tony Sipp through the boxscores. He lights up the competition and sits at 92-93 mph with his fastball and features a low-to-mid 80's slider. He has shown the ability to miss bats on a consistent basis, and many in Cleveland think of him as the "closer of the future." My personal desire was to have Jensen Lewis / Rafael Betancourt closing in the first half of 2008 and to have Tony Sipp up halfway through the year to usurp the role, but Sipp is up now, having thrown three scoreless innings and striking out six batters, most notably coming into an 8-8 game on April 29th, pitching 1.1 innings and striking out three batters in the process.

However, Sipp's elbow injury is cause for concern. Let's take a look at his delivery to see what, if any, indicators that may have contributed to the injury...

The first thing I notice is that Tony Sipp's landing foot is extremely closed at impact. I tend to dislike this, as it can cause incomplete hip rotation, or it can cause more serious problems upstream.

The second thing I notice is the gloveside flyout combined with the pitching arm recoil, which can cause undue stress to the hip flexor and the entirety of the pitching arm.

Thirdly, I would guess that Tony Sipp throws his slider with a supinated release like the majority of pitchers in the MLB do, which causes the olecranon process to slam into its fossa, irritating the hyaline cartilage, and furthering the damage to the ulnar collateral ligament.

The bad things: I see significant reverse rotation, a closed finish, gloveside flyout, and arm recoil.

The good things: Sipp is fast to the plate (~19 frames from maximal leg lift to footplant), gets his arm into the high-cocked position early (as to avoid significant late forearm turnover), and, well, you can't argue with his results.

As an aside, people often think that injury is the cause for bad mechanics, when in reality it is the other way around - injury is defined by bad mechanics.