Oh Kip

Yesterday afternoon I drove up to Clarion to visit some friends from back home (explaining the absence of posts yesterday). Anyways, I woke up this morning (I use morning loosely, think 11:30 AM) in pain on a couch (is there any way to wake up on a couch other than in pain?) hobbled into my friends room, and sat down at the computer to browse for any interesting Pirates news I may have missed (which is what I do every morning anyways). What I saw was this, that Kip Wells was having some arm fatigue and was going to get his arm checked out by a clot specialist. I found that a bit worrisome, espcially after reading this:

Pirates general manager Dave Littlefield did not divulge any specifics of Wells' status, referring to it solely and repeatedly as arm fatigue, and he did not say if any procedure was performed upon Wells' visit to St. Louis.

Anytime Dave Littlefield says something like that, it's not good. Anyways, we went to get some Eat n' Park breakfast, then I got in the car to come back to Pittsburgh. By the time I made it back to my room, like 4:30ish, I had completely forgotten about Kip Wells. That didn't last long, as I sat down at my desk, opened up ESPN.com, and immediately saw this. Not only does Kip have a clot, but it sounds like a bad one.

General manager Dave Littlefield described the clot as a "100 percent blockage" of an artery under the clavicle, the primary vessel that carries blood from the chest to the arms.

Not quite "arm fatigue" anymore, is it, Dave? My roommate, who's a pharmacy major in the process of taking anatomy, read that and said "If that's true, I can't imagine how he could move his arm at all."

WOW. I still don't quite know how to process all this. My first thought is, of course, that I hope Kip's OK. They caught it early, which is good news, but this is still very serious. Two people immediately came to mind after hearing about blood clots in a pitcher's arm like that, JR Richard and David Cone. I'm sure most of you know their stories. Richard was diagnosed with a blood clot in his pitching arm, but was told he was OK to keep pitching. Shortly afterwards he suffered a career ending (and nearly fatal) stroke. David Cone had an aneurysm in his pitching shoulder, got the surgery in May, and was back pitching in September. I would guess that this being a contract year for Kip where he's finally in a situation with a manager and pitching coach that he gets along with, his first inclination is to try and keep pitching. If this thing is as serious as it sounds though, he's got to get the surgery. And if he's having surgery, we won't see Kip Wells until August at the earliest.

Anyways, besides the serious health ramifications this has for Kip (which are the primary concerns above all else), I really hate to see this happen for a number of reasons. First off, I always had the impression that Kip did not get along well with Williams or McClendon and his level of frustration with those two was affecting his pitching. He seemed to have a very positive reaction to the embryonic stages of Jim Colborn's career as the Pirates pitching coach. I was holding out hope that one place to find a lot of improvement in the '06 Pirates was for Kip Wells to return to his 2003 form, and early reports from camp seemed to indicate he was on his way back. Now all of a sudden we're staring at a rotation in which the bottom 40% will likely be made up of Victor Santos and Ryan Vogelsong (I don't care how good Burnett looks, he's missed way too much time to jump right back into a major league rotation, I'm guessing he'll start the year in AAA and I can't say I would disagree with that). Maybe neither one will be as bad as Kip Wells was last year (it would be hard to be that awful), but neither one can be as good as he could potentially be. I've always liked Kip and I was willing to give him one more shot to start over this year, but now it looks like he might not get it anyways.