The Feelings Behind Joe Nathan’s Elbow

Well, you can take those Minnesota Twins’ “Off-season in review” pieces and add one massive asterisk (what would modern baseball be without one, really?). One of the biggest weapons the team had is now, in all likelihood, out for the year. Joe Nathan, the super door slamming closer the team has relied on at the end of games for six years was diagnosed this morning with a tear in a ligament in his pitching elbow. While the team is saying he’s going to try two weeks of cautious strength training around the injured area and then attempt to throw, the smart guys around the team say to expect the worse.

While the news itself was surprising – as the buzz around the pain he was suffering last week that led to his elbow scan didn’t sound all that serious – I was even more surprised at how I took the news. Shock and grief should have coursed through my very baseball soul in loyalty to this man and in realization of what we’ll be missing this year. After all, in the past 3 years he’s saved 47, 39, and 37 games respectively. Since becoming the Twins’ stopper in ’04, he’s never sported an earned run average over 3.00. In fact, he’s had 4 seasons with an ERA under 2.00! That is just uncanny. When you look at how razor thin the Twins’ entry into playoff baseball has been these past few trips, Nathan’s brilliance should be appreciated all the more for the role it played getting the team there.

But instead – my honest first thought on hearing the news was an emotion-less ‘Hmmmmm…’. Granted it was early in the morning (for me) and I’ve recently had some form of flu plauge that’s reduced me to attempting to converse with my carpet and wall hangings. But still. WHY?! Why didn’t I weep or yell or something epic? I will be honest. It’s because of the playoffs. It’s because of Nathan’s meltdowns in October against the Yankees this past year and in the mid-2000s when Jo-hizzle Santana still strode to the Metrodome mound. It was because of the hope that was dashed while pumping gasoline into my car and on a brisk October evening as I listened to John Gordon detail Nathan blowing a decisive lead against New York several years ago. It was the crushing feeling in my emotion-producing-region while watching Joe surrender a lead to those disgusting pin-stripe clad miscreants once again this year.

This realization leads to some self-loathing on my part because it comes ever so close to some unfair mentalities I despise. “He’s not a gamer!” and “He’s not clutch!” are the declarations of which I speak, and they’re usually found after a formerly favorite player makes one mistake on a highly publicized stage – like the playoffs. I’ve always found this buffoonish because it often ignores a huge body of work, like a 162 game schedule full of success, in favor of dwelling on a single moment of human frailty. It’s the ultimate manifestation of the “What have you done for me lately” belief system. Yet here I am. I know I shouldn’t feel this senseless way about poor Joe, but by golly I do.

Part of what works against Joe in this scenario is the fact that, as a closer, his moment for success or failure is so short. Win or lose, he’ll probably only face 3 to 5 batters in the entire game. The whole affair can be over in a hop, skip, and a jump (sometimes off a bridge). As an Atlanta Braves fan growing up (don’t stop reading now, you can do this!), I joyfully took in season’s of starting pitching brilliance from Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz only to be disappointed year after year with playoff defeats. I was 10 in 1995 when they won their world series, so I didn’t get to treasure it as actively as I might have liked. Each year they fell, I was able to ward off suggestions that they weren’t clutch – that they somehow  weren’t big game pitchers – by pointing to the sensible train of thought from the paragraphs above. How could you malign some of the all time greats for what happened in a handful of games. Also, the individual pitchers often performed very well over the course of the whole game the team lost. Usually, they’d lose in trademark Atlanta style – 1 to 0 or 2 to 1. It was an emotional time. Joe Nathan didn’t really have that luxury though. When he gave up runs in those playoff games, the game was simply over and the appearance was deemed a failure. For stoppers like Joe, it’s a moment of glee or an instance of misery.

We all wish Joe well if he does have to undergo the dreaded Tommy John surgery. Let’s hope that the year we’ll likely spend without his dominance doesn’t serve to remind fans like me just how good we had it and how silly we were not to weep like babies when we heard of his lugubrious ligament.

Photo Credit – graphics8.nytimes.com