Snelling out six weeks
Jeff · February 28, 2005 at 2:40 pm · Filed Under Mariners
You knew that when the words “Snelling” and “MRI” were said so close together, the word “surgery” had to soon follow. Chris Snelling has torn a meniscus, and will go under the knife.
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41 Responses to “Snelling out six weeks”
&%^*&%&*$*#Q*#@(*@$^&(*^$_)*_!!!!!!!!!
(Yes, that was the sound of me swearing.)
Un-freaking-believable. He must have really offended the baseball gods in an earlier life or something.
I blame Dave Myers.
I keep thinking that while on his off-season walkabout, Snelling rubbed the Devil’s Marbles wrong or something.
The same knee as his ACL problem. Is anyone close enough to shoot Dave Meyers?
Where is Myers now? He’s back in the M’s organization I know, but WHERE (specific location) is he?!
I’M GONNA!!!! I’M GONNA!!!! EGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Poor Snelling.
He’s had so much surgery, can’t we just replace all his connective tissue with kevlar or something?
If Dan Rohn’s in the current camp, and HE’s not a ML coach, and while Myers was finally jettisoned from the ML-coachhood, it’s not impossible to assume that since he’s still in the M’s minor league coaching system, and probably is in Peoria helping out in some capacity.
Of course, “helping out” is a subjective, abstract term, with MUCH room for interpretation…
Wow, somebody who makes Griffey look like Ironman…
I can’t imagine how much it must suck to be so close to achieving your dream only to have your body betray you again and again.
Myers took a job in another organization, he’s nowhere near the Mariners anymore.
I thought I’d read Myers took a job as a roving instructor within the Seattle system, but I certainly could’ve misread that. Maybe it’s what he was offered, and he took it for awhile, and then another job, God help that team, came along.
Even better if he’s completely out of the M’s picture!
Maybe I’m wrong… searcing for cite… nnnoot finding anything. Man, I could have sworn the Cardinals hired him.
I second Shannon’s comment (#3).
Either I’m getting my nightmares mixed up with reality or DMZ is getting his best dreams mixed up with reality…
But here is where he is OFFERED a new role:
http://seattle.mariners.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sea/news/sea_news.jsp?ymd=20041029&content_id=908147&vkey=news_sea&fext=.jsp
I love how Myers said they offered him another “unspecified” role in the minor leagues … perhaps the guy who goes around picking up all the dog poop out of the bushes in the parking lot at 89ers games?
Re: Snelling, too bad. Would it be premature to say that his career is pretty much over by this point? The dude’s injury history is starting to become a joke of Grant Hill-esque proportions.
Maybe we could fuse Chris Snelling and Ryan Anderson into one supreme cyberplayer, like what happens to Kusanagi and The Puppetmaster at the end of Ghost in the Shell.
#16, career ending is pretty extreme, all in all this is fairly minor, any other player and no one would be too worried
Looks like it’s entirely possible Myers was slated to be in Peoria (as of January 24th):
Leave it to Jim Street to scoop those details: http://seattle.mariners.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sea/news/sea_news.jsp?ymd=20050121&content_id=933358&vkey=news_sea&fext=.jsp
I’m sure someone somewhere in Peoria heard this quite loudly:
Oi!
Please refresh my failing memory – why do we hate Myers? He gave Snelling the go ahead when he shouldn’t have and that caused the injury in 2002 – is that it?
#20 He was a horrible third base coach. That was just the kicker.
Dave Myers? Because he waved him in? You must be kidding… Snelling is fragile, period. He’s not built to take the abuse.
I’ve had plenty of reasons to dislike Myer’s calls at third but Snelling being unable to hold up isn’t one of them.
Guys get injured all the time in sports, be it Little League or MLB. Most us don’t get hurt and immediately need surgery to correct it. The fact that he needs sugical correction every season is very telling. Some guys go their whole career without any surgery at all, ever. Why is it that Snelling hasn’t made it out of Peoria the last two years? It’s not Myers.
Snelling has exactly zero professional seasons without needing surgery during them, folks. He makes Pete Reiser look like Cal freaking Ripken, and he’s going to be lucky as hell to have ANY major league career. Myers didn’t help, but the guy’s just not going to stay healthy, period.
I remember that game in 2002, and remember the play in question. Myers put up the stop sign AFTER Snelling hit the bag, and with rookie enthusiasm, Snelling blew out his ACL trying to stop. This was a poor job by Myers, and he really does deserve our scorn.
Myers put up the stop sign too late. Once the runner is that far around the bag, just accept that you made a mistake and let him run.
Baseball players make sudden stops on their own accord all the time and typically without tearing something in the process. Think about the other ball sports, they change direction and speed. They start fast and stop suddenly.
Placing blame on someone else for Snellling being a lilly is simply illogical. It’s not always someones fault, it just happens to be.
I’m not placing the blame on Myers for Snelling’s injury … Myers was an awful third base coach, period. I saw so many mixups, botched go-aheads and bad outfield reads to last a lifetime in his first couple of seasons alone … and yet, they inexplicably retained him year after year.
Was Larry Bowa better?
Well, at least Snelling hasn’t burst into flames…yet.
Perhaps sometimes base-runners do make sudden stops, and perhaps they sometimes get hurt, but it seems that the reason for their sudden stop (and the reason for their possible injury) should never be because of a late decision by a coach. *
I question Myers’ qualifications (his common sense). I still have nightmares about his sending Edgar into an inevitable collision, trying to score him on a medium fly ball.
[BTW, in many other businesses too, if someone screws up, you don’t can him; you just give him a different job.]
________
*Was one of Griffey’s injuries similar to Snelling’s?
Just want to say in defense of Myers that I had many years of playing experience, and knew what to do and when to do it when coaching 3b. But there are times in games when you make poor calls. It happens. I once had a kid thrown out by 6 feet once on a hard send hit and run from first.
But then, I was coaching freshman and other team made two perfect exchanges including a spotty LF looking like a gold glover out there.
Myers is at the highest level, and is paid to not make such mistakes. Even so, I don’t believe he was as bad as Dale Sveum in Boston.
To say that Myers destroyed Snelling is hyperbole. To compare him to Grant Hill is a misnomer. Grant was a league MVP caliber player, Snelling a good prospect at one time. Plus Grant is having a solid year this year, and perhaps his troubles are for the most part behind him.
Snelling is going through a bad run of injuries. Hopefully he can learn to play in a way he can stay healthy.
Let Myers be a good coach imparting knowledge somewhere in the system. Preferably not as a 3b coach is all.
To my recollection, Snelling tore meniscus in the knee he blew out the following summer while playing his way back, at Tacoma if I recall. —And that’s what worries me. You can come back reasonably well from a torn meniscus in principle, but if this is his second tear in a largely reconstructed knee to begin with it suggests that what’s left of that joint is less than stable and simply can’t withstand the strain of competitive athletics. I’d like to be wrong about that, but _this_ injury really could be the beginning of the end for Chris, which is a cryin’ shame as far as I’m concerned. I like the guy, his bat, and his competitiveness, and the team could use all three components. But there’s never been a one-legged baseball player to the best of my recollection, and Snelling won’t be the first if it comes to that.
So how many of the Myers bashers actually saw Bill Plummer coach third for Lefevre? Or Wendell Kim for other teams? I remember Larry Bowa in the first week of 2000 nearly wave Edgar into home to face his doom.
I think Russ in #22 & #26 is on the money.
This is quickly entering blogosphere lore like the “Bobby Ayala is Lou’s son-in-law” did into talk radio lore.
The Snelling ACL problem was clearly Myers’ fault: he called for a stop much too late and advanced to the bag to make sure Snelling saw the sign. Snelling then over-ran the bag and snapped his ACL when he landed and braked on one of Myers’ feet. Never a very good 3B coach anyway, that incident was a complete disaster.
You do realize how silly that sounds, right? One guy’s hand waving caused a ligament in another guy’s knee to snap? You might as well blame someone in the stands with a Voodoo doll. Can anyone say “scapegoat?”
And since its absurd to blame Dave Myers for Snelling’s injury, complaining about Myers’ third base coach decisions is completely irrellevant to this topic.
Any thought that a switch to DH would be possible and helpful for Snelling? If it stresses his knee less, would that allow him to contribute, or does he not have enough potential in his bat alone?
Also, if Snelling comes back in 6 weeks and has a productive year in Tacoma, or wherever he ends up, would he be ready to make the big league club in ’06? How much does this injury really set him back?
I was wastching the game in question when Myers waved Snelling in, poor judegement on his part no doubt. Right or wrong, I do blame Myers for that first injury. Chris Snelling is like Martin Short in that awful movie Pure Luck.
Re: injuries
http://www.thenewstribune.com/sports/story/4638029p-4304411c.html
This article from Larry Larue talks about Ryan Christianson’s struggle with chronic injuries. The interesting thing is the revelation that they were exacerbated, if not caused, by Christianson’s attempt to “play through the pain.”
Makes me wonder if there’s some kind of pain denial culture within the M’s organization that contributes to the seeming high rate of injuries among the prospects. I remember that Roger Salkeld blew out his shoulder attempting to impress the team after feeling a “twinge.”
I’m sure that the need to show toughness exists everywhere in baseball, but I wonder if some organizations do a better job than others in telling their farmhands to pay attention to those pains.
Why is it absurd to blame Myers for Snelling’s first major injury? I remember screaming at the television when I saw the play wondering what in the hell Myers was thinking when he gave Snelling the stop sign at the last possible second. If it had a been a veteran player not trying to hold down a job they most likely would’ve ignored the ridiculously late stop sign and headed home so as not to tear something trying to stop suddenly in cleats. And yes players in other sports do stop and cut and not get injured, but some players do get injured when they cut and making generalizations one way or the other doesn’t have relevance to this individual discussion. I would expect from having played baseball and from having watched it for a number of years, that if a player was to be running full speed and then tried to come to a full stop by planting a cleat in the dirt, there is a fairly good chance an injury could result. This is why most third base coaches don’t put stop signs up as the player rounds the base and if they do throw up a late stop sign, they run down the line so as to emphasize a gradual stop rather than a sudden one, to lessen the chance of an injury.
James-Good point, Myers actually gave the stop sign AFTER the last possible second. Exhibit A-Chris Snelling.
FWIW, I seem to recall Snelling running towards third with his head down….
“Makes me wonder if there’s some kind of pain denial culture within the M’s organization that contributes to the seeming high rate of injuries among the prospects.–Comment by Joel 3/1/2005 @ 10:07 am
Not just the M’s… (http://www.postgazette.com/pg/05057/463279.stm)
I think it’s more to do with a player trying to keep playing & not fall back, and it’s not just the young players, either:
“After blowing his second save opportunity in three games on July 31, then-manager Bob Melvin and pitching coach Bryan Price sat down with Guardado and insisted he be candid about the condition of his arm. “They brought me in and told me, ‘Eddie, this ain’t you.’ It took them an hour to get it out of me,” Guardado said. “But they convinced me I wasn’t helping the team by keeping quiet. I wasn’t doing the job.””
FWIW: Here’s the Seattle TIMES write-up of the game where Snelling…
http://tinyurl.com/4ubbr