Schilling’s MRI or How I Blew My Arm Out Trying to Throw a No-Hitter
Curt Schilling sucked enough last night to get sent home and have his arm checked out. Multiple sources, including the Sox staff and Chipper Jones, pointed out that Schill never quite hit 90 on the radar gun, and that this was a potential sign of an injury.
So he’s being sent home for an MRI. What is an MRI you ask? This is:
MRI is short for magnetic resonance imaging. It is similar to a CT scan, though CT uses X-Ray which is radioactive (thus the lead, uh, private parts protector). Instead, MRI uses all magnets. It is non-invasive and completely safe, though it has to take a really long time. The only reason you wouldn’t want to use MRI is if you have a lot of metal in your body, like say a pacemaker on an old person (I guess Roger Clemens is safe!)
Basically, when you get an MRI, you don’t move for about 45 minutes. They stick headphones on you so you have something to focus on besides not moving, and take magnetic pictures. Usually they take about 6 or so which take 5-6 minutes each, thus the 45 minutes of laying still. Its not fun, but not that bad - I’ve had MRI’s done on both my knees.
The results of the MRI will show if there is any structural damage, in this case, to his right (pitching) shoulder. Examples of what it may turn up would be any sort of muscle, tendon or tissue damage. For example, an MRI showed excessive scar tissue on Clemens hamstring before he came back (they called it fatigued groin). Guys who undergo Tommy John surgery start by looking at their elbows with an MRI and usually see some sort of stretched or torn tendon which the procedure repairs. In my case, the MRI revealed that my ACL was in fact torn (both times) and you can see it just laying there, disconnected, on the pictures.
So for Schilling, when we are looking at the shoulder on an MRI, we are looking for any sort of tendon or muscle damage. With a shoulder, you are most likely to see muscle stress or tearing. Best case scenario is, of course, nothing looks out of the ordinary. Worst case is probably some kind of torn labrun (muscle in the shoulder) that could potentially require surgery to fix. For more details on torn labrum shoulder surgery, talk to Pedro Martinez.
The most probable scenario is that it will show some inflammation around the muscle that was prohibiting it from firing fully and rest will be the cure. Or, if rest isn’t enough, we start talking cortisone injection. Once you start treating an injury with cortisone though, it becomes very dangerous. Cortisone doesn’t fix anything - it just reduces inflammation for a couple weeks using a synthetic version of a chemical your body produces naturally. Once it wears off, the problem will usually come back.
Clearly Schill would never admit he is injured. He probably pushed too hard during the no-hit bid and caused some minor damage that has gotten worse over his last 2 (poor) starts and pushed his shoulder to a point where he will need to shut it down. If he keeps forcing it, he’ll pull a Pedro and totally blow out his shoulder - thus the MRI test.
My guess is he won’t start until the Sox are back in Boston, but that remains to be seen when we hear about the test results. Time will tell. And somewhere in northern Rhode Island, Jon Lester just perked up…
Stumble it!