Deep-frayed arm

A few days ago, Dotel went to Dr. Lewis Yocum, a leading elbow specialist, in regards to the extreme pain that made him unavailable Tuesday night. On Friday, Dotel was back with the club and spoke to the beat-writers about his elbow injury.

"I even asked if maybe there was a little operation he(Yocum) could do to make [rehab] go faster, because I just want to take care of this now. But he said if he went in there, he'd have to replace the whole ligament."

However, the situation got interesting this evening as Gammons' new article contains this snippet:

Under normal circumstances, Octavio Dotel would not have been disabled with calcification in his elbow. But the plague that has descended on the A's required they get as many healthy bodies on the roster as possible.

The issue is two-fold:

1. Why would the A's decide to put Dotel on the DL and not callup another reliever? Reames would have been a serviceable addition to the pen and would not have required the A's to remove Saarloos from the rotation. By calling up Clark, all that is fulfilled is the team's healthy-body quota.


2. When Yocum told him that if surgery was to be done, he would have to replace the entire ligament; that procedure would be Tommy-John Surgery which deals with the ulnar collateral ligament. Calcification in the elbow is known as bone spurs and coupled with Yocum's opinion on surgery, this means that the ligament must contain spurs. According to a report conducted by Dr. James Andrews, "Heterotopic calcification in the ulnar collateral ligament may be associated with ulnar collateral ligament injury and tear."

From this point forward, the A's must feel that if they are to get anything for their injured reliever, they must leak out to the known media pawn that there is nothing wrong with Dotel and that in normal circumstances he would be on the club and given some down-time. For the real truth could be that the A's know Dotel's injury is much more serious then a case of bone-spurs that most pitchers have; rather, it's an issue of when his elbow will explode and how soon can they get a return on their purchase...

UPDATE: Baseball Prospectus' Will Carroll has comfirmed the issue of Dotel's elbow and reached a similar conclusion.