The Story Of CC & The Prophylactic Heating Pad

Via Anthony McCarron -

The Yankees insist CC Sabathia is healthy, but the heating pad, a dip in velocity and his awful results on Opening Day are causing some knowledgeable baseball observers to wonder what was happening when the lefty got rocked by the Orioles.

“When I’m watching him pitch and see the heat pad and then see him throwing 88-89 (miles per hour), it’s almost like he’s protecting something and pitching at 70%,” said ex-catcher John Flaherty, who played in the majors for 14 seasons and is now a YES Network analyst. “But everybody says he’s feeling fine, so obviously that wasn’t the issue.”

Still, Flaherty thought it odd “to see a day when (Sabathia) can’t control his fastball and his velocity is down. When I’ve seen guys amped up, they’re throwing gas and they’re all over the place. But it was like he never really got going.”

Sabathia lasted only 4-1/3 innings and allowed six runs and eight hits. He walked five and had no strikeouts, only the fifth time in his career in which he started and failed to whiff anyone.

Television cameras showed him in the dugout with a heating pad on his side while the Yankees were hitting, but he insisted he was using it only to keep warm. The game-time temperature was 56 degrees, and it had rained much of the afternoon leading up to the first pitch.

Sabathia has had two abdominal strains, both serious enough to warrant time on the disabled list, so he was using the heating pad as a preventative measure, Brian Cashman said. With Cleveland, Sabathia was on the disabled list with a right oblique strain from March 25-April 15, 2005 and again from April 3-May 2, 2006 with the same injury.

“I can understand why people would ask the question,” Cashman said. “But he has a history of early oblique strains and it (the heating pad) is a preventative thing, nothing more than that. It’s a program they developed to combat that.

“I can honestly tell you there is nothing bothering him, other than maybe the way he pitched. There is no health issue that we’re hiding. If there was something that was troublesome, we’d do something about it tucked away where no one would see anything. He wouldn’t be doing it in the dugout.”

Cashman said Sabathia will make his next start, scheduled for Saturday in Kansas City.

“We have no one missing starts at this stage,” Cashman said.

Heating pad? What…Steve Donohue’s hottest possible liniment rub is no longer available?

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