The Grisly Truth About 22-Year-Old Aces

As Chicago Cubs fans learned earlier this decade, and as Yankees fans are now discovering, the bad thing about having a 22-year-old ace is having a 22-year-old ace. Injuries to hard-throwing young starters may not be metaphysically certain, but they're about as close as anything in baseball. You can mourn Joba Chamberlain's shoulder injury, which landed him on the disabled list yesterday, but you can't be surprised.

Over the last 20 years, a dozen pitchers 22 or younger have started 10 or more games in a season, struck out at least eight per nine innings, and posted an ERA of 3.50 or below. A straight accounting of what happened to them is a tale of carnage and woe. Chamberlain may well lord over baseball as an unmatched ace for the next decade; precedent suggests you'd do well to be skeptical.

Take two of the bright stars of the last decade. In 1990, at 22, Ramon Martinez finished second in the Cy Young voting for the Los Angeles Dodgers with a 20-6 record and a 2.92 ERA. Through the end of July the next year, he was even better, with a 14-5 record and a 2.25 ERA. He was awful the rest of the year — 3-8, 5.50 — and pretty bad in 1992 as well, when he missed the last month of the season and finished with a losing record and a below-average ERA. After July 1991, he was never again anything near an ace, and he was basically done after 30. That's at least better than Jason Bere's story: After two promising seasons, in neither of which he even qualified for the ERA title, Bere pitched in 1995 despite needing Tommy John surgery and ruined his career. He pitched 239.1 mostly terrible innings in the next four years, and he too was essentially done at 30.

To be fair, Ramon's younger brother Pedro started 23 games at 22 and struck out a man per inning with a 3.42 ERA, and then went on to enjoy the most dominant prime of any pitcher in major league history. All is not doom with great young pitchers.

You wouldn't know that, though, from what happened to St. Louis pitcher Rick Ankiel after the 2000 season, nor from the aforementioned suffering of the Chicago Cubs. In 1998, at 21, Kerry Wood tied the record for strikeouts in a game and helped drag a largely unimpressive team into the playoffs. He missed the next year to elbow surgery and has either been injured or recovering from an injury ever since, aside from two strong years in 2002 and 2003. In those years, he was joined by the even more dominant Mark Prior, who at his best made Chamberlain look like Carl Pavano. He also suffered the first in a brutal string of injuries in 2004, at 23, and hasn't pitched since a 2006 shoulder operation.

Around the same time that Wood and Prior were shredding the National League, another young starter by the name of Oliver Perez was doing the same. In 2004, at 22, he finished fifth in wins and fourth in strikeouts for the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 2005, he pitched with what he described at the time as a stiff shoulder, and between that year and the next he ran up a 5.51 ERA and missed more than 20 starts. Occasionally brilliant, as he's been with the Mets, who picked him up in a 2006 trade, he's never again been as good as he was in 2004, and he likely never will be. At least he avoided surgery, unlike Minnesota's Francisco Liriano. In 2006, he was about as good as a pitcher can be, going 11-3 with a 1.92 ERA and 112 strikeouts in 16 starts as he helped his team win the division by a single game. He didn't pitch again until last week, the victim of a blown-out elbow.

Even those great young pitchers who have avoided major injuries haven't generally avoided injury. Seattle's Felix Hernandez, for instance, pitched exceptionally well at 19 in 2005, but he hasn't pitched as well until this year and missed a month last year with a strained forearm. And Tampa Bay's Scott Kazmir missed most of the last two months of the 2006 season with a sore shoulder. Now that Chamberlain has hit the disabled list, the one pitcher meeting the criteria with which we started who has yet to suffer an injury is the Dodgers' Chad Billingsley. He's a brilliant pitcher; he's also a bomb waiting to go off.

The takeaway here shouldn't be that Chamberlain is doomed to Bere-like irrelevance; he isn't. No one's asked him to gut through a sore shoulder or pitch while doctors are recommending surgery, and every pitcher is a unique snowflake anyway. Pending dramatic results from his latest MRI tests, there's every reason to hope that the cautiously handled phenom is experiencing nothing more than the sort of terror-inducing but ultimately benign problems Hernandez and Kazmir have gone through. Hope, though, doesn't win ball games, and going by the recent past, Chamberlain may not be doing much of that the rest of this year either.

tmarchman@nysun.com