Yahoo is reporting Olivera has UCL damage that may require Tommy John surgery, which Olivera’s camp is denying. While whether Olivera has UCL damage is a black-and-white issue, there are still plenty of gray areas left for teams to wade through, including the UCL question itself.
First, some background: Olivera hasn’t played in a competitive game in awhile, hasn’t played in the field on even a part-time basis in years, and hasn’t played an international game (the only games that MLB teams can scout Cubans in person) in years. He has a blood disorder that knocked him out of game action for over a year, turns 30 next month and was noticeably fatigued in some private workouts for clubs, which were all scheduled with plenty of downtime between so he could recover.
In the game/workout I saw him play in, he had four plate appearances in six innings, then left the game right before he would’ve faced
RHP Yadier Alvarez, who was sitting 93-97 mph. The pitchers Olivera has been facing in these workouts generally work around 88-91 mph and are of roughly A-Ball quality. Olivera’s careful handling has been a good move by his representation because it controls how scouts see him and limits risk, but it’s raised more than a few eyebrows and is doing nothing to allay fears about various medical and durability issues.
Olivera has had physicals with four teams, who brought their doctors to the Dominican, where Olivera is training, to watch him take a physical. More than four teams want physicals with Olivera, but some teams only want a physical in America with their doctors/facilities/equipment, where they can control the process rather than Olivera’s doctors.
Sources have indicated it’s unlikely that Olivera would be allowed to enter the U.S. before he has agreed to terms with a team. This means the situation I outlined in my
recap of Olivera’s workout is still in play: a team agrees to terms with Olivera, flies him to the U.S. for a physical, then, depending on the results of the physical, could reduce the terms of the deal, which would also allow Olivera to back out of the deal if he chooses.
While the report of UCL damage is disputed by his agents, it doesn’t matter because any team that signs him, even if they’ve already had a physical, will have another one before anything is official. The issue is that there is a new and specific medical issue has been raised and one that can’t be disproven even if Olivera shows his arm is healthy and that his UCL has no damage.
There’s recent precedent with the #1 overall pick in the 2014 MLB Draft, LHP Brady Aiken, that a fully healthy elbow can be deemed a risk in a physical, given the subjective way that teams project future health. What this Yahoo report does is give teams even more license to project a possible future health problem, and use that to squeeze the contract total lower, with a player who already has legitimate medical concerns that may be hard to quantify perfectly in a physical.
As I mentioned in my earlier Olivera article, a real concern is about Olivera’s durability to play on an everyday basis and play the field. The only data we have in the last few years on this topic is his recent workouts. While you can say these aren’t professional game situations and he might not fully up to game speed, teams are openly asking questions about what they’ve seen from a durability standpoint.
A fatigue/durability problem won’t come up in a physical, it would just show up on the field in 2015, and that would impact his future more than any of the more concrete issues, as he may just be a part-time player if it becomes a problem. That means this concern gets baked into the terms of an initial deal, with the results of a physical possibly pushing down the terms of the deal that he actually signs.
