Starting pitcher Marco Estrada of the Toronto Blue Jays throws to first base against Baltimore Orioles batter, Sept. 19, 2018.Rob Carr/Getty Images
Marco Estrada has not had a finger blister since he began throwing a baseball as a child – until this season.
And, as with the growing number of other major-leaguers who have had to deal with the seemingly innocuous but nevertheless debilitating injury, the 35-year-old Toronto Blue Jays pitcher still has no idea what caused the flare-up or how to prevent a recurrence.
“It’s something I’ve never had to deal with my entire career,” Estrada said recently about the callus that formed on his right middle finger in late July and affected his pitching for the next month or so. “I’ve been throwing a baseball since I was six years old and not once I’ve had a blister.”
Estrada was one of the lucky ones as he was able to play through his bothersome blister, albeit with some difficulty. For others, such as fellow Blue Jays starter Marcus Stroman, it required a trip to the disabled list and, ultimately, the premature end to his season.
Blue Jays pitcher Aaron Sanchez’s last season was almost completely wiped out because of a nagging blister. He had part of his finger nail surgically removed to try to alleviate the problem, but even that bold measure didn’t work.
The 26-year-old landed on the DL on four occasions before he had to pack things in.
Usually considered just a nuisance to ordinary working stiffs, a blister on the throwing hand of a professional baseball pitcher is a serious matter that can last for weeks, even months, and drastically impede performance.
With the playoffs set to begin Tuesday with the National League wild-card game, there will be a number of high-profile pitchers participating who have battled finger calluses.
Perhaps the best known is Los Angeles Dodgers starter Rich Hill, who missed a month earlier this season after a debilitating blister formed on his left middle finger.
The 38-year-old has suffered from blisters for years and has tried every known treatment, from laser therapy to chugging apple cider, even to urinating on his hand to try to toughen up the damaged area.
Boston starter David Price is another who has suffered from blisters as has Atlanta rookie Max Fried. So has Cleveland starter Corey Kluber, although he is loath to admit it, as are a lot of other pitchers who are blister-bitten.
At the start of last season, Cleveland manager Terry Francona conceded to reporters that Kluber had been dealing with blisters on his pitching hand during his initial start of the year, against the Texas Rangers.
Kluber was reluctant to talk about the subject himself after the game, admitting only that a callus had ripped open. When asked which finger it was on, he testily responded, “One of them.”
When Cleveland was in Toronto earlier this month to play the Blue Jays, Kluber was approached by a reporter hoping to speak with him about his experiences with blisters.
He politely declined comment. “I’ve never had a blister before,” he said.
Gord Ash, the general manager of the Blue Jays from 1995 to 2001, said blisters were also an issue in his day – and that pitchers have never liked talking about them.
It’s just not a macho-enough injury.
“Everybody understands a pitcher who has to have Tommy John or is sidelined because of a labrum tear,” Ash said. “But to have to admit you can’t pitch just because you have a blister, they never like talking about that.”
Blisters occur when skin continuously rubs against another surface causing the skin to slowly soften and become sore. Eventually, fluid will fill in between the torn layers.
It isn’t surprising that athletes who hurl a small, round, leather-bound ball, with immense velocity and spin, are susceptible to the formation of blisters on their pitching hands.
Some pitchers have been known to soak their fingers in pickle brine in between starts to try to resolve the problem. Others will try to toughen up the area by swirling their fingers in a bag of dry rice.
One widespread concoction that is said to help – one that Estrada and the Blue Jays have used – is a salve known as Stan’s Rodeo Ointment, a product developed and marketed back in the early 2000s by Stan Johnson, a former head trainer for the Dodgers.
Johnson grew up on a ranch in Montana and embarked for a time on a professional rodeo career where competitors continually fought blisters from holding and swinging ropes. It was from that that he started experimenting with various solutions that could be applied to the affected areas.
According to a story in the Los Angeles Times in 2003, his secret potion contained 12 ingredients, “smells like an old-fashioned medicine cabinet [and] looks like thick teriyaki sauce.”
While remedies to try to fix pitching blisters are widespread, there is no method that guarantees relief.
“I used to know pitchers who would put Crazy Glue on them to try to harden the blisters up,” Ash said. “There was no right answer. It was trial and error.”
“The issue is, there isn’t a lot of research and data around,” Toronto general manager Ross Atkins said. “There’s blood blisters, there’s nail cracks. Sometimes the blisters form on the side, sometimes they have it on the pad of the finger. And all impact in different ways. They impact the feel, some impact explosiveness. Some impact just overall ability to throw. It’s been a lot to absorb.
“But it does seem to be the case that they are occurring more across the game, and more across the major leagues than the minor leagues.”
Major League Baseball played down the notion that the game has a blister problem.
“Blister injuries have increased in the past few years but remain a minor contributor to overall time lost,” a league spokesman said in an e-mail exchange with The Globe and Mail.
The league said that in 2018, the number of disabled-list assignments to players because of wrist, hand and finger blisters was 12 (representing 367 player games lost) up from nine (271 player games) in 2017.
The league also pointed out that the DL changed from a 15-day minimum to a 10-day minimum before the 2017 season. As a result, teams were probably more likely to put a player on the DL because they could return to play more quickly than in previous years, which might account for any blister increase the past two seasons.
In 2016, before the DL stay was shortened, there were only four cases of players being sidelined because of blisters (108 player games).
One of the more comprehensive looks into pitching blisters was undertaken by Ben Lindbergh writing for the Ringer, a sports and pop culture website, in 2017, relying on data provided by the Micheli Center for Sports Injury Prevention.
The Micheli Center, in Waltham, Me., created a comprehensive data base covering 2007 through 2017 on all major-league-related injuries, including blisters.
Lindbergh was provided access to the data and he determined a significant increase in days missed by pitchers as a result of blisters, rising from about 80 in 2015 to close to 200 in each of 2016 and 2017. His methodology included pitchers who were placed on the DL by blisters and those who were struggling with the issue on a day-by-day basis.
To many in the game, the rise in pitching blisters is directly related to the baseball itself. The ball is not always considered to be the same as it used to be.
“I think it has changed, but that’s my personal opinion,” said Toronto pitching coach Pete Walker. “The texture of the ball, the seams, seem different. It feels a little bit different, a little bit more abrasive to me.”
Estrada, and other pitchers, would agree.
“The balls are different nowadays,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, they don’t feel the same. I feel like the last two years the balls have been completely different.”
Late in the 2017 season, as a result of the record number of major-league home runs (the final tally was 6,105, easily surpassing the old mark of 5,693 set in 2000, at the height of what’s known as the steroid era), MLB ordered an independent scientific study of the balls
The study, released in May of this year, concluded that the increase in home runs was due, “at least in part,” to the fact that the current balls have less drag and therefore fly further than balls that were used in the past.
The committee that did the study said it could not find any change in the size, weight and seam height that would explain the home-run surge.
However, a more recent study by long-time baseball enthusiast Meredith Wills, an astrophysicist, concluded that the seams used to stitch together the covers on baseballs are 9-per-cent thicker than seams used on 2014 baseballs.
This, Wills said, could be the cause of both an increase in home runs and blisters.