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Mark DeRosa: my wrist surgery was “a total failure”

Image (1) Mark%20DeRosa%20swing.jpg for post 5940

Mark DeRosa has numbness in the ring and pinky fingers of his left hand, preventing him from swinging the bat effectively. “I feel like my bottom hand’s underwater. I don’t have much feeling in my bottom two fingers,” he says.

This is bad enough as it is, but what makes it worse is that this sort of thing was supposed to have been corrected by the offseason surgery he had. Now he’s calling that surgery a “total failure,” and he’s considering having another surgery because he simply can’t hit the ball. Attention Mark DeRosa’s surgeon: put your insurance carrier on notice.

But I’m less interested in the specifics of DeRosa’s wrist injury as I am in his anecdote about how it’s affecting him:

DeRosa last played Saturday, when he went 0-for-5 at New York and didn’t hit the ball out of the infield in three at-bats against Mets starter Johan Santana.

“It came to a full head in my second at-bat,” DeRosa recalled. "[Santana’s] throwing 88, 89 [mph] and I was sitting on a middle-in fastball. It was there on a tee. I went to move on it. When it came out of his hand, I [said], ‘This is a bare minimum double to left-center.’ The next thing I know, it’s a weak popup to second base.”
What does it say about Santana’s velocity that his pitches are being referred to as being “there on a tee” by a middlin'-at-best super utility guy?