Stottlemyre’s Goal to Pitch Entire Season

Todd Stottlemyre is buff this spring. He has to be if he wants to succeed in his unprecedented effort to make it through a season pitching with a partially torn rotator cuff.

Beefed up by 20 pounds of muscle, the product of long hours in the weight room, Stottlemyre is cautiously confident he will make it.

“I’ve had some anxiety in the offseason, but if I was going to bet, yeah I’d bet that I’m going to make it all the way,” he said Thursday as the Arizona Diamondbacks pitchers and catchers reported.

“You obviously knock on wood,” Stottlemyre said, “but I honestly feel as good now as anytime in my career.”

No big-league pitcher has come back from a rotator cuff tear without surgery, let alone finish his career with a season or more in that condition. Such injuries invariably have led to an operation and one or two years of rehabilitation. Sometimes, as in the case of Stottlemyre’s dad Mel, it ends a pitcher’s career.

At age 34, in the first season of a three-year contract, Stottlemyre decided he couldn’t face a long rehabilitation. Instead, he opted for an intense conditioning program aimed at strengthening the area around the injury to take the pressure off the rotator cuff.

It worked well enough that Stottlemyre was able to start eight games late last season, including an outstanding performance in Arizona’s lone victory over the New York Mets in the first round of last year’s playoffs.

Now the question is can his arm make it through an entire season.

“I’m more concerned with the endurance over the course of the season than I am with the short term,” manager Buck Showalter said. “There’s so much uncharted territory here.”

Stottlemyre does not consider himself a medical pioneer paving the way for a new method of dealing with rotator cuff injuries.

“If that’s the case, so be it,” he said, “but when it gets down to it, I’m doing this so I can keep playing the game I love to play. I’m buying time now. The challenge now is how long can I make this work.”

He has no plans to baby himself this spring.

“I have to be smart when I’m on the mound as far as not trying to do too much too early,” he said, “but I come to camp every year with the thought that I’ve got to make the club. I try to have that approach so in six weeks I’m ready to pitch in a major-league game. . . . I don’t want to have any excuses. I’ll go all-out and work as hard as I can work. I’m not going to shortcut anything.”