Depending on the way you're approaching the topic, this is either a great or terrible time to get elective surgery.
For some areas, it's such a terrible time for unnecessary hospital visits that a lot of states and municipalities have banned or called for halts to elective surgeries altogether. And even if they're still permissible, given the overall need for protective equipment, space, and other resources for the medical community, it's probably best to delay procedures you can live without.
However, when even healthy athletes are looking at a lost season due to circumstances beyond anybody's control, now is probably a pretty appealing time to get a major surgery out of the way. Everybody's doing things they'd ordinarily avoid to kill time, be it taxes, cleaning, reading, running, talking on the phone, etc. Why not repair a muscle, or get a new ligament?
(The San Francisco Chronicle's interview with Dr. Neil ElAttrache goes into why not, and that's the tension right now.)
If and when and where they happen, Chris Sale and Noah Syndergaard will be two such cases, as they've both decided in the last week to succumb to Tommy John surgery, even though they aren't typical cut-and-dried cases. Sale has been battling elbow issues for a while, but even now it doesn't seem as though he's getting a defined resolution for a defined ligament tear.
The funny thing about Sale's surgery is that it proved the naysayers right ... just a decade late and after a Hall of Fame peak. Anybody who had ever seen a picture of Sale's arm mid-delivery wondered when it was going to go flying into the 15th row, but he managed to throw 1,600 innings and post seven consecutive top-six Cy Young finishes before encountering an arm problem he couldn't power past. Nevertheless, Tom Verducci still felt compelled to write a tonally strange, told-you-so column as if Sale barely outperformed one of the pitching flops drafted ahead of him.
Sale's decision was announced nearly a week ago, and to my knowledge, the situation hasn't been resolved, so perhaps stars will be just like us in this particular situation. Boil it down to an individual struggle, and TJS is typically an outpatient procedure performed in private clinics, so what's the big deal? Tie together all of those individual struggles across a whole country struggling to get on top of coronavirus containment, and therein lies the ethical rub.
The good news is that White Sox pitchers are only recovering from surgeries, not trying to sidestep them, so the time off is mostly beneficial when it comes to the pitching depth of our collective concern. Healthy pitchers shouldn't get cocky, though. Beyond the standard hazards of the job, Brandon McCarthy issued a warning about future injuries thanks to the massive interruption in a pitcher's standard preparation.
