‘Phillies Extra’ Q&A: David Cone on Zack Wheeler’s blood clot, and how he returned from an aneurysm
Like Wheeler, Cone was a top pitcher when the game took a back seat to his health. Cone joined The Inquirer's baseball show to discuss the Phillies ace, and his own experience returning to the mound.
David Cone was an elite major league pitcher in 1996 when his career was interrupted in the scariest way imaginable.
An aneurysm formed near his right armpit.
Cone had surgery to remove the aneurysm, which caused the formation of clots that traveled down to his arm. He missed four months, then returned to the mound to help the Yankees win the World Series.
Surely, then, the news last month that Zack Wheeler had a blood clot near his right shoulder must have resonated with Cone, now an analyst for ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.
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Wheeler’s condition — thoracic outlet syndrome, which will end the Phillies ace’s season and require surgery — isn’t the same as Cone’s. But in both cases, baseball took a back seat to their ability to lead a healthy lifestyle.
Cone joined Phillies Extra, The Inquirer’s baseball show, before calling Sunday night’s game at Citizens Bank Park to chat about Wheeler, the rest of the Phillies’ starting rotation, and more.
Watch the full interview below and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Q: I wonder when you hear Zack Wheeler, 35 years old, top of the sport, was diagnosed with an upper extremity blood clot that had to be removed, does that take you right back to 1996 and your experience with the aneurysm that you had to have removed and everything you had to go through with that?
A: It absolutely does. It’s a scary situation. When you start hearing about vascular issues or blood clots or things that go way beyond your career as a player, you start to kind of cross over into, is this life-threatening or not? How serious is this? So, yes, your perspective gets changed immediately. I’m sure his family is very worried about him right now. It’s a little different than what I had. Obviously, I had an aneurysm. His is more of the thoracic outlet syndrome, so we’ll see how he comes out of it. But baseball becomes secondary when you’re faced with this kind of problem.
Q: At what point were you able to focus on returning to pitching rather than just, how is this going to change my life?
A: There just wasn’t a lot of basis for comparison. For me, I was one of the first ones to have sort of an arterial bypass, where they did a vein graft. They took a vein from my upper thigh and grafted it into my shoulder, my axillary artery, which is kind of in my armpit area. So I think, in comparison with Wheeler’s, is a little different location where the blood clot is, and thoracic outlet syndrome might involve removing a rib. Certainly location matters.
But once you get past the point of, OK, the surgery is done, I’m on the road to recovery, then you’re looking for comparisons. OK, who else went through this? How long did it take them? And for me, there just wasn’t any comps. I talked actually to Whitey Ford, who had something similar back in his day, and they didn’t really know what it was back then. But he had sort of a vascular problem as well, and a circulatory issue. So that was before we had modern science and some of the methods we have now to be able to fix it. But I still didn’t have a lot of comparison. There was nobody to look to.
There was a little trepidation — is this going to hold up? Is this vein graft going to hold up if I start to throw a baseball again at a high level? So, yeah, there was a little nervousness there. But I was assured that I would be OK. With Wheeler, it’s going to be a different story. I’m sure he can work his way back, but there’s a different set of circumstances for him and then, obviously, at his age as well, and contract status, there’s just a whole host of questions. But one thing we know for sure, he’s not going to pitch this year. That impacts the Phillies greatly.
Q: You won the World Series with the Blue Jays in 1992 and the Cy Young Award with the Royals in 1994. When you went through this in 1996, was there a part of you that thought, if this is it for me, in baseball, I’ve accomplished many of the personal and team goals I wanted to achieve?
A: I was actually the opposite. I wish I had that kind of perspective and maturity, but I didn’t. I was desperate to come back. I was desperate not to let it end this way. I was desperate to fulfill my contract with the Yankees, who had, back then, had signed me to a big deal, and [I] was one of the highest-paid pitchers at the time, so I really felt an obligation to live up to that as well.
Now looking back on it, I wish I would have had that maturity and that perspective, but I didn’t. I remember waking up from surgery, and the first thing I asked the surgeon was, ‘When can I pitch again?’ [It] wasn’t, ‘How did it go? Was it a success?’ It was, ‘When can I pitch again?’ So it was different for me. Once again with Zack, it’s going to be a different set of circumstances depending on what type of procedure he had.
But the luck of my procedure was they didn’t have to cut any muscle or remove a rib. They just moved all of my muscles out of the way, went right to the axillary artery and did a vein graft. So I was spared any of the invasive type stuff that goes on with the thoracic outlet syndrome, or that can happen in terms of removing a rib. So that complicates things enormously. It is apples to oranges, my procedure, and what I had done and what I went through, and what he potentially is going to have to have done and go through.
Q: Given the way starters are used nowadays, given the wave of injuries to starters that have shortened careers, do we have to adjust how we judge starters for the Hall of Fame?
A: Well, it’s a great question. I mean, we could spend a lot of time talking about these issues on that. There needs to be an emphasis on quality over quantity in today’s game. That even goes to who qualifies for the ERA title nowadays. That’s supposed to capture three or four starters on every team. It only captures maybe one or two nowadays, and you have pitchers that won’t qualify for the ERA title, that won’t quite get to 162 innings. So maybe we need to look at that. The qualifier for the ERA title needs to be adjusted.
It’s generational as well. The argument for guys in my generation, whether it’s Dave Stieb, or even a Jimmy Key, or Bret Saberhagen, those type of guys that [are] close-but-no-cigar kind of guys is, was that generation underrepresented? Do we need a bigger Hall? The argument for a bigger Hall comes into play. Not so much comparing this guy’s career, with that guy’s career, or Jack Morris versus Bret Saberhagen, that kind of argument. I don’t like those kind of arguments. I don’t want to take anything away from Jack Morris. I love Jack Morris. I think maybe a bigger Hall is the argument for guys like me, or guys in my category, especially when you go back to the ’80s, in the ’80s and the ’90s. So that’s an argument that we made there.
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But moving forward, absolutely, you need to adjust your sight lines and concentrate on quality and compare apples to apples, because there’s no way you could compare. And this has been an argument forever. Mel Stottlemyre was my pitching coach, both with the Mets and the Yankees. Mel Stottlemyre used to throw 30 complete games a year. I remember I had six or seven one year, and I was patting myself on the back, and Mel looked at me and he laughed.
This has been happening forever. Bob Gibson looked at us when we thought we were tough. ‘Hey, I threw 145 pitches last night, Bob.’ He’d laugh at me — what does that mean? That’s nothing. That’s kind of a perpetual argument of the thinning of pitching, the workloads, everything, the quantity of numbers. Yes, absolutely, to answer your question, in short, yes, we need to adjust our sight lines.