Successful Surgery? Reeeeaaaally!!!

The big story yesterday was not the Mets 8-3 loss to the Rockies in Colorado where Mike Pelfrey continued his mastery of the inadequate. And it wasn't the return of David Wright from his head concussion, who singled sharply in his first at-bat back with specially fit headgear that made him look like Dark Helmet from Spaceballs.

No, actually the big news came from the Mets medical department who CLAIMED to have performed successful surgery on both Johan Santana and Oliver Perez, which brings me to one of my pet peeves about announcements such as these - I love it when marketing departments add meaningless words to their statements as if to convince us they know what they're doing.

I've never liked the word "successful" with "surgery" as in "successful surgery" in press releases. You hear it all the time though. "He underwent successful surgery"... "Yesterday, Dr. David Altchek, the Mets' medical director, performed successful surgeries..."

First of all, what's the definition of "successful"? - What, the patient didn't die?!?! How do we know it's successful? Won't it take months of rehab and healing before we know if the surgery was successful? If Johan comes back at half the pitcher he was, was the surgery successful? Whether or not the surgery was successful or not can only be determined in the future!!! You can't claim a successful surgery at the time of surgery, can you? Yet find me a statement from any ballclub that doesn't use the word "successful" when surgery is performed on one of their players.

"Successful" is totally unnecessary in the context of the sentence. What are they going to say?: "you know, we performed surgery on the guy yesterday and boy did we really screw it up!" Of course not. (well, maybe the Mets organization can) The correct sentence should read:

"Dr. David Altchek, the Mets' medical director, performed surgeries Tuesday morning on left-handers Johan Santana and Oliver Perez."

Not "successful"... just "surgeries" thank you. What about all these players all over baseball who have "successful surgery", then have to have surgery again... and again... and again... all on the same problem - where each surgery is a "success". Please, let's stop with this.

Then again, we're talking about the Mets crack medical staff here. So I guess it is successful surgery if the doctor even performs the correct procedure on the patient.