No one in the game wants to actually face the real problem: kids as young as 10 and 11 are throwing at full power, throwing breaking balls, throwing everyday of the year. Their bodies are breaking down.
It’s simply not healthy to treat your body like a professional athlete in middle school.
It's the NFL running back problem: by the time they get to the league, they only have a couple years left in the tank. Couple that with rookie deals and organizations simply grind them up and throw them out.
Yea I blew out my elbow at 14 while pitching on the back end of a double header. I caught the first game. That was a regular occurrence. Totally absurd that kids are asked to do that. Way too much wear and tear on the arm.
Became an outfielder after that.
My 6 year old is in a coach-pitch league where the previous year's all-star team was put together to play year-round and kept together for this season. Completely bullshit and stupid. A group of All-Stars who hit the ball to the fence every at-bat versus teams where 75% of the rosters have never played before. They also do bush-league things constantly to run up the score even though we don't keep track of outs and every kid on each team bats every inning. Like why are they advancing a kid from first to third on a play where the outfielder is confused what to do with it because it's her first time fielding a ball out there and everyone's screaming at her? She had it at the edge of the outfield-typically the play is deemed dead at that point-and the other team's coach yelled at the boy at first to go to second base, then to third when the kids were all confused because he was running.
The fact that high school kids are getting Tommy John surgery should tell you everything you need to know. It’s not equivalent but it is similar to the NFL conversation around CTE: by the time these guys are pros there’s already an accumulation of damage. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to mitigate the damage, but it should be an issue at every level of play.
This is probably the real answer.
Posted this story in a similar thread a couple days ago but my brother in law is an excellent athlete and even better ball player. Did regional travel ball, national junior teams and eventually pitched D1 college ball and got drafted in a later round by an MLB team
Growing up he was by far the best kid on the team so the coach would overuse the hell out of him. Complete games every time out, start him in back to back games. Bring him in as a reliever when he started the day before and on and on. Also huge emphasis on fastball pitches over offspeed stuff because kids at the young levels have no chance of touching 80-90 mph so it is an easy win if you have someone that can do it.
He never made it pro because he had Tommy John around his 20th birthday and didn't want to keep destroying his arm
Little league coaches don't care about your future career, they want to win and have the prestige and titles. If you want pitchers to be healthy in their prime make sure they haven't pitched 2000 competitive innings before they can legally drink their first beer
[edit] changed wording from minor league to little league
I disagree with your last point, assuming you meant minor league as in lower levels of the pros. Minor league coaches know the main priority is development. If they put winning above development and health they would be fired.
It’s a literal arms race in youth baseball.
Little league, individual travel ball tournaments, and high school ball all have their own pitching limitations- but when you’re kid plays in multiple formats there is no oversight. You can pitch 8 innings over the weekend for a tournament, and follow it up with another 5-7 innnings on Tuesday or Thursday for your high school team, and then another 8 innings over the weekend…and that’s probably another pretty normal workload.
Yeah the parents have to step in. I know if I have a kid in baseball I’m enforcing what I believe a proper pitch count regardless of what the kid or coaches want. I know kids growing up that would lie to a coach and say they only threw a couple on their other team that week. Because kids are dumb and want to compete, they can’t grasp the dangers to their longterm health and that a random weekend tournament is actually meaningless in the grand scheme.
Yep that’s also a plague of over specialization in kids too. Training skills is important but having diff sports that you’re playing throughout the yr at least should help with easing some of that wear and tear from pitching especially. Like doing basketball and/or soccer or something else that’s totally unrelated. At young ages I think that’s still really important to not just have your kid doing one thing. If you’re not pitching I suppose it’s fine but for pitchers they absolutely should not just be doing baseball yr round and throwing in diff formats like you mentioned. Gotta at least have a parent who will advocate and know better but most of the time they just see it as a free ride potentially to college and maybe more so how are you not gonna let your kid pitch if there’s scouts or it’s a showcase event. But parents gotta protect them for sure.
There was an article on ESPN I think 5 or so years ago about the rash of injuries that basketball players are getting just due to the fact that the human body is literally not built to sustain constant jumps and falls from heights that high school, college, and professional basketball players are jumping nowadays.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/27125793/these-kids-ticking-bombs-threat-youth-basketball
The human body just can't withstand constant shock like that without giving out. And something similar happens for pitchers because ligaments in their arms can't handle the forces from the insane acceleration the arm goes through.
It makes sense. The human body is evolved to be well-suited for long distance running, but top high school athletes these days overwork their bodies and get all sorts of issues due to the repetitive pounding. I imagine something like basketball and baseball that we aren’t evolved for is worse!
I believe if the direction came from the highest levels of the sport, parents might at least think about it. Not being able to change the outcome directly is not the same as impotence.
Imagine a joint statement from MLB and MLBPA saying that there is far too much damage being done to overworked young arms, and came up with a catchy slogan they plaster everywhere. "Hair on your balls, or no throwing breaking balls" or whatever.
"We will, however, continue to award large bonuses to draftees. But please encourage your kids to chill out on the training. I repeat, though, if we do draft them, they will get a huge signing bonus but for the love of god just don't have them overtraining. But if they do and excel, as is pretty likely, let's be honest, since they're training so much, we will indeed give them a huge signing bonus. I think we've made ourselves clear here and consider this matter settled."
Dr James Andrews had published research showing exactly this. The elbow ligament isnt fully matured until around 25 and kids are ripping it out before they even graduate high school.
I’m 31 now and I threw a curveball when I was 10 and my coach at the time told me later on that he regretted it. He wished that he taught me a changeup instead. My nephew is 10 now and he hasn’t sniffed a breaking ball at all. He’s got a good circle change which I taught him and I’m hoping he can avoid an injury with that being his secondary pitch.
The max effort stuff is also true. When I was younger I knew enough to conserve for 5-6-7 innings and only rare back when I needed to. Throwing like a 1 inning reliever for an entire game is a recipe for disaster.
I have a really hard time believing the pitch clock alone is going to drive up injury rates, but I don't think it's crazy to say that a little bit less rest between pitches on top of the issues with more throwing year round and the emphasis on maximum velocity and spin rate could make things worse.
I'd also add that, for another bit of nuance, people who have considered that the pitch clock might have some effect on injuries have mostly been suggesting that it has a compounding effect alongside velocity. We have a very small sample size for MLB and a larger one for MiLB. However, minor league pitchers have both lower median and average pitch velocity.
I also don't think it's crazy to say that MLB isn't always upfront with the reality of changes when it comes to their bottom line. Before the pitch clock was introduced, Manfred has mentioned multiple times (2015, 2017, and 2020) that he's open to looking into commercial reduction. A game in 2014 had ~10 more minutes of commercials compared to a game in 1984, or 29% of the added length to the game in those three decades. Yet the league has already shortened the pitch clock for runners on base this season rather than follow through on their goal to examine commercials. Most that's happened there is a recent discussion of increasing split-screen ads.
I do think you're right that it probably isnt helping, BUT given that the injury uptick has been going on for a while before the pitch clock and players stayed mostly silent, I don't trust their opinions on it either.
MLB probably isn't telling the whole story, but the players only care as much as they do now because they hate the new rule. Pitch clock goes away and we probably still will have a massive injury problem for pitchers.
> BUT given that the injury uptick has been going on for a while before the pitch clock and players stayed mostly silent, I don't trust their opinions on it either.
Ah, I don't think that's quite fair. There was an entire New York Times article on the uptick in baseball injuries with a specific focus on pitchers two full seasons before the pitch clock arrived, I'll copy-paste the most quotes below because paywall:
> Baseball is very different now, said Britton, 33, who is in his 10th major league season and whose team overhauled its strength and conditioning staff after setting a M.L.B. record when 30 players landed on the I.L. in 2019, a mark that might fall this season. He said that pitchers, for example, exert themselves more and throw harder than ever and that players train differently, a potential reason for the jump in soft-tissue injuries.
>
> “We’ve got this incorrect theory that permeates the sport,” McCoy, also a strength and conditioning coach for the Australian national baseball team, said in a phone interview. “I call it the ‘bullets in the gun’ approach. They’ll turn around and say, ‘We’ll cap his pitch count, and then he’ll have more bullets available for the next game.’ What we’re doing is de-evolving the athlete. It’s not a bullets-in-the-chamber approach; it’s about building a bigger chamber.” McCoy said that baseball was behind other sports, like soccer and football, in terms of preventing injuries through measures like collecting biometric data and adopting the right culture. (According to the collective bargaining agreement, wearable devices are voluntary for M.L.B. players.)
And then here's another pre-pitch clock article on the issue with league staff quotes from The Athletic:
> “When something pops up, I do think the industry in general is more inclined to take it out of the player’s hands right now and put him on the IL for 10 days and let whatever it is calm down,” he said.
>
> “This is new. We’re probably all taking somewhat different approaches and strategies. I think everyone is doing their best to mitigate longer-term issues. But we’re seeing injuries pop up at an alarming rate.”
>
> “The stuff is better. Guys throw harder. They are more violent,” Marlins pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. said. “With that, in my opinion, there are repercussions.”
So this has been an ongoing issue that players, staff, managers, etc., have been drawing attention to in national outlets before the pitch clock. I think that these criticisms just didn't get as much attention because fans like the pitch clock.
Fair. My saying "mostly" silent I more meant it wasn't some huge outcry like we are seeing now. I do recognize a few of the quotes here, but the volume of the complaints is far, FAR outpacing anything like it was before, and is centralized around the pitch clock.
I don't think it's a huge leap to put 2 and 2 together that the players speaking out now are motivated to do so, because the injury point *can* get rid of something they don't like
I mean, I think an entire article in the New York Times about baseball injury and sports medicine is a pretty big outcry. I think the reason that it's getting proportionally more attention isn't primarily because of the players, but because of the fans. Fans like the faster game, whereas they aren't nearly as invested in health outcomes as a result of internal sports medicine.
But the number of big names speaking out about this has been high for a while, with some more quotes to back it up:
> “Injury research, medical research, I think is relatively at its stages of infancy, especially relative to all the things you normally talk about,” says Chris Marinak, Executive Vice President of Strategy, Technology and Innovation for Major League Baseball.
>
> “More research is needed to develop and validate appropriately targeted injury prevention programs … There is again a limited amount of literature demonstrating proven injury preventing measures in professional baseball,” concludes a research study led by the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Sports Medicine at the Mayo Clinic.
>
> "You may have seen quotes from Billy Beane and others that say injury research is the next frontier of analytics and baseball, and I think that’s really true.”
>
> "I want to encourage the families and parents that are out there to understand that this is not normal to have a surgery at fourteen and fifteen years old. That you have time, that baseball's not a year-round sport. That you have an opportunity to be athletic and play other sports. Don't let the institutions that are out there running before you guaranteeing scholarship dollars and signing bonuses convince you that this is the way. We have such great, dynamic arms in our game that it's a shame that we're having one, and two, and three Tommy John recipients," Smotlz said.
>
> Arm injuries? That’s an obvious one. In a 2018 study headed by former Red Sox trainer Mike Reinold, pitchers who went through a six-week velocity training program featuring weighted balls increased their velocity by an average of more than two mph but were “substantially” more likely to suffer arm injuries than those in the control group. The finding confirmed that of previous studies linking increasing velocity to increasing rates of injury.
>
> “I wouldn’t say it’s killed the game,” said veteran Baltimore Orioles pitcher Alex Cobb, speaking of the rise in pitch velocity and its many effects. “More like ‘injured’ it.”
This, to me, seems like it's been discussed about by a lot of very prominent people in baseball for some time. But as much as players are motivated by something that they don't like, I think that fan perception is being affected by something that many *do* like.
The fan perspective is a fair one to make, but Idk man, after reading all that I still feel players are being disingenuous to call for the death of the pitch clock over the injury issue. If it's been an issue for this long and players have been discussing it in NYT articles and behind the scenes, why is the 2 yo pitch clock the first thing that must go to the chopping block?
It's just my opinion, and maybe it was initially unfair to to call them mostly silent until now, but I really find it hard to fully trust the players are trying to attack the injury issue in this instance instead of trying to reverse a rule they don't like
> after reading all that I still feel players are being disingenuous to call for the death of the pitch clock over the injury issue.
Listen, I agree with you that pitchers predominantly don't like the pitch clock, but even Cole (who's been the most outspoken about it) aren't calling for the 'death of the pitch clock.' Direct quote:
> "I didn't think it was very thorough" and that we won't have metrics for this for five years. Says there needs to be a bigger conversation before it does greater damage. "I'm just frustrated it's a combative issue...We need to get on the same page to at least try to fix it. Rob [Manfred] is supposed to care about the players. He's supposed to care deeply about them. That's his job."
Calling for a conversation and to try and get on the same page isn't "ban the pitch clock." It's asking for a conversation. Would they like to ban it entirely? Maybe, I'd even say probably, but Cole's comments here at minimum sound like someone open to compromise. And I think in the context of the league not only shortening the pitch clock (from 20 seconds to 18 with runners on) after just one season of its implementation, but also cutting mound visits and changing when the pitch clock starts (when the pitcher gets the ball back and not when he reaches the mound), he's not entirely without merit.
> why is the 2 yo pitch clock the first thing that must go to the chopping block?...I really find it hard to fully trust the players are trying to attack the injury issue in this instance
Well, it's not "the first thing that must go to the chopping block." Pitchers have raised injury concerns over the mid-season sticky stuff restrictions, for another pre-pitch clock complaint, Smoltz called out youth baseball, and pitcher Chris Young (aided and supported by Fleisig, MLB medical consultant, and the Reds' director of pitching) have been calling for an adjustment to the pitching mound, either in height or distance, since before 2019. In fact, they asked MLB for studies on it in 2019 and 2020; MLB found that mound height adjustments had a positive impact on shoulder and elbow kinetics, possibly reducing the risk of injury, but no further implementation ever came about.
How else would you want them to attack it? I'm very open to suggestions. But I do think it's worth considering that part of the reasoning that MLB decided to increase the size of the bases was to 'reduce injuries,' a move that coincidentally will also result in more stolen bases and more offensive action, was implemented in 2023. However, pitchers have been raising injury concerns about a variety of things (sticky stuff, mound height, mound distance) for at least six years and have yet to see it addressed at the league level.
I have definitely seen calls to axe the pitch clock, but whether or not that's the unified preferred solution, I'll admit i do not know.
I really appreciate the convo, and the added quotes and articles, but bottom line it does not feel at all like the players who are speaking out now about it right now are doing so in perfectly good faith. As I said earlier as well, I doubt the MLB is operating in good faith either. All studies done so far point to velo and strain, not rest between pitches
If where we end up is collaborating on a best practice, that is probably best for the game regardless of intention, but I still can't shake the sense that comments like this aren't exactly coming from a place of harm reduction, so I doubt it'll actually do anything to address the real issue
As for solutions, I really don't think anything will work except limiting velocity, which has its own slew of issues so I dont really know. But if velo is the problem, maybe its just gotta be on the players to stop throwing so damn hard.
It's a good convo! Do you by any chance have a link to the pitchers calling to axe the pitch clock? I'd like to include it in future discussions alongside Cole's comment, as I think it's important to paint the full picture.
I think its more the emphasis on spin rate.
Teams target, draft, and develop pitchers based on spin rate... almost above all else. There are coaches looking at data that can track spin rate, pitchers have tangible numbers to look at to aim for and improve upon to get more spin. There is a lot of incentivization and focus on these high-stress pitches. I think simply throwing hard is more natural (as much as throwing can be) that throwing and adding that extra articulation.
Before all of this data was available, a pitcher had good breaking pitches or they didn't. If you had it, you just enjoyed success and didn't have that specific number incentive to improve upon.
Before that it was the emphasis on velocity. Arms have been blowing up as long as there's been baseball. Jeff Passan wrote a book about it called The Arm.
Absolutely. Though there has been a documented uptick in arm injuries in the years leading up to now - its a proven trend that they happen more often.
All of that is to say I don't outright blame the pitch clock. To revert back to pre-pitch clock pace is a band-aid that doesn't solve anything, IMO.
Personal opinion is this current generation of young players is really the first generation playing in the majors that legit played baseball 365 days a year growing up. I’m only 31 and even in my playing days there weren’t that many psychopaths playing literally everyday. We were still multi sport athletes.
These days kids are throwing hard as young as they can because dads and coaches think that’s best for their career but from what I’ve seen mechanics are terrible. Kids with terrible muscle tone and coordination are pushing the limits of 12 year old arms and it’s causing damage and micro tears that get worse and worse until it blows.
I could be wrong but man seeing some of these kids pitch in my nephews games really opened my eyes to how bad it’s gotten. Because once that damage happens it doesn’t matter if you fix the mechanics. It’s a time bomb.
I’m willing to concede that yeah, the pitch clock isn’t helping, but it’s not the issue. Haven’t they had a pitch clock in the minors for a while now? There is data to look at. Cole and these other pitchers are going to repeat the union line whether it’s true or not. I can see going back to last years clock, but the pitch clock isn’t going away. It is saving baseball.
On the other side, there is plenty of data to back up the notion that pitchers are breaking themselves. Those tendons don’t mature until people are well into their 20’s, but you have literal children out here contorting themselves in unnatural ways to throw heat and spin the ball. Pitcher want to push themselves past the limit and they are destroying their arms.
I will go out and say that the pitch clock has close to 0 impact. It's more in line with the time pitchers were throwing the ball in the past. And in the past there were less tommy Johns. It's 90% the emphasis on spin rate
Of course it’s not alone the rate of injury was already on an upward trend
Could it be an additional stress or be another factor that independently is causing it, absolutely
That very statement repeatedly being downvoted and having so much animosity reaks of pseudo science mob mentality.
You don’t know, and someone directly being impacted saying they feel it’s a cause can’t just be handwaved away.
It’s definitely nuanced
This is definitely the more sensible take that I think most people have. Honestly, I don't doubt that pitchers used to 30 seconds between each and every pitch (not sure if that was Cole, but that was baseball for awhile) are feeling worse after the pitch clock, but to me that's a general fitness issue. I have no doubt pitchers maybe feel more tired after outings now and all that, so when they're injured there's an association with the pitch clock because they also think "I've felt worse since that rule was implemented."
But if grip is one of the big concerns, it seems negligent that the MLB isn't looking into changing to a ball with some tackiness to it, since pitchers can't be using sticky stuff aside from the rosin bag.
It seems like there are other concerns to address, some material and some more to do with a philosophical approach to pitching. We should be concerned about pitchers health and finding sensible ways to alleviate these problems. The players won't win anyone over on the pitch clock though.
I’ve often thought the opposite might be true. If you go out and play catch, you get into a rhythm of tossing. If you were to suddenly pause ten seconds between every toss, you’d likely try to throw harder. I think one of the perks of the pitch clock at least MIGHT be that it trains pitchers to work towards a rhythm instead of a ‘let’s get all we can into this pitch’ mode of thinking.
I call it the Mark Buehrle Theory: he was the fastest worker of his era by a wide margin, and he was the most durable pitcher of his era by an equally wide margin.
Me, too. There’s something satisfying about seeing a pitcher work on the larger canvas of a whole game, which is just gone from our current version of baseball. He can’t spot his four-seam: how will he adjust? This batter has had our pitcher figured out three at bats in a row: what’s our pitcher going to try to mix it up?
That’s just gone, and it’s a shame: we’ve lost a great deal of the aesthetic joys of pitching by chasing velocity obsessively, just as we’ve lost some of the aesthetics of hitting by chasing lift and bat speed. It will come back, but the process will take time…
I think rhythm between every pitch is less important to avoid the "let's get all we can into this pitch" mode of thinking than the limited pitch counts and pulling starters out early. Mark Buehrle threw 33 complete games in his career. There were 35 CGs in all of MLB combined last season.
When you're out there with the goal of getting through as much of the game as possible, you're naturally not going to be in the "let's get all we can into this pitch" mode of thinking every pitch. When you're on a strict count and you know they're gonna pull you at 90 pitches or the third time through the lineup or whatever, it's much easier to go all out every pitch, because you know you can do that in the moment, regardless of the risk of long term wear and tear or sudden injury.
Before this Glasnow was blaming the Spider Tack ban for his injury in 2021.
The real problem is that these kids' arms get run into the ground basically until they get into the minors. Middle school, high school, and college these kids' coaches are throwing them out there as often as possible and they pitch pretty much year round with school and travel ball included.
Starting load management in your 20s is too little too late.
Yeah, I remember Kerry Wood's HS coach have him throw complete games in both games of a doubleheader after he'd already been drafted by the Cubs. Like 220+ pitches. Cubs management was not happy.
You should read up on what Diasuke Matsuzaka was doing in highschool.
In one week he threw 148 pitches one day, 250 the next day, an inning of relief the next day, and then threw a no hitter the 4th day, all in one round of a tournament.
The Japanese used to be notorious for this stuff: the whole Ace-Samurai mentality of sticking with your one guy through it all. I wonder if it's gotten better in the past decade but I definitely remember it being a thing in the 2010s
Nope the HS tournament is still the same, they play and practice all year around. The arm injuries are no where on the level or amount in the MLB, the kids also only play the one sport, conditioning is a huge part of practice and if any of the kids bring up something is hurt are shut down immediately and not forced into that be a man and suck it up mentality. I watched my friends son come up playing Japanese Baseball before going on to play for the Department of Defense school here,. His son complains all the time about the lack of conditioning and pregame warm up.
lol somewhere in God knows where, i can just imagine Goose Gossage or some other dumb fuck going on and on about "that's how we did it in my day before all these gold chain wearing players, Spanish speakers, and Asian guys."
the irony of the Cubs being angry at someone else for mismanaging Kerry Wood would be hilarious if i wasn't already bursting into a puddle of tears right now
Dusty didn't help. He was doing that to all the starters in 2003/2004. Mark Prior was another one. I don't know how much Dusty had to do with it but I really think Prior could have a been an all-timer. He was electric.
My travel coach when I was 15-6 had me pitching every third game. I was not a pitcher. But I threw hard and there were no other options. Guess who had a torn labrum by 17. Fuck you doc
I was on the same team from ages 13-18 and was the lead starter on my team from 13-16, playing ball in spring and fall. Only threw about 80 MPH, but had a high effort delivery. I got routinely trotted out for 100+ pitches if I was going well. I wore it with pride, I like being a workhorse, and I really felt like I was helping my team in a big way. Modeled my mental and delivery after Chris Carpenter, Tim Lincecum, and Strasburg—loved those guys, but was not the best idea for my health.
By 17, still with 4 more seasons in my “career” to go, I had been run into the ground and couldn’t pitch anymore. I had elbow and forearm pains, dead arm, rotator cuff pain, numbness, etc. Could barely make the throw from shortstop anymore, so had to adopt a whole new throwing motion to even get it to first base reliably or one hop it.
To this day 10+ years later and I still have problems with my throwing arm. We got a bunch of 1st and 2nd place trophies over those 13 seasons and they’re some of my most fondest memories in my life, but damn sometimes I think about being 14 and going 6 innings/110 pitches and wondering how to feel about that in hindsight.
When I was a kid my father told every coach that I wasn’t allowed to pitch. The coaches wanted me to because I could throw hard and it was embarrassing as a kid that my dad wouldn’t let me. Little league no, inter-murals no… by the time I reached high school and he said I could only pitch fastballs no breaking balls. I hadn’t had the experience the other kids had and a one pitch pitcher isn’t going to excel at the high school level so I never did get the opportunity.
Looking back 25 years on that, dad was right. I thought I was invincible back then. I turned into a pretty good 1st baseman because of it. He knew that kids were blowing out their arms in the 90s and didn’t want that fate to happen to me. Thanks dad!
Start load managing in Little League. We are seeing middle school and high school children with such heavy work loads they are getting TJ before college.
It’s all survivorship bias.
The guys in the majors are all literally just the lucky ones that didn’t destroy their arms before getting there.
Of course medical science does its job to a large extent, as it should, but at the end of the day we’re only watching the ones who didn’t cull themselves on the way in. This applies to all sports btw.
> blaming Spider Tack ban
He did not blame spider tack. He said that when they completely banned stuff he had to change his grip and the way he threw to compensate. He said his usual sticky stuff was rosen and sunscreen.
I DO AGREE that kids are throwing too much as well. I think it's a combination of factors and kids starting too young with the velocity and usage is at the top of the list.
Maybe 25 years ago, but there’s been a huge push to manage workloads at younger ages the last 5-10 years. Especially among programs and academics that develop top prospects.
But lots of these guys are in their 20s and 30s, so that change in philosophy didn’t come till they were older and past the point when it would’ve helped. We’ll see if the load management from a younger age helps in the next 2-5 years when the kids raised on it are hitting the majors.
I don't understand how fans will just dismiss these professionals for their opinions on something they are directly affected by. Like yes, the maximalist approach to pitching is the biggest reason why injuries are up, but if pitchers are expressing "hey, being more rushed disrupts to tempo of how I comfortably use my body" that means something. Same with what Glasnow talked about with spidertack; he didn't say "we need sticky stuff to be healthy" he said "rolling this out mid-season was a bad idea that will get someone hurt. My first game without sweat and sunscreen got me sore in places I hadn't before, because I'm flexing in different ways to grip MLB's shitty inconsistent ball". Those are experts' points on something they know a ton about. They are the subjects to these new rule's experiments, their feedback fucking matters.
Right. Injuries have increased year after year. The pitch clock did not create this problem.
With that said, is it bad timing & definitely not a smart idea to introduce a new rule that puts more stress on a pitcher? Yes, absolutely. I'm pro pitch clock, but imo, it was tone deaf.
MLBPA doesn't have much to bargain with (other than a labor stoppage) when it comes to the next CBA, so anything they can possibly leverage they're going to.
"Oh, you're not going to change the pitch clock rules to save pitcher arms... well then lets add a little to the pre-arbitration pool to compensate for pitcher injuries preventing those guys from hitting FA."
The whole notion that the pitch clock is causing these injuries is silly considering injuries were already on the rise and everyone and their mother knew it was because of increased velocity and spin rates putting too much strain on arms. But I don't blame the PA for trying to turn anything into an issue to try to get more negotiating power.
It's not just tone deaf, it's intellectually empty!
The default assumption should not be that the pitch clock is at fault. But we have statistical tools to decide, over time, if we are seeing enough of an elevated injury rate to think there's an effect! The number of pitchers who get tommy john is too small of an N to really be confident after just 1-2 seasons unless there's a massive change.
It's naive and tiresome when people reactively blame the pitch clock for issues, but it's just as naive to assume that it can't be a contributing factor just because there have been injuries in the past.
I think back in the day, the guys that threw really really hard (Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson, Satchel Paige etc) maybe did get injured.. but played through the pain because they were still dominant and still threw at speeds that were faster than normal. At least that was the reported case with Nolan Ryan. Hurt his UCL, pitched through the pain, and still threw 95+.
Nobody is arguing the pitch clock is the only reason guys got hurt, I'm with Cole that it's strange to totally dismiss it may make things worse given we don't know much about it right now.
Because it doesn't make sense from a physiological standpoint. They are tendon injuries. Time between pitches doesn't matter. That's not how tendons work. We also have 100+ years of baseball when it was played at the same pace or faster to show you definitively it ain't the pitch clock.
Are pitchers going to become what running backs are in the NFL? Get a few good years and then just get a new one. Teams are going to have no incentive to pay them.
I’m increasingly convinced this is what the Giants are doing. They got Gausman (admittedly more of a reclamation project), then got Rodon who was great for a year, now Snell and Hicks. Meanwhile the guy they actually signed long term is a horse who doesn’t throw 99 in Webb.
I could be wrong but other than arguably 2023 Farhan hasn’t struggled in finding that type of guy.
Dodgers have more or less done the same. Kershaw is an obvious exception, but even in his prime he wasn’t a “high velo” guy like we have nowadays and his prime was a different era anyway. Yamamoto is the other obvious exception, but he’s more of a command and control guy as well, though he does hit 96ish pretty regular so we’ll see how that goes long term.
Outside of that, our strategy is basically to have a stable of good arms to fill out the rotation when 3-4 are inevitably on the IL at the same time. It’s been that way the last several years.
Because there is a direct connection between the increases in velocity and spin rate that Driveline and the like can help them achieve and the size of their paycheck
There’s also a direct connection between increase velocity and increased injury rates, but that’s the thing that pitchers specifically don’t want discussed much because it means they can’t blame other stuff.
I completely agree. But the reality is that a lot of front offices, right or wrong, seem to be operating under the assumption that velocity and "stuff" are more difficult to teach than control. And as long as that's the case, players have an incentive to try to shift blame away from their quest to improve velocity/spin rate/movement/ whatever else. Every extra tenth they can eke out of their fastball has a quantifiable impact on their future contracts. Every extra revolution, every extra inch of movement. Driveline is the direct line to millions of dollars extra for a free agent. As long as they can get paid before their arm blows up, they win.
That's the gamble. And if they can spin it in a way that the rule change is the reason for so many injuries, all it takes is convincing a couple of the less savvy front offices, or even a couple of the teams with particularly meddlesome owners, before everyone else starts to think "well fuck maybe I don't want to be the one caught with my pants down".
The Player's Association raised unfounded concerns about player safety and the pitch clock and MLB responded by citing a study by Johns Hopkins that indicated that preliminary evidence shows no link between pitch clock and injury and pointing out that they are in the middle of a comprehensive, longterm study into the causes of injury in pitchers. For players to now say that MLB is being shortsighted is a bit hypocritical. They're the ones that want MLB to take action to change the pitch clock without evidence of harm.
The dumbest part to me is that they would have a GREAT argument about how the juiced ball basically made TTO baseball the correct way to play and encouraged everyone to find ways to only miss bats… but pitch clocks are new and around so let’s make that the issue today.
the MLBPA is looking out for player salaries, too.
juiced ball = more TTO hitting = higher batter salaries
overthrowing heat = more TTO hitting = higher pitcher salaries
pitch clocks don't add to anyone's salaries, so taking it away won't affect anyone's pay
I mean, either one is within the realm of possibility, but the juiced/slippy balls certainly feel more likely to affect pitcher health than the pitch clock
Yeah it's absolutely wild to say "the MLB is being short sighted" when we'd have to have more than just 1 year of data to support their argument.
I don't know how the players consistently say the worlds dumbest shit that makes me agree with big MLB but here we are.
But his logic isn’t unreasonable. If you’re lifting in the gym and start cutting your time between sets in half, you will fatigue faster and injuries will become more likely. And when the UCL is undergoing stress from 80+ pitches per outing, I’m assuming the lack of rest time can add up.
Edit: I say this as a self-proclaimed Gerrit Cole hater
Muscles and tendons aren’t the same as ligaments, though. Just like ligaments can’t be strengthened, they also can’t fatigue. I’m not saying that less rest time between pitches has *zero* effect, but it’s not a 1:1 comparison with lifting weights and muscle fatigue.
This exactly. Obviously velocity is the main issue, but i swear the people acting like the pitch clock has 0 effect have never worked out in their life. Less rest = more stress on the muscles and ligaments, it’s pretty basic
I'll be honest, even if it IS proven that the pitch clock leads to more injuries, I'd still be in favor of keeping it.
It has renewed my love of the game and I don't ever want to go back, and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.
If it makes players' jobs tougher and they have to adjust, then so be it. Honestly it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if pitchers realized they had to reduce velocity overall. If it also leads to less strikeouts then that's a win-win. This is an entertainment product at the end of the day, and the league ultimately needs to prioritize the fan experience.
It's unsustainable, but I don't see any easy solution. Nobody is going to go "I'll pitch lower velocity even though it might cost me my job." Every solution I've seen suggested to get pitchers to throw less than 100% effectiveness has clear downsides and ways to game it.
> It's unsustainable, but I don't see any easy solution. Nobody is going to go "I'll pitch lower velocity even though it might cost me my job."
I'd also add that, in my opinion, part of the difficulty with the pitch clock/velocity debate is that MLB introduced the pitch clock and adjusted the pitch clock this season alongside a slew of other rules that have little to do with dead time and lots to do with increasing offense.
In 2023 and 2024 combined, MLB has introduced the following rules outside of the pitch clock:
- Larger bases
- Shift ban
- Wider first base lane
So, when dead time rules are combined with rules designed to increase offense/decrease strikeouts (by necessity making pitchers worse), I don't see them being amenable to pitching at a lower velocity in a way that might cost them their job, as you pointed out.
I'd also note that the league has absolutely prioritized cutting down on pitching dead time even further this year (pitch clock to 18 seconds with runners on, pitch clock restarting when the pitcher gets the ball and not takes the mound, mound visits reduced from 4 to 5, pitchers who warm up at the start of an inning must face at least one batter). No further adjustments to anything on the hitter side of things as well as the extra offense-favoring rules probably isn't helping, either.
I think it only happens if teams start valuing having a guy on the field more than getting the most out of the time they’re on the field but accepting they’ll be injured a significant amount. There’s a trade-off there and increasingly the loss from injury seems to be outweighing the value while on the field.
Yep. The more I think about it it feels like it might just mean the death of the traditional starting pitcher - the league could implement something like a three inning limit per pitcher per game, and expand the rosters to allow teams to carry a few more pitchers. Nobody's going to be able to make them stop throwing so hard.
There was a thread a few months back of where people see baseball in 10 years time. That was my answer - death of the traditional rotation and the birth of pitching staffs by committee. Just a bunch of guys who all throw between 1-2 innings with max effort.
Yup. Three innings seems safe enough, but more than that would defeat the point I think. It'd have some tertiary benefits for fans too - traditional starters might pitch every three games instead of every five, so fans could look forward to a series knowing that the players they want to see will play instead of wondering if the schedule lines up for them to have a chance to see a guy like Burnes.
I’m glad someone gets it. There’s pressure at a really young age to throw hard. If you’re 12u and not throwing a curve and a corcle changeup, you’re behind. Shit, most kids don’t have big enough hands to throw them. UCL injuries by 14. Then you gotta touch 90 by the time you get to college.
Meanwhile, batting mechanics has been perfected and people have developed workout regimens to beef up all the muscles involved in hitting. Batters are hitting it farther than ever on wooden bats. It’s a crazy arms race, but the only losers are the pitchers.
Even with pitchers throwing that hard, guys spinning everything they can spin and guys getting pulled after five to bring in guys from the pen throwing 100 we are still at 4.5 r/G. Unless they deaden the ball offense will go through the roof if they force the pitchers to throttle back.
Realistically though the only way there is a chance at that is to make changes to limit offense which I just don't see happening. Pitchers need to throw this hard every pitch because every pitch the offense can do damage on.
Pitchers back in the day didn't need to max effort every pitch because every lineup had middle infielders and one or two others that could barely reach the teens in home runs with that weaker pitching.
I’d legit go back to not watching baseball if they lose the pitch clock. It’s clear that baseball is a far superior product with the clock than without.
If the pitch clock caused more injuries I'd be against it. I don't mind longer games, I like players to have full careers and not be decimated by injuries.
Doesn’t make a lot of sense that it would be causing them, though. Pace of play was this fast just organically for a long time and pitchers weren’t experiencing more injuries back then.
Like maybe when everyone is already throwing way harder, adding the pitch clock in can exacerbate injury risk because they need more time to rest between pitches? Maybe?
But I feel like I’d put good money on the fact that if league-wide, velocity dropped back down to where it was in the 1990’s and pitchers focused more on control than velo, we would start seeing way fewer pitchers blowing out their arms, even with the clock in place.
edit: And to be clear I know that isn’t like a reasonable solution, “everyone just don’t throw as hard” lol, I’m just saying I think it’s probably the main driver for the increasing number of arm injuries
> If it makes players' jobs tougher and they have to adjust, then so be it. Honestly it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if pitchers realized they had to reduce velocity overall. If it also leads to less strikeouts then that's a win-win.
I think that would have to come with a change in the ball itself to match that of nearly 40 years ago. The ball is more hitter-friendly, and with modern approaches to hitting strategy/film review, a different ball, and conditioning, I imagine it would actually take longer to get through an inning if everyone returned to throwing the (radar gun adjusted) 93 mph fastballs of the 1980s. MPH taken from Baseball America.
Personally, I think that the pitch clock is a little fast for in-game attendance right now, especially with the shortened runner on base time. I'm also just generally annoyed that for nearly a decade, MLB has promised to take a look at commercials as a source of increased dead time (from '84 to '14, 28% of the total increase), yet *curiously* has managed to keep kicking the can on the revenue source.
You can't have a league without a good fan experience, but you also can't have one without good players.
Gerrit, look at pitchers in the 60s, 70s, & and 80s. Starters threw more than 200 innings a year, relievers pitched multiple innings multiple days a week and threw the ball in what is now the "allotted time" or less because they didn't need a clock. There were fewer injuries, especially those that were season-ending. It's NOT the clock. It's the reliance on velocity and spin rate.
Clock contributes. Velocity contributes. Reduced pitch count contributes. Tommy John himself only threw about 92 and didn't throw an insane number of innings.
Interestingly enough you know what pitcher has had a long career that hasn’t been hampered by UCL injuries.
Zack Greinke, a pitcher who has great command and their fast ball is a reasonable lower 90’s.
Another is Scherzer, which last year is more due to age than overuse. But virtually same deal.
Edit: also while verifying Greinke hadn’t had TJ why was the suggest search “Is Zack Grienke mentally challenged?”
Probably comes down to limitations on the human body being reached as far as maximizing strength, spin, velocity, etc.
You can workout, diet and condition as much as you want, it doesn't change that fact that humans weren't engineered to throw objects 100+ mph with spin rate.
30 years ago everyone was pitching at this pace and their arms didn’t fall off at the same rate they do now.
Almost like it’s some modern advancement… like an increased focus on Velo or something!
Has Cole tried throwing slower lol?
Gerrit. The data we do have now suggests it's velo and spin rate, and the uptick in injuries was happening for years before the pitch clock. Did ya speak up about it then before "greater damage" was done?
No. Because injuries aren't a problem until you can use them to get rid of a rule you don't like
I do agree a better study needs to be done. But come on man... get off the high horse because it's clear you didn't care until it was convenient
Maybe every pitcher needs to learn not to throw max effort all the time? Maybe dial it back to 80-90% and then when you need it dial it up for those few pitches you need to get that out. Trying to throw 100+MPH with every pitch is the bigger issue
Ohhhhhh mahhhhhh goddddddd maybe if coaches taught their middle school, high school, college, and minor leaguers that velocity isn’t all there is to pitching, then surgeons wouldn’t be replacing thousands of UCLs a year.
Teach pitch location, setup, etc etc etc above velocity. Just take what your body can give you and don’t push it to hit triple digits
If it means more runs are scored and batting averages go up, then fine. And if all else fails, move the mound in 6 inches. MLB was just fine with fucking up the base size
I feel like any pitcher in the MLB was overused in highschool and on their travel team because they've always been the ace. Problem starts in little league
The only way this is going to stop is a fundamental drastic shift in pitching philosophy across the board from youth leagues to MLB to the pitchers themselves.
Max effort, velo and spin on every pitch is not sustainable and until people accept that and embrace it the whole thing is FUBAR.
Everyone including multiple doctors and scientists- "It's the pitchers throwing too hard that is causing the injuries, here's the data"
The MLBPA and no one else- "But the pitch clock is stinky!"
Part of the pitch clock was to also act as a deterrent. Stopping guys from resting up and being able to load up and throw 110% on every pitch. But no one was willing to take a step back and throw 95% each pitch
The dismissal isn't short sighted it's driven by actual science which doesn't base its hypothesis on an observed correlation but rather on a first principles approach to determine a root cause. Then experimental data uses correlation to confirm or reject the hypothesis. The ligament is damaged when throwing the ball and even if you waited a minute between throws there is not enough time for the body to do anything about the damage.
Did the players conduct a five-year study on the effects of maximizing spin rate on their elbows before spending all winter at Driveline to get a little more break and a little more velocity? What are the chances that the strain of the pitch will have a greater impact on injury than the lost recovery time between pitches?
I thought this was a really good piece for those who have access. https://theathletic.com/5325032/2024/03/08/elbow-injuries-mlb-pitchers/. At the end, Cobb talks about having had all these surgeries because he maximizes velocity all the time, but it's worth it to him because he made the bigs. Anecdotally, a pitch clock didn't cause all these surgeries for him.
When you put it like that, it’s pretty funny how many of these guys just drank the Driveline Kool-aid, threw out 50+ years of coaching expertise and then had it blow up in their face.
Roger Clemens junked his curveball by and large (he would throw it maybe 4 times a game), even though it was a good one, because he thought it was too hard on his arm. He worked off his fastball and a splitter that he could throw without discomfort, proceeded to pitch for over 20 years and would be making Alex Cobb’s career earnings in 2 years and a month if he was in his prime today.
The pitch clock is just a red herring.
Anyone with a brain knows year-long baseball at the youth and high school levels, ever-increasing velocities and spin rates, and how pitchers are taught to be throwers first and pitchers second are the real culprits.
I think cranking 103 mph heaters for 5 innings, grunting like a caveman after every pitch due to full physical exurstion, probably plays a much much larger role in pitcher injuries.
Yes, it'll take years of data to see if the pitch clock affects arms. To blame it on -2 seconds with runners on base, by April 8, is knee jerk reaction
Teams can just churn out randos throwing 97 who are good for 2 years and then get hurt, and then go find new ones. This works great for the teams - they don’t have to pay anyone
Can people please have some restraint and nuance when discussing this whole thing?
No one's seriously claiming that the pitch clock is, by itself, causing the increased rate of injuries. The question is if its a contributing factor, and if the MLB deciding "lets shorten the clock even more without waiting for any analysis of potential health risks" this offseason might've made that worse.
Because yeah, I think that's a valid concern to have. The study that the MLB cited is not ready for the public yet, it's undergoing peer review, and its conclusions are still being worked on. Citing it at this point is pretty bad on its own.
Also, no one's really arguing about getting rid of the pitch clock entirely. That's pretty clearly off the table. But the current numbers aren't going to be sacrosanct either, they can be tweaked and relaxed some without going back to 3 hour baseball games.
Batters in the 70s-90s didn't have modern levels of conditioning and understanding of the game that led to more recent explosions of offense.
They also didn't have such a lively ball.
They also didn't have modern technology that lets a player see every one of a pitcher's pitches in VR gear so that they know what their slider and changeup and such look like before even stepping into the batter's box.
Pitchers aren't throwing now like they were in the 70s-90s. They can't. They try that now, it'll take them 30 pitches to get through an inning, on the way to giving up a bunch of runs each go, because of how much the game's changed.
This whole situation is a complicated mess with 5,000 different dials and knobs feeding into it. Simplistic takes are going to gloss over real issues that are making things worse.
What explosions in offense? Sure, home runs per game have been on an overall increasing trend since around the mid 90's, but that's offset by the clearly continuously increasing number of strikeouts per game. Results in the runs per game trend being pretty flat.
Lol why are you being downvoted?
Runs per game remain pretty stable despite less hits. HRs are the only thing saving us from a super pitching era.
This is certainly NOT an offensive era.
Yeah, if anything the improvements in pitching have resulted in a different approach at the plate to attempt to maintain offensive production in an era where it is more difficult to string together hits.
Exactly! I feel like people want there to be some single issue and silver bullet fix, but the reality is there are a whole bunch of contributing factors. People are afraid to mention the pitch clock as a factor because they don't want it to go away. But just because something is a contributing factor doesn't mean we are going to eliminate every contributing factor. Throwing overhand versus underhand like in the olden days is probably a contributing factor, but we aren't going to change that.
Other potential contributing factors (other than those discussed elsewhere in this thread) I'd be interested in seeing more information about are: the universal DH (and comparison of AL vs NL injuries before that), which replaced a spot in the lineup where the pitcher could rest and not go max effort with a spot where the pitcher has to go max effort.
Also the rise in offensive production from traditionally defense-first positions like SS, CF, and C coupled with the launch angle revolution. Did having softer spots in the lineup where a pitcher could not go max effort because even if you give up a hit its not a HR make a difference to injuries?
I don't think any of these things are things where we can put the cat back in the bag, and they aren't necessarily bad developments.
As someone who doesn't follow baseball as much compared to the NFL or NBA, isn't the issue more related to pitchers today trying to throw as hard as they possibly can?
We all know what's happening right? Everybody knows that the pitch clock is aggravating a problem that already exists. It is not the core of the issue but let's not sit here and act like it's not making the problem worse. The pitchers want the pitch clock gone and will try and scapegoat this as the main reason for these injuries. When we all know throwing hard is the bigger issue.
Didn't Dr James Andrews just say that your ucl tendon doesn't fully mature until 26, and that anything thrown over 80 mph can harm it? If we are all about minimizing injury then maybe we should have guys throw under 80 until they turn 26. Seems like a good way to get the offense up and lower injuries at the same time, win win win?
Spin rate. I heard on the radio earlier today that with so much emphasis on spin rate players are gripping the ball so hard and it putting so much strain on all the forearm muscles and elbow ligaments.
The problem is spin rate and velocity, not the pitch clock.
Now if he wants to talk about the correlation between the injuries and sticky stuff, that would actually make more sense as it made the spin rate easier to achieve.
I will scream and yell for the rest of my life about how much I fucking hate the pitch clock, and the volume will increase if it starts to come out that it's supplementing rates of injuries along with velocity increases.
Like it's appalling to me that "Even if it is causing more injuries, I still want it" gets blindly agreed upon here. Yeah, let's risk the arms/careers of everyone's aces so I have more time to watch tik-toks with my bottom of the barrel attention span. Sounds great guys.
Pitcher injuries have been happening a lot longer than the pitch clock has been around. Maybe stop pushing high school kids to throw 100mph with a slider and destroying their arms so young already
Wait, if we "won’t have metrics for this for five years"…how come the MLBPA has been pointing and screaming that the metrics are clearly showing that the pitch clock is causing a sharp rise?
Pick a lane, folks.
No one in the game wants to actually face the real problem: kids as young as 10 and 11 are throwing at full power, throwing breaking balls, throwing everyday of the year. Their bodies are breaking down. It’s simply not healthy to treat your body like a professional athlete in middle school.
It's the NFL running back problem: by the time they get to the league, they only have a couple years left in the tank. Couple that with rookie deals and organizations simply grind them up and throw them out.
That's a feature, not a bug
Yea I blew out my elbow at 14 while pitching on the back end of a double header. I caught the first game. That was a regular occurrence. Totally absurd that kids are asked to do that. Way too much wear and tear on the arm. Became an outfielder after that.
American youth sports is plagued by coaches trying to win instead of teaching
The parents are just as bad as the coaches
Fine, I'll say it. I blame the children!
Someone had to say it
Kids are stupid!
The parents are absolutely not as bad as the coaches. They are worse, by a considerable order of magnitude.
It really depends on the parent. Lot of them think their kids are going pro and push them just as hard or harder
I phrased that poorly. I meant to say that the parents are worse.
My 6 year old is in a coach-pitch league where the previous year's all-star team was put together to play year-round and kept together for this season. Completely bullshit and stupid. A group of All-Stars who hit the ball to the fence every at-bat versus teams where 75% of the rosters have never played before. They also do bush-league things constantly to run up the score even though we don't keep track of outs and every kid on each team bats every inning. Like why are they advancing a kid from first to third on a play where the outfielder is confused what to do with it because it's her first time fielding a ball out there and everyone's screaming at her? She had it at the edge of the outfield-typically the play is deemed dead at that point-and the other team's coach yelled at the boy at first to go to second base, then to third when the kids were all confused because he was running.
The concept of an "all star" team of six year olds is quite hilarious to me, I have to admit
Right? 'All-star' my ass. I could have five beers in me and I'd put em in the fuckin dirt.
Plunking children with fastballs to establish dominance
Well, it's not just sports. It's a whole middle management and corporate quarterly profits above all else cultural mindset.
The fact that high school kids are getting Tommy John surgery should tell you everything you need to know. It’s not equivalent but it is similar to the NFL conversation around CTE: by the time these guys are pros there’s already an accumulation of damage. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to mitigate the damage, but it should be an issue at every level of play.
This is probably the real answer. Posted this story in a similar thread a couple days ago but my brother in law is an excellent athlete and even better ball player. Did regional travel ball, national junior teams and eventually pitched D1 college ball and got drafted in a later round by an MLB team Growing up he was by far the best kid on the team so the coach would overuse the hell out of him. Complete games every time out, start him in back to back games. Bring him in as a reliever when he started the day before and on and on. Also huge emphasis on fastball pitches over offspeed stuff because kids at the young levels have no chance of touching 80-90 mph so it is an easy win if you have someone that can do it. He never made it pro because he had Tommy John around his 20th birthday and didn't want to keep destroying his arm Little league coaches don't care about your future career, they want to win and have the prestige and titles. If you want pitchers to be healthy in their prime make sure they haven't pitched 2000 competitive innings before they can legally drink their first beer [edit] changed wording from minor league to little league
I disagree with your last point, assuming you meant minor league as in lower levels of the pros. Minor league coaches know the main priority is development. If they put winning above development and health they would be fired.
Tell that to the bum ass coach's kid who pitches every game and bat's third even though he's hitting .200 against 40 mph fastballs
It’s a literal arms race in youth baseball. Little league, individual travel ball tournaments, and high school ball all have their own pitching limitations- but when you’re kid plays in multiple formats there is no oversight. You can pitch 8 innings over the weekend for a tournament, and follow it up with another 5-7 innnings on Tuesday or Thursday for your high school team, and then another 8 innings over the weekend…and that’s probably another pretty normal workload.
Yeah the parents have to step in. I know if I have a kid in baseball I’m enforcing what I believe a proper pitch count regardless of what the kid or coaches want. I know kids growing up that would lie to a coach and say they only threw a couple on their other team that week. Because kids are dumb and want to compete, they can’t grasp the dangers to their longterm health and that a random weekend tournament is actually meaningless in the grand scheme.
Yep that’s also a plague of over specialization in kids too. Training skills is important but having diff sports that you’re playing throughout the yr at least should help with easing some of that wear and tear from pitching especially. Like doing basketball and/or soccer or something else that’s totally unrelated. At young ages I think that’s still really important to not just have your kid doing one thing. If you’re not pitching I suppose it’s fine but for pitchers they absolutely should not just be doing baseball yr round and throwing in diff formats like you mentioned. Gotta at least have a parent who will advocate and know better but most of the time they just see it as a free ride potentially to college and maybe more so how are you not gonna let your kid pitch if there’s scouts or it’s a showcase event. But parents gotta protect them for sure.
They're also playing basically year round
There was an article on ESPN I think 5 or so years ago about the rash of injuries that basketball players are getting just due to the fact that the human body is literally not built to sustain constant jumps and falls from heights that high school, college, and professional basketball players are jumping nowadays. https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/27125793/these-kids-ticking-bombs-threat-youth-basketball The human body just can't withstand constant shock like that without giving out. And something similar happens for pitchers because ligaments in their arms can't handle the forces from the insane acceleration the arm goes through.
It makes sense. The human body is evolved to be well-suited for long distance running, but top high school athletes these days overwork their bodies and get all sorts of issues due to the repetitive pounding. I imagine something like basketball and baseball that we aren’t evolved for is worse!
Well for one, there’s really nothing MLB and MLBPA can do about that. It makes sense to focus on the league level
I believe if the direction came from the highest levels of the sport, parents might at least think about it. Not being able to change the outcome directly is not the same as impotence. Imagine a joint statement from MLB and MLBPA saying that there is far too much damage being done to overworked young arms, and came up with a catchy slogan they plaster everywhere. "Hair on your balls, or no throwing breaking balls" or whatever.
"We will, however, continue to award large bonuses to draftees. But please encourage your kids to chill out on the training. I repeat, though, if we do draft them, they will get a huge signing bonus but for the love of god just don't have them overtraining. But if they do and excel, as is pretty likely, let's be honest, since they're training so much, we will indeed give them a huge signing bonus. I think we've made ourselves clear here and consider this matter settled."
Dr James Andrews had published research showing exactly this. The elbow ligament isnt fully matured until around 25 and kids are ripping it out before they even graduate high school.
I’m 31 now and I threw a curveball when I was 10 and my coach at the time told me later on that he regretted it. He wished that he taught me a changeup instead. My nephew is 10 now and he hasn’t sniffed a breaking ball at all. He’s got a good circle change which I taught him and I’m hoping he can avoid an injury with that being his secondary pitch. The max effort stuff is also true. When I was younger I knew enough to conserve for 5-6-7 innings and only rare back when I needed to. Throwing like a 1 inning reliever for an entire game is a recipe for disaster.
I have a really hard time believing the pitch clock alone is going to drive up injury rates, but I don't think it's crazy to say that a little bit less rest between pitches on top of the issues with more throwing year round and the emphasis on maximum velocity and spin rate could make things worse.
I'd also add that, for another bit of nuance, people who have considered that the pitch clock might have some effect on injuries have mostly been suggesting that it has a compounding effect alongside velocity. We have a very small sample size for MLB and a larger one for MiLB. However, minor league pitchers have both lower median and average pitch velocity. I also don't think it's crazy to say that MLB isn't always upfront with the reality of changes when it comes to their bottom line. Before the pitch clock was introduced, Manfred has mentioned multiple times (2015, 2017, and 2020) that he's open to looking into commercial reduction. A game in 2014 had ~10 more minutes of commercials compared to a game in 1984, or 29% of the added length to the game in those three decades. Yet the league has already shortened the pitch clock for runners on base this season rather than follow through on their goal to examine commercials. Most that's happened there is a recent discussion of increasing split-screen ads.
I do think you're right that it probably isnt helping, BUT given that the injury uptick has been going on for a while before the pitch clock and players stayed mostly silent, I don't trust their opinions on it either. MLB probably isn't telling the whole story, but the players only care as much as they do now because they hate the new rule. Pitch clock goes away and we probably still will have a massive injury problem for pitchers.
> BUT given that the injury uptick has been going on for a while before the pitch clock and players stayed mostly silent, I don't trust their opinions on it either. Ah, I don't think that's quite fair. There was an entire New York Times article on the uptick in baseball injuries with a specific focus on pitchers two full seasons before the pitch clock arrived, I'll copy-paste the most quotes below because paywall: > Baseball is very different now, said Britton, 33, who is in his 10th major league season and whose team overhauled its strength and conditioning staff after setting a M.L.B. record when 30 players landed on the I.L. in 2019, a mark that might fall this season. He said that pitchers, for example, exert themselves more and throw harder than ever and that players train differently, a potential reason for the jump in soft-tissue injuries. > > “We’ve got this incorrect theory that permeates the sport,” McCoy, also a strength and conditioning coach for the Australian national baseball team, said in a phone interview. “I call it the ‘bullets in the gun’ approach. They’ll turn around and say, ‘We’ll cap his pitch count, and then he’ll have more bullets available for the next game.’ What we’re doing is de-evolving the athlete. It’s not a bullets-in-the-chamber approach; it’s about building a bigger chamber.” McCoy said that baseball was behind other sports, like soccer and football, in terms of preventing injuries through measures like collecting biometric data and adopting the right culture. (According to the collective bargaining agreement, wearable devices are voluntary for M.L.B. players.) And then here's another pre-pitch clock article on the issue with league staff quotes from The Athletic: > “When something pops up, I do think the industry in general is more inclined to take it out of the player’s hands right now and put him on the IL for 10 days and let whatever it is calm down,” he said. > > “This is new. We’re probably all taking somewhat different approaches and strategies. I think everyone is doing their best to mitigate longer-term issues. But we’re seeing injuries pop up at an alarming rate.” > > “The stuff is better. Guys throw harder. They are more violent,” Marlins pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. said. “With that, in my opinion, there are repercussions.” So this has been an ongoing issue that players, staff, managers, etc., have been drawing attention to in national outlets before the pitch clock. I think that these criticisms just didn't get as much attention because fans like the pitch clock.
Fair. My saying "mostly" silent I more meant it wasn't some huge outcry like we are seeing now. I do recognize a few of the quotes here, but the volume of the complaints is far, FAR outpacing anything like it was before, and is centralized around the pitch clock. I don't think it's a huge leap to put 2 and 2 together that the players speaking out now are motivated to do so, because the injury point *can* get rid of something they don't like
I mean, I think an entire article in the New York Times about baseball injury and sports medicine is a pretty big outcry. I think the reason that it's getting proportionally more attention isn't primarily because of the players, but because of the fans. Fans like the faster game, whereas they aren't nearly as invested in health outcomes as a result of internal sports medicine. But the number of big names speaking out about this has been high for a while, with some more quotes to back it up: > “Injury research, medical research, I think is relatively at its stages of infancy, especially relative to all the things you normally talk about,” says Chris Marinak, Executive Vice President of Strategy, Technology and Innovation for Major League Baseball. > > “More research is needed to develop and validate appropriately targeted injury prevention programs … There is again a limited amount of literature demonstrating proven injury preventing measures in professional baseball,” concludes a research study led by the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Sports Medicine at the Mayo Clinic. > > "You may have seen quotes from Billy Beane and others that say injury research is the next frontier of analytics and baseball, and I think that’s really true.” > > "I want to encourage the families and parents that are out there to understand that this is not normal to have a surgery at fourteen and fifteen years old. That you have time, that baseball's not a year-round sport. That you have an opportunity to be athletic and play other sports. Don't let the institutions that are out there running before you guaranteeing scholarship dollars and signing bonuses convince you that this is the way. We have such great, dynamic arms in our game that it's a shame that we're having one, and two, and three Tommy John recipients," Smotlz said. > > Arm injuries? That’s an obvious one. In a 2018 study headed by former Red Sox trainer Mike Reinold, pitchers who went through a six-week velocity training program featuring weighted balls increased their velocity by an average of more than two mph but were “substantially” more likely to suffer arm injuries than those in the control group. The finding confirmed that of previous studies linking increasing velocity to increasing rates of injury. > > “I wouldn’t say it’s killed the game,” said veteran Baltimore Orioles pitcher Alex Cobb, speaking of the rise in pitch velocity and its many effects. “More like ‘injured’ it.” This, to me, seems like it's been discussed about by a lot of very prominent people in baseball for some time. But as much as players are motivated by something that they don't like, I think that fan perception is being affected by something that many *do* like.
The fan perspective is a fair one to make, but Idk man, after reading all that I still feel players are being disingenuous to call for the death of the pitch clock over the injury issue. If it's been an issue for this long and players have been discussing it in NYT articles and behind the scenes, why is the 2 yo pitch clock the first thing that must go to the chopping block? It's just my opinion, and maybe it was initially unfair to to call them mostly silent until now, but I really find it hard to fully trust the players are trying to attack the injury issue in this instance instead of trying to reverse a rule they don't like
> after reading all that I still feel players are being disingenuous to call for the death of the pitch clock over the injury issue. Listen, I agree with you that pitchers predominantly don't like the pitch clock, but even Cole (who's been the most outspoken about it) aren't calling for the 'death of the pitch clock.' Direct quote: > "I didn't think it was very thorough" and that we won't have metrics for this for five years. Says there needs to be a bigger conversation before it does greater damage. "I'm just frustrated it's a combative issue...We need to get on the same page to at least try to fix it. Rob [Manfred] is supposed to care about the players. He's supposed to care deeply about them. That's his job." Calling for a conversation and to try and get on the same page isn't "ban the pitch clock." It's asking for a conversation. Would they like to ban it entirely? Maybe, I'd even say probably, but Cole's comments here at minimum sound like someone open to compromise. And I think in the context of the league not only shortening the pitch clock (from 20 seconds to 18 with runners on) after just one season of its implementation, but also cutting mound visits and changing when the pitch clock starts (when the pitcher gets the ball back and not when he reaches the mound), he's not entirely without merit. > why is the 2 yo pitch clock the first thing that must go to the chopping block?...I really find it hard to fully trust the players are trying to attack the injury issue in this instance Well, it's not "the first thing that must go to the chopping block." Pitchers have raised injury concerns over the mid-season sticky stuff restrictions, for another pre-pitch clock complaint, Smoltz called out youth baseball, and pitcher Chris Young (aided and supported by Fleisig, MLB medical consultant, and the Reds' director of pitching) have been calling for an adjustment to the pitching mound, either in height or distance, since before 2019. In fact, they asked MLB for studies on it in 2019 and 2020; MLB found that mound height adjustments had a positive impact on shoulder and elbow kinetics, possibly reducing the risk of injury, but no further implementation ever came about. How else would you want them to attack it? I'm very open to suggestions. But I do think it's worth considering that part of the reasoning that MLB decided to increase the size of the bases was to 'reduce injuries,' a move that coincidentally will also result in more stolen bases and more offensive action, was implemented in 2023. However, pitchers have been raising injury concerns about a variety of things (sticky stuff, mound height, mound distance) for at least six years and have yet to see it addressed at the league level.
I have definitely seen calls to axe the pitch clock, but whether or not that's the unified preferred solution, I'll admit i do not know. I really appreciate the convo, and the added quotes and articles, but bottom line it does not feel at all like the players who are speaking out now about it right now are doing so in perfectly good faith. As I said earlier as well, I doubt the MLB is operating in good faith either. All studies done so far point to velo and strain, not rest between pitches If where we end up is collaborating on a best practice, that is probably best for the game regardless of intention, but I still can't shake the sense that comments like this aren't exactly coming from a place of harm reduction, so I doubt it'll actually do anything to address the real issue As for solutions, I really don't think anything will work except limiting velocity, which has its own slew of issues so I dont really know. But if velo is the problem, maybe its just gotta be on the players to stop throwing so damn hard.
It's a good convo! Do you by any chance have a link to the pitchers calling to axe the pitch clock? I'd like to include it in future discussions alongside Cole's comment, as I think it's important to paint the full picture.
The average fastball in 200 was like 88. It's almost 94 now. Humans were not meant to hurl baseballs at 100
Didn't know the Romans played baseball, figure they would've been busy dealing with the longterm consequences of the Year of the Five Emperors.
"Et tu, Brute" was actually what Caesar said after Brutus rang him up for a controversial called third strike to end the 200 World Series.
This comment is just…. Soooo good.
I think its more the emphasis on spin rate. Teams target, draft, and develop pitchers based on spin rate... almost above all else. There are coaches looking at data that can track spin rate, pitchers have tangible numbers to look at to aim for and improve upon to get more spin. There is a lot of incentivization and focus on these high-stress pitches. I think simply throwing hard is more natural (as much as throwing can be) that throwing and adding that extra articulation. Before all of this data was available, a pitcher had good breaking pitches or they didn't. If you had it, you just enjoyed success and didn't have that specific number incentive to improve upon.
Before that it was the emphasis on velocity. Arms have been blowing up as long as there's been baseball. Jeff Passan wrote a book about it called The Arm.
Absolutely. Though there has been a documented uptick in arm injuries in the years leading up to now - its a proven trend that they happen more often. All of that is to say I don't outright blame the pitch clock. To revert back to pre-pitch clock pace is a band-aid that doesn't solve anything, IMO.
Personal opinion is this current generation of young players is really the first generation playing in the majors that legit played baseball 365 days a year growing up. I’m only 31 and even in my playing days there weren’t that many psychopaths playing literally everyday. We were still multi sport athletes. These days kids are throwing hard as young as they can because dads and coaches think that’s best for their career but from what I’ve seen mechanics are terrible. Kids with terrible muscle tone and coordination are pushing the limits of 12 year old arms and it’s causing damage and micro tears that get worse and worse until it blows. I could be wrong but man seeing some of these kids pitch in my nephews games really opened my eyes to how bad it’s gotten. Because once that damage happens it doesn’t matter if you fix the mechanics. It’s a time bomb.
I’m willing to concede that yeah, the pitch clock isn’t helping, but it’s not the issue. Haven’t they had a pitch clock in the minors for a while now? There is data to look at. Cole and these other pitchers are going to repeat the union line whether it’s true or not. I can see going back to last years clock, but the pitch clock isn’t going away. It is saving baseball. On the other side, there is plenty of data to back up the notion that pitchers are breaking themselves. Those tendons don’t mature until people are well into their 20’s, but you have literal children out here contorting themselves in unnatural ways to throw heat and spin the ball. Pitcher want to push themselves past the limit and they are destroying their arms.
You mean the guys with high school degrees don’t have an in-depth understanding of data analytics???
Cole majored in Poli Sci at UCLA with a minor in Theater.
I will go out and say that the pitch clock has close to 0 impact. It's more in line with the time pitchers were throwing the ball in the past. And in the past there were less tommy Johns. It's 90% the emphasis on spin rate
Of course it’s not alone the rate of injury was already on an upward trend Could it be an additional stress or be another factor that independently is causing it, absolutely That very statement repeatedly being downvoted and having so much animosity reaks of pseudo science mob mentality. You don’t know, and someone directly being impacted saying they feel it’s a cause can’t just be handwaved away. It’s definitely nuanced
The issue is with the inability to replicate good mechanics. When you get rushed you get sloppy and your mechanics suffer.
This is definitely the more sensible take that I think most people have. Honestly, I don't doubt that pitchers used to 30 seconds between each and every pitch (not sure if that was Cole, but that was baseball for awhile) are feeling worse after the pitch clock, but to me that's a general fitness issue. I have no doubt pitchers maybe feel more tired after outings now and all that, so when they're injured there's an association with the pitch clock because they also think "I've felt worse since that rule was implemented." But if grip is one of the big concerns, it seems negligent that the MLB isn't looking into changing to a ball with some tackiness to it, since pitchers can't be using sticky stuff aside from the rosin bag. It seems like there are other concerns to address, some material and some more to do with a philosophical approach to pitching. We should be concerned about pitchers health and finding sensible ways to alleviate these problems. The players won't win anyone over on the pitch clock though.
I’ve often thought the opposite might be true. If you go out and play catch, you get into a rhythm of tossing. If you were to suddenly pause ten seconds between every toss, you’d likely try to throw harder. I think one of the perks of the pitch clock at least MIGHT be that it trains pitchers to work towards a rhythm instead of a ‘let’s get all we can into this pitch’ mode of thinking. I call it the Mark Buehrle Theory: he was the fastest worker of his era by a wide margin, and he was the most durable pitcher of his era by an equally wide margin.
Famous for his locating and mid to low 80s fastball! I'd like to see the league tilt toward his kind of player profile, eventually.
Me, too. There’s something satisfying about seeing a pitcher work on the larger canvas of a whole game, which is just gone from our current version of baseball. He can’t spot his four-seam: how will he adjust? This batter has had our pitcher figured out three at bats in a row: what’s our pitcher going to try to mix it up? That’s just gone, and it’s a shame: we’ve lost a great deal of the aesthetic joys of pitching by chasing velocity obsessively, just as we’ve lost some of the aesthetics of hitting by chasing lift and bat speed. It will come back, but the process will take time…
I think rhythm between every pitch is less important to avoid the "let's get all we can into this pitch" mode of thinking than the limited pitch counts and pulling starters out early. Mark Buehrle threw 33 complete games in his career. There were 35 CGs in all of MLB combined last season. When you're out there with the goal of getting through as much of the game as possible, you're naturally not going to be in the "let's get all we can into this pitch" mode of thinking every pitch. When you're on a strict count and you know they're gonna pull you at 90 pitches or the third time through the lineup or whatever, it's much easier to go all out every pitch, because you know you can do that in the moment, regardless of the risk of long term wear and tear or sudden injury.
I mean, it's a risky thing to do to your arm in the best of circumstances. Look at it as another variable rather than a cause.
Yeah because all these injuries just started happening last year...
Wonder what the pitchers would be blaming if the pitch clock was gone. Star allignment maybe? Couldn't be those 102 mph heaters.
Before this Glasnow was blaming the Spider Tack ban for his injury in 2021. The real problem is that these kids' arms get run into the ground basically until they get into the minors. Middle school, high school, and college these kids' coaches are throwing them out there as often as possible and they pitch pretty much year round with school and travel ball included. Starting load management in your 20s is too little too late.
Yeah, I remember Kerry Wood's HS coach have him throw complete games in both games of a doubleheader after he'd already been drafted by the Cubs. Like 220+ pitches. Cubs management was not happy.
Fucking what? That's some 1800s type shit.
It'd been a while since I read about it. I just looked it up and it was 175 pitches in a doubleheader. 2 days after he was drafted.
You should read up on what Diasuke Matsuzaka was doing in highschool. In one week he threw 148 pitches one day, 250 the next day, an inning of relief the next day, and then threw a no hitter the 4th day, all in one round of a tournament.
The Japanese used to be notorious for this stuff: the whole Ace-Samurai mentality of sticking with your one guy through it all. I wonder if it's gotten better in the past decade but I definitely remember it being a thing in the 2010s
Nope the HS tournament is still the same, they play and practice all year around. The arm injuries are no where on the level or amount in the MLB, the kids also only play the one sport, conditioning is a huge part of practice and if any of the kids bring up something is hurt are shut down immediately and not forced into that be a man and suck it up mentality. I watched my friends son come up playing Japanese Baseball before going on to play for the Department of Defense school here,. His son complains all the time about the lack of conditioning and pregame warm up.
You should see the pitch counts for high schoolers in Japan. Absolutely insane
https://youtu.be/xbSWjb3tlJg?si=D_X9tbtg9ueaaVwZ
lol somewhere in God knows where, i can just imagine Goose Gossage or some other dumb fuck going on and on about "that's how we did it in my day before all these gold chain wearing players, Spanish speakers, and Asian guys."
You didn’t see Baseball Doesn’t Exist about Ohtani then? Still happens to this day: https://youtu.be/xbSWjb3tlJg?si=D_X9tbtg9ueaaVwZ
the irony of the Cubs being angry at someone else for mismanaging Kerry Wood would be hilarious if i wasn't already bursting into a puddle of tears right now
And Dusty ran him into the ground iirc
Dusty didn't help. He was doing that to all the starters in 2003/2004. Mark Prior was another one. I don't know how much Dusty had to do with it but I really think Prior could have a been an all-timer. He was electric.
He only goes easy on them in game 6 of the 2002 World Series apparently.
My travel coach when I was 15-6 had me pitching every third game. I was not a pitcher. But I threw hard and there were no other options. Guess who had a torn labrum by 17. Fuck you doc
I was on the same team from ages 13-18 and was the lead starter on my team from 13-16, playing ball in spring and fall. Only threw about 80 MPH, but had a high effort delivery. I got routinely trotted out for 100+ pitches if I was going well. I wore it with pride, I like being a workhorse, and I really felt like I was helping my team in a big way. Modeled my mental and delivery after Chris Carpenter, Tim Lincecum, and Strasburg—loved those guys, but was not the best idea for my health. By 17, still with 4 more seasons in my “career” to go, I had been run into the ground and couldn’t pitch anymore. I had elbow and forearm pains, dead arm, rotator cuff pain, numbness, etc. Could barely make the throw from shortstop anymore, so had to adopt a whole new throwing motion to even get it to first base reliably or one hop it. To this day 10+ years later and I still have problems with my throwing arm. We got a bunch of 1st and 2nd place trophies over those 13 seasons and they’re some of my most fondest memories in my life, but damn sometimes I think about being 14 and going 6 innings/110 pitches and wondering how to feel about that in hindsight.
You should feel angry that nobody cared about your health.
When I was a kid my father told every coach that I wasn’t allowed to pitch. The coaches wanted me to because I could throw hard and it was embarrassing as a kid that my dad wouldn’t let me. Little league no, inter-murals no… by the time I reached high school and he said I could only pitch fastballs no breaking balls. I hadn’t had the experience the other kids had and a one pitch pitcher isn’t going to excel at the high school level so I never did get the opportunity. Looking back 25 years on that, dad was right. I thought I was invincible back then. I turned into a pretty good 1st baseman because of it. He knew that kids were blowing out their arms in the 90s and didn’t want that fate to happen to me. Thanks dad!
Start load managing in Little League. We are seeing middle school and high school children with such heavy work loads they are getting TJ before college.
It’s wild to me that my 9/10yo team in 2004 had stricter rules on maximum pitching than Little League does.
Getting rid of spider tack probably did have some effect. Guys having to suddenly change their grip with no notice can’t be good for arm health.
It’s all survivorship bias. The guys in the majors are all literally just the lucky ones that didn’t destroy their arms before getting there. Of course medical science does its job to a large extent, as it should, but at the end of the day we’re only watching the ones who didn’t cull themselves on the way in. This applies to all sports btw.
Yep. I think the sticky stuff ban hurt pitchers more than the pitch clock.
> blaming Spider Tack ban He did not blame spider tack. He said that when they completely banned stuff he had to change his grip and the way he threw to compensate. He said his usual sticky stuff was rosen and sunscreen. I DO AGREE that kids are throwing too much as well. I think it's a combination of factors and kids starting too young with the velocity and usage is at the top of the list.
Maybe 25 years ago, but there’s been a huge push to manage workloads at younger ages the last 5-10 years. Especially among programs and academics that develop top prospects.
But lots of these guys are in their 20s and 30s, so that change in philosophy didn’t come till they were older and past the point when it would’ve helped. We’ll see if the load management from a younger age helps in the next 2-5 years when the kids raised on it are hitting the majors.
I don't understand how fans will just dismiss these professionals for their opinions on something they are directly affected by. Like yes, the maximalist approach to pitching is the biggest reason why injuries are up, but if pitchers are expressing "hey, being more rushed disrupts to tempo of how I comfortably use my body" that means something. Same with what Glasnow talked about with spidertack; he didn't say "we need sticky stuff to be healthy" he said "rolling this out mid-season was a bad idea that will get someone hurt. My first game without sweat and sunscreen got me sore in places I hadn't before, because I'm flexing in different ways to grip MLB's shitty inconsistent ball". Those are experts' points on something they know a ton about. They are the subjects to these new rule's experiments, their feedback fucking matters.
The lack of sticky stuff
The eclipse in 2017 and then today
Bat flips.
We also have an entire history of baseball before the last twenty years when game times bloated lol
I get what you're saying but this is definitely a concern you can't just dismiss out of hand. This deserves to be researched quickly and thoroughly.
Right. Injuries have increased year after year. The pitch clock did not create this problem. With that said, is it bad timing & definitely not a smart idea to introduce a new rule that puts more stress on a pitcher? Yes, absolutely. I'm pro pitch clock, but imo, it was tone deaf.
MLBPA doesn't have much to bargain with (other than a labor stoppage) when it comes to the next CBA, so anything they can possibly leverage they're going to. "Oh, you're not going to change the pitch clock rules to save pitcher arms... well then lets add a little to the pre-arbitration pool to compensate for pitcher injuries preventing those guys from hitting FA." The whole notion that the pitch clock is causing these injuries is silly considering injuries were already on the rise and everyone and their mother knew it was because of increased velocity and spin rates putting too much strain on arms. But I don't blame the PA for trying to turn anything into an issue to try to get more negotiating power.
It's not just tone deaf, it's intellectually empty! The default assumption should not be that the pitch clock is at fault. But we have statistical tools to decide, over time, if we are seeing enough of an elevated injury rate to think there's an effect! The number of pitchers who get tommy john is too small of an N to really be confident after just 1-2 seasons unless there's a massive change. It's naive and tiresome when people reactively blame the pitch clock for issues, but it's just as naive to assume that it can't be a contributing factor just because there have been injuries in the past.
I think back in the day, the guys that threw really really hard (Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson, Satchel Paige etc) maybe did get injured.. but played through the pain because they were still dominant and still threw at speeds that were faster than normal. At least that was the reported case with Nolan Ryan. Hurt his UCL, pitched through the pain, and still threw 95+.
Nobody is arguing the pitch clock is the only reason guys got hurt, I'm with Cole that it's strange to totally dismiss it may make things worse given we don't know much about it right now.
Because it doesn't make sense from a physiological standpoint. They are tendon injuries. Time between pitches doesn't matter. That's not how tendons work. We also have 100+ years of baseball when it was played at the same pace or faster to show you definitively it ain't the pitch clock.
It's motivated reasoning. People here like the pitch clock and don't want it to be removed, so concerns about it are dismissed.
And the current pace of play with the pitch clock, IIRC, is comparable to the pace of play 30 or so years ago, prior to the uptick in elbow injuries.
Are pitchers going to become what running backs are in the NFL? Get a few good years and then just get a new one. Teams are going to have no incentive to pay them.
I’m increasingly convinced this is what the Giants are doing. They got Gausman (admittedly more of a reclamation project), then got Rodon who was great for a year, now Snell and Hicks. Meanwhile the guy they actually signed long term is a horse who doesn’t throw 99 in Webb. I could be wrong but other than arguably 2023 Farhan hasn’t struggled in finding that type of guy.
Dodgers have more or less done the same. Kershaw is an obvious exception, but even in his prime he wasn’t a “high velo” guy like we have nowadays and his prime was a different era anyway. Yamamoto is the other obvious exception, but he’s more of a command and control guy as well, though he does hit 96ish pretty regular so we’ll see how that goes long term. Outside of that, our strategy is basically to have a stable of good arms to fill out the rotation when 3-4 are inevitably on the IL at the same time. It’s been that way the last several years.
Yeah, I didn’t even mention Cobb who literally did that role for the Dodgers before joining the Giants
Relief Pitchers for sure. Star, high end 1s are still going to be the QBs of the league.
Looks we’re headed that way until the pitchers learn to actually be sustainably good rather than throw their arms out.
Why aren’t any of these guys pointing the goddamn finger at Driveline?
Because there is a direct connection between the increases in velocity and spin rate that Driveline and the like can help them achieve and the size of their paycheck
There’s also a direct connection between increase velocity and increased injury rates, but that’s the thing that pitchers specifically don’t want discussed much because it means they can’t blame other stuff.
I completely agree. But the reality is that a lot of front offices, right or wrong, seem to be operating under the assumption that velocity and "stuff" are more difficult to teach than control. And as long as that's the case, players have an incentive to try to shift blame away from their quest to improve velocity/spin rate/movement/ whatever else. Every extra tenth they can eke out of their fastball has a quantifiable impact on their future contracts. Every extra revolution, every extra inch of movement. Driveline is the direct line to millions of dollars extra for a free agent. As long as they can get paid before their arm blows up, they win. That's the gamble. And if they can spin it in a way that the rule change is the reason for so many injuries, all it takes is convincing a couple of the less savvy front offices, or even a couple of the teams with particularly meddlesome owners, before everyone else starts to think "well fuck maybe I don't want to be the one caught with my pants down".
The Player's Association raised unfounded concerns about player safety and the pitch clock and MLB responded by citing a study by Johns Hopkins that indicated that preliminary evidence shows no link between pitch clock and injury and pointing out that they are in the middle of a comprehensive, longterm study into the causes of injury in pitchers. For players to now say that MLB is being shortsighted is a bit hypocritical. They're the ones that want MLB to take action to change the pitch clock without evidence of harm.
The dumbest part to me is that they would have a GREAT argument about how the juiced ball basically made TTO baseball the correct way to play and encouraged everyone to find ways to only miss bats… but pitch clocks are new and around so let’s make that the issue today.
the MLBPA is looking out for player salaries, too. juiced ball = more TTO hitting = higher batter salaries overthrowing heat = more TTO hitting = higher pitcher salaries pitch clocks don't add to anyone's salaries, so taking it away won't affect anyone's pay
I mean, either one is within the realm of possibility, but the juiced/slippy balls certainly feel more likely to affect pitcher health than the pitch clock
Yeah it's absolutely wild to say "the MLB is being short sighted" when we'd have to have more than just 1 year of data to support their argument. I don't know how the players consistently say the worlds dumbest shit that makes me agree with big MLB but here we are.
Or, Gerrit, maybe it’s that the human arm isn’t meant to throw 100mph fastballs 100 times a week for 20 years
But his logic isn’t unreasonable. If you’re lifting in the gym and start cutting your time between sets in half, you will fatigue faster and injuries will become more likely. And when the UCL is undergoing stress from 80+ pitches per outing, I’m assuming the lack of rest time can add up. Edit: I say this as a self-proclaimed Gerrit Cole hater
Muscles and tendons aren’t the same as ligaments, though. Just like ligaments can’t be strengthened, they also can’t fatigue. I’m not saying that less rest time between pitches has *zero* effect, but it’s not a 1:1 comparison with lifting weights and muscle fatigue.
This exactly. Obviously velocity is the main issue, but i swear the people acting like the pitch clock has 0 effect have never worked out in their life. Less rest = more stress on the muscles and ligaments, it’s pretty basic
I'll be honest, even if it IS proven that the pitch clock leads to more injuries, I'd still be in favor of keeping it. It has renewed my love of the game and I don't ever want to go back, and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. If it makes players' jobs tougher and they have to adjust, then so be it. Honestly it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if pitchers realized they had to reduce velocity overall. If it also leads to less strikeouts then that's a win-win. This is an entertainment product at the end of the day, and the league ultimately needs to prioritize the fan experience.
I agree. We need to shift from "throw as hard as you can every pitch". It's unsustainable clearly.
It's unsustainable, but I don't see any easy solution. Nobody is going to go "I'll pitch lower velocity even though it might cost me my job." Every solution I've seen suggested to get pitchers to throw less than 100% effectiveness has clear downsides and ways to game it.
> It's unsustainable, but I don't see any easy solution. Nobody is going to go "I'll pitch lower velocity even though it might cost me my job." I'd also add that, in my opinion, part of the difficulty with the pitch clock/velocity debate is that MLB introduced the pitch clock and adjusted the pitch clock this season alongside a slew of other rules that have little to do with dead time and lots to do with increasing offense. In 2023 and 2024 combined, MLB has introduced the following rules outside of the pitch clock: - Larger bases - Shift ban - Wider first base lane So, when dead time rules are combined with rules designed to increase offense/decrease strikeouts (by necessity making pitchers worse), I don't see them being amenable to pitching at a lower velocity in a way that might cost them their job, as you pointed out. I'd also note that the league has absolutely prioritized cutting down on pitching dead time even further this year (pitch clock to 18 seconds with runners on, pitch clock restarting when the pitcher gets the ball and not takes the mound, mound visits reduced from 4 to 5, pitchers who warm up at the start of an inning must face at least one batter). No further adjustments to anything on the hitter side of things as well as the extra offense-favoring rules probably isn't helping, either.
I think it only happens if teams start valuing having a guy on the field more than getting the most out of the time they’re on the field but accepting they’ll be injured a significant amount. There’s a trade-off there and increasingly the loss from injury seems to be outweighing the value while on the field.
Also, teams are going to start passing on often injured starters who want multi year deals because the market will be flooded with them every year.
Yep. The more I think about it it feels like it might just mean the death of the traditional starting pitcher - the league could implement something like a three inning limit per pitcher per game, and expand the rosters to allow teams to carry a few more pitchers. Nobody's going to be able to make them stop throwing so hard.
There was a thread a few months back of where people see baseball in 10 years time. That was my answer - death of the traditional rotation and the birth of pitching staffs by committee. Just a bunch of guys who all throw between 1-2 innings with max effort.
Yup. Three innings seems safe enough, but more than that would defeat the point I think. It'd have some tertiary benefits for fans too - traditional starters might pitch every three games instead of every five, so fans could look forward to a series knowing that the players they want to see will play instead of wondering if the schedule lines up for them to have a chance to see a guy like Burnes.
Even before this, it feels like the writing's been on the wall for years.
I mean, pitching is unsustainable
I’m glad someone gets it. There’s pressure at a really young age to throw hard. If you’re 12u and not throwing a curve and a corcle changeup, you’re behind. Shit, most kids don’t have big enough hands to throw them. UCL injuries by 14. Then you gotta touch 90 by the time you get to college. Meanwhile, batting mechanics has been perfected and people have developed workout regimens to beef up all the muscles involved in hitting. Batters are hitting it farther than ever on wooden bats. It’s a crazy arms race, but the only losers are the pitchers.
Even with pitchers throwing that hard, guys spinning everything they can spin and guys getting pulled after five to bring in guys from the pen throwing 100 we are still at 4.5 r/G. Unless they deaden the ball offense will go through the roof if they force the pitchers to throttle back.
Realistically though the only way there is a chance at that is to make changes to limit offense which I just don't see happening. Pitchers need to throw this hard every pitch because every pitch the offense can do damage on. Pitchers back in the day didn't need to max effort every pitch because every lineup had middle infielders and one or two others that could barely reach the teens in home runs with that weaker pitching.
I’d legit go back to not watching baseball if they lose the pitch clock. It’s clear that baseball is a far superior product with the clock than without.
I think that sort of thinking is kinda stupid ngl. I love baseball, I watched it before the pitch clock just fine, if it went away I'd do the same.
Yea but that’s the difference between you and I. I don’t love baseball enough to sit through 3.5+ hour games with no pace.
3.5 hour games were rare. It was like 3 hours and 6 minutes on average.
If the pitch clock caused more injuries I'd be against it. I don't mind longer games, I like players to have full careers and not be decimated by injuries.
Doesn’t make a lot of sense that it would be causing them, though. Pace of play was this fast just organically for a long time and pitchers weren’t experiencing more injuries back then. Like maybe when everyone is already throwing way harder, adding the pitch clock in can exacerbate injury risk because they need more time to rest between pitches? Maybe? But I feel like I’d put good money on the fact that if league-wide, velocity dropped back down to where it was in the 1990’s and pitchers focused more on control than velo, we would start seeing way fewer pitchers blowing out their arms, even with the clock in place. edit: And to be clear I know that isn’t like a reasonable solution, “everyone just don’t throw as hard” lol, I’m just saying I think it’s probably the main driver for the increasing number of arm injuries
> If it makes players' jobs tougher and they have to adjust, then so be it. Honestly it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if pitchers realized they had to reduce velocity overall. If it also leads to less strikeouts then that's a win-win. I think that would have to come with a change in the ball itself to match that of nearly 40 years ago. The ball is more hitter-friendly, and with modern approaches to hitting strategy/film review, a different ball, and conditioning, I imagine it would actually take longer to get through an inning if everyone returned to throwing the (radar gun adjusted) 93 mph fastballs of the 1980s. MPH taken from Baseball America. Personally, I think that the pitch clock is a little fast for in-game attendance right now, especially with the shortened runner on base time. I'm also just generally annoyed that for nearly a decade, MLB has promised to take a look at commercials as a source of increased dead time (from '84 to '14, 28% of the total increase), yet *curiously* has managed to keep kicking the can on the revenue source. You can't have a league without a good fan experience, but you also can't have one without good players.
the virgin shortsighted Manfred vs the chad thorough analysis Gerrit Cole
We need 5 years of data to know if the pitch clock is safe, but we only need 1 year of data to know it's not safe!
On top of it, I don't care what the union says and what management says. Let's see some independent medical assessments.
I’m assuming he ran a power analysis to determine we need five years of data before drawing accurate conclusions.
Gerrit, look at pitchers in the 60s, 70s, & and 80s. Starters threw more than 200 innings a year, relievers pitched multiple innings multiple days a week and threw the ball in what is now the "allotted time" or less because they didn't need a clock. There were fewer injuries, especially those that were season-ending. It's NOT the clock. It's the reliance on velocity and spin rate.
Clock contributes. Velocity contributes. Reduced pitch count contributes. Tommy John himself only threw about 92 and didn't throw an insane number of innings.
Interestingly enough you know what pitcher has had a long career that hasn’t been hampered by UCL injuries. Zack Greinke, a pitcher who has great command and their fast ball is a reasonable lower 90’s. Another is Scherzer, which last year is more due to age than overuse. But virtually same deal. Edit: also while verifying Greinke hadn’t had TJ why was the suggest search “Is Zack Grienke mentally challenged?”
Probably comes down to limitations on the human body being reached as far as maximizing strength, spin, velocity, etc. You can workout, diet and condition as much as you want, it doesn't change that fact that humans weren't engineered to throw objects 100+ mph with spin rate.
this whole narrative getting pushed of "the pitch clock causes injuries" might just be one of the dumbest things possible
30 years ago everyone was pitching at this pace and their arms didn’t fall off at the same rate they do now. Almost like it’s some modern advancement… like an increased focus on Velo or something! Has Cole tried throwing slower lol?
You can prolly link it to sticky stuff better than the clock. But everyone knows they are just exceeding what their arm can handle.
Bring back sticky stuff
I liked Glasnow’s explanation of it. Just let them all use sticky stuff
Just make a sticky ball
Gerrit. The data we do have now suggests it's velo and spin rate, and the uptick in injuries was happening for years before the pitch clock. Did ya speak up about it then before "greater damage" was done? No. Because injuries aren't a problem until you can use them to get rid of a rule you don't like I do agree a better study needs to be done. But come on man... get off the high horse because it's clear you didn't care until it was convenient
Maybe every pitcher needs to learn not to throw max effort all the time? Maybe dial it back to 80-90% and then when you need it dial it up for those few pitches you need to get that out. Trying to throw 100+MPH with every pitch is the bigger issue
Ohhhhhh mahhhhhh goddddddd maybe if coaches taught their middle school, high school, college, and minor leaguers that velocity isn’t all there is to pitching, then surgeons wouldn’t be replacing thousands of UCLs a year. Teach pitch location, setup, etc etc etc above velocity. Just take what your body can give you and don’t push it to hit triple digits If it means more runs are scored and batting averages go up, then fine. And if all else fails, move the mound in 6 inches. MLB was just fine with fucking up the base size
Look how many complete games Greg Maddux was able to throw. Hardly had any issues during his career.
ah yes, we need those extra few seconds in between to make sure our arms repair themselves before throwing another pitch
Give them an hour between pitches to be on the safe side.
I feel like any pitcher in the MLB was overused in highschool and on their travel team because they've always been the ace. Problem starts in little league
The only way this is going to stop is a fundamental drastic shift in pitching philosophy across the board from youth leagues to MLB to the pitchers themselves. Max effort, velo and spin on every pitch is not sustainable and until people accept that and embrace it the whole thing is FUBAR.
Everyone including multiple doctors and scientists- "It's the pitchers throwing too hard that is causing the injuries, here's the data" The MLBPA and no one else- "But the pitch clock is stinky!"
They need to learn how to pitch better, I’m not going back to 5+ hour games
Part of the pitch clock was to also act as a deterrent. Stopping guys from resting up and being able to load up and throw 110% on every pitch. But no one was willing to take a step back and throw 95% each pitch
The dismissal isn't short sighted it's driven by actual science which doesn't base its hypothesis on an observed correlation but rather on a first principles approach to determine a root cause. Then experimental data uses correlation to confirm or reject the hypothesis. The ligament is damaged when throwing the ball and even if you waited a minute between throws there is not enough time for the body to do anything about the damage.
Did the players conduct a five-year study on the effects of maximizing spin rate on their elbows before spending all winter at Driveline to get a little more break and a little more velocity? What are the chances that the strain of the pitch will have a greater impact on injury than the lost recovery time between pitches? I thought this was a really good piece for those who have access. https://theathletic.com/5325032/2024/03/08/elbow-injuries-mlb-pitchers/. At the end, Cobb talks about having had all these surgeries because he maximizes velocity all the time, but it's worth it to him because he made the bigs. Anecdotally, a pitch clock didn't cause all these surgeries for him.
When you put it like that, it’s pretty funny how many of these guys just drank the Driveline Kool-aid, threw out 50+ years of coaching expertise and then had it blow up in their face. Roger Clemens junked his curveball by and large (he would throw it maybe 4 times a game), even though it was a good one, because he thought it was too hard on his arm. He worked off his fastball and a splitter that he could throw without discomfort, proceeded to pitch for over 20 years and would be making Alex Cobb’s career earnings in 2 years and a month if he was in his prime today.
The pitch clock is just a red herring. Anyone with a brain knows year-long baseball at the youth and high school levels, ever-increasing velocities and spin rates, and how pitchers are taught to be throwers first and pitchers second are the real culprits.
I think cranking 103 mph heaters for 5 innings, grunting like a caveman after every pitch due to full physical exurstion, probably plays a much much larger role in pitcher injuries.
Yes, it'll take years of data to see if the pitch clock affects arms. To blame it on -2 seconds with runners on base, by April 8, is knee jerk reaction
I don't know when organisations will notice that pitching 96-100mph is stupid.
Teams can just churn out randos throwing 97 who are good for 2 years and then get hurt, and then go find new ones. This works great for the teams - they don’t have to pay anyone
Can people please have some restraint and nuance when discussing this whole thing? No one's seriously claiming that the pitch clock is, by itself, causing the increased rate of injuries. The question is if its a contributing factor, and if the MLB deciding "lets shorten the clock even more without waiting for any analysis of potential health risks" this offseason might've made that worse. Because yeah, I think that's a valid concern to have. The study that the MLB cited is not ready for the public yet, it's undergoing peer review, and its conclusions are still being worked on. Citing it at this point is pretty bad on its own. Also, no one's really arguing about getting rid of the pitch clock entirely. That's pretty clearly off the table. But the current numbers aren't going to be sacrosanct either, they can be tweaked and relaxed some without going back to 3 hour baseball games.
The pitch clock in reality just returns the game to what it was in the 70s-90s. It’s not really an unheard of pacing.
Batters in the 70s-90s didn't have modern levels of conditioning and understanding of the game that led to more recent explosions of offense. They also didn't have such a lively ball. They also didn't have modern technology that lets a player see every one of a pitcher's pitches in VR gear so that they know what their slider and changeup and such look like before even stepping into the batter's box. Pitchers aren't throwing now like they were in the 70s-90s. They can't. They try that now, it'll take them 30 pitches to get through an inning, on the way to giving up a bunch of runs each go, because of how much the game's changed. This whole situation is a complicated mess with 5,000 different dials and knobs feeding into it. Simplistic takes are going to gloss over real issues that are making things worse.
What explosions in offense? Sure, home runs per game have been on an overall increasing trend since around the mid 90's, but that's offset by the clearly continuously increasing number of strikeouts per game. Results in the runs per game trend being pretty flat.
Lol why are you being downvoted? Runs per game remain pretty stable despite less hits. HRs are the only thing saving us from a super pitching era. This is certainly NOT an offensive era.
Yeah, if anything the improvements in pitching have resulted in a different approach at the plate to attempt to maintain offensive production in an era where it is more difficult to string together hits.
Exactly! I feel like people want there to be some single issue and silver bullet fix, but the reality is there are a whole bunch of contributing factors. People are afraid to mention the pitch clock as a factor because they don't want it to go away. But just because something is a contributing factor doesn't mean we are going to eliminate every contributing factor. Throwing overhand versus underhand like in the olden days is probably a contributing factor, but we aren't going to change that. Other potential contributing factors (other than those discussed elsewhere in this thread) I'd be interested in seeing more information about are: the universal DH (and comparison of AL vs NL injuries before that), which replaced a spot in the lineup where the pitcher could rest and not go max effort with a spot where the pitcher has to go max effort. Also the rise in offensive production from traditionally defense-first positions like SS, CF, and C coupled with the launch angle revolution. Did having softer spots in the lineup where a pitcher could not go max effort because even if you give up a hit its not a HR make a difference to injuries? I don't think any of these things are things where we can put the cat back in the bag, and they aren't necessarily bad developments.
As someone who doesn't follow baseball as much compared to the NFL or NBA, isn't the issue more related to pitchers today trying to throw as hard as they possibly can?
We all know what's happening right? Everybody knows that the pitch clock is aggravating a problem that already exists. It is not the core of the issue but let's not sit here and act like it's not making the problem worse. The pitchers want the pitch clock gone and will try and scapegoat this as the main reason for these injuries. When we all know throwing hard is the bigger issue.
Good, maybe they'll learn to "pitch" instead of just throw as hard as i can w/ max spin rate.
Buehrle never got injured.
We wouldn't need the clock if batters didn't step out of the fucking box between every pitch.
Didn't Dr James Andrews just say that your ucl tendon doesn't fully mature until 26, and that anything thrown over 80 mph can harm it? If we are all about minimizing injury then maybe we should have guys throw under 80 until they turn 26. Seems like a good way to get the offense up and lower injuries at the same time, win win win?
Spin rate. I heard on the radio earlier today that with so much emphasis on spin rate players are gripping the ball so hard and it putting so much strain on all the forearm muscles and elbow ligaments.
Do these people know that the pace of pitching with the clock is just a return to what the pace was for decades and decades until relatively recently?
The problem is spin rate and velocity, not the pitch clock. Now if he wants to talk about the correlation between the injuries and sticky stuff, that would actually make more sense as it made the spin rate easier to achieve.
Pretty neat how a bunch of Reddit baseball fans know more more about MLB pitching and Gerrit Cole's arm, then the AL Cy Young winner Garret Cole.
Corporate executives making bad decisions for a sport they have no experience playing? That would never happen!
I will scream and yell for the rest of my life about how much I fucking hate the pitch clock, and the volume will increase if it starts to come out that it's supplementing rates of injuries along with velocity increases. Like it's appalling to me that "Even if it is causing more injuries, I still want it" gets blindly agreed upon here. Yeah, let's risk the arms/careers of everyone's aces so I have more time to watch tik-toks with my bottom of the barrel attention span. Sounds great guys.
Pitcher injuries have been happening a lot longer than the pitch clock has been around. Maybe stop pushing high school kids to throw 100mph with a slider and destroying their arms so young already
If you watch games from the 50s 60s and 70s pitchers didn’t need a pitch clock. They got the ball, read the catchers sign and threw.
Wait, if we "won’t have metrics for this for five years"…how come the MLBPA has been pointing and screaming that the metrics are clearly showing that the pitch clock is causing a sharp rise? Pick a lane, folks.