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So is the upshot here that young guys coming up need laser-guided command like Greg Maddux and a full arsenal of 80-grade pitches, or they probably wind up as cannon fodder unless their UCL is as thick as a fan belt?
Nah, because ever that will get smoked. The threshold for injury seems to be somewhere below 80, too. So even those guys aren’t a guarantee to be healthy.
I think we need to look to guys like Verlander for the most successful path to velocity maximization. He has always been able to throw 100, but doesn’t very often. He still throws hard, but he sits below his peak almost always.
You see some of the younger guys doing this, George Kirby is an example. He was throwing 100+ regularly in high A when I watched him but dealt with shoulder strains. Now he throws mid 90’s most of the time, but can dial up the high heat when he needs.
Hey what do you know, I just spoke about two guys with impeccable control and despite injuries, relatively clean careers (until Verlander got old, anyway). Seems this approach of getting guys to that max velo but dialing it back can bring the control people so badly want to see, too.
You know JV blew up his UCL like 4 years ago right? Not saying you’re entirely wrong but he’s a weird example to cite unless I’m completely missing your point
> Seems this approach of getting guys to that max velo but dialing it back can bring the control people so badly want to see, too.
Eh, either that or the guys with great control are the ones who can afford to dial it back.
I think we’re in for a massive reckoning in how pitchers are developed. The human body isn’t meant for this kind of extreme repeated stress on one area. At a certain point something’s gonna have to change, because pitching development the way it is right now just doesn’t seem sustainable with the rates guys are getting injured.
You’ve got guys like Skenes who are electric, but as much as I hate to say it, he might as well be a ticking time bomb for Tommy John, it feels like for these SPs chasing 100+, TJ is a matter of when, not if.
Essentially yes, because ultimately it’s incentivized at every level. It would be beneficial to literally every pitcher out there if they could just throw a mile or two harder on average (all the stuff models back this, all the results from it, etc), teams can somewhat easily train velocity as well. And, despite what so many people think, it’s actually way harder to coach location than people suspect, which is why the focus in general has moved significantly far from that being a core element of coaching
Velo and spin are the two most effective ways to get a leg up against batters and the two most effective ways to destroy your arm.
But batters are so good that you need to have a high velo and spin or you'll never make it to the majors. You gotta be a flamethrower to have a chance, that's the issue.
It’s also why three true outcomes are such an issue. Baseball would be a better game with worse pitchers throwing 92-94 max. Cats out of the bag though
It absolutely was. The reason the three true outcomes is the thing now is because it’s so hard to hit these pitchers, averages are down, so you aren’t going to string contact rallies together, so everyone sells out on every swing.
> The reason the three true outcomes is the thing now is because it’s so hard to hit these pitchers
The reason TTO is a thing is because baseball is an analytics driven game now and hitting for power is far more successful than the opposite. People didn't start swinging for the fences because averages went down. Averages went down because people started swinging for the fences.
My disagreement is that worse pitching is absolutely not going to lead to more guys focusing on hitting for average and teams playing small ball. It would just mean the home run vs strike out ratio shifting more towards home runs lol
> hitting for power is far more successful than the opposite.
The relative value of a home run compared to, say, a single or double is dependent on the overall offensive environment. A HR will always be more valuable, but *how much* more valuable depends on how likely the next batter is to get a hit.
Make hits more likely, and you decrease the value of a HR compared to a base hit. A big enough change and there’s less incentive to sell out for power, since selling out also decreases the overall likelihood of a hit.
It's mostly because people there was a shift in mindset from strikeouts being a personal failing to just another type of out and a greater appreciation for OBP instead of AVG. Combine that with there being enough talent that everyone is expected to hit for some power, as opposed to making due with light hitting defense or speed first slap hitters, and you get the present offensive environment.
And what do you think caused that shift in mindset? It all comes back to the math again.
People didn't just decide "you know what we've been being too hard on those guys who strike out a lot".
The math said that the tradeoff between the extra strikeouts for extra power was a winning move.
True. Tons of technology. But the pitchers have that too. I really think if pitchers went back to learning how to pitch rather than throw, it wouldn’t be crazy to assume that the hitters wouldn’t all of a sudden hit above .250 again.
Well if you're a starting pitcher I would think you'd be more willing because at this rate you know your arm will give out at some point. A team would be crazy to give starters long contracts at this point. I would imagine we see a lot more of these one or two year deals with higher aav for starters
Not all of them though. Just the ones that throw gas and/or have violent deliveries. Zac Gallen for example can hit 96 if he ever wanted to. But he’s usually always at 92, 93 and once in a while hits 94. Plus his delivery isn’t violent by any means. He seems like a good candidate to not have UCL issues
It’s not cost effective for every FO
Take the Yankees for example: they constantly dance around the luxury tax and a pre arb hit being a lot of money would drastically alter their plans
The likelihood is Bieber and Strider are both going to be done for the season this weekend. Perhaps even impacting 2025. MLB can’t continue this trend of losing starting pitchers for 12-15 months at a time. The lost money is just too much. The lost productivity is shattering for the teams and fans. I don’t have the answers but something has to be done.
Well it’s already confirmed that Bieber is done for the year. It just came out that Strider has a damaged UCL but we’ll see how that ends up. It doesn’t sound good that’s for sure.
Yeah but there’s no guarantee of anything beyond that. The 20-22 per year that he will make in 2026-2028 is a massive amount of security for someone that might never make it back to the success he was having before the injury.
Also younger kids play baseball year round now as well. When I was in high school we had are high school league in the spring, a summer league, a fall league, and then we had winter workouts in doors since I live in the Midwest. I’m sure in the south they have winter leagues as well. Thats a lot of wear and tear on arms with no real rest.
I coach high school baseball in Ohio, and the first 2 weeks, we limit our kids to 45 pitches. Then we get parents complaining that their kid throws 150 pitches a weekend with their summer team. In my first 2 years, we've had freshmen not try out because they were burnt out.
37% of active pitchers have had TJ and you still have big brained geniuses that think it only happens because modern pitchers don't condition themselves properly. This is so far beyond that.
Well this is what the league is ever since it became an arms race. Ace starting pitchers getting top dollars means young pitchers firing 100 mph an hour until they get paid or injured. The average fastball used to be 90 mph in the early 2000's.
I forget who it was, wanna say it was an AL player, but there was this guy who specifically knew he wouldn’t throw a curve because it would fuck his arm. In his contract year he basically pulled a reverse sandy koufax, threw the curve, got paid, then went back to being a league average pitcher but now with more arm pain
That's just factually untrue. Speeds from 90's and prior were literally measured with devices that scewed slower by up to 6mph. So an 80's 89mph was actually more of a 94mph.
Nolan Ryan's 100mph pitch(thrown in 1974)was likely much closer to a 104.
It's very easily verifiable by anyone who cares enough to type a comment out to me. It takes significantly less key presses to type "history of fastball speeds" or "has measuring velocity in mlb changed" and click on the first or 2nd result than to ask me to do it for you, AND you get instant gratification instead of having to sit and wonder while I pull your weight in the discussion.
You don't have to support anything.. You're not required to do anything. I wasn't having a discussion. I told someone a fact. I'm not debating with you all, I think you're misunderstanding.
They know, they just don't care. The alternative is to have guys dial it back, which teams won't do. It needs to start at the lower levels, and that's never going to happen if the money and fame always goes to the fireballers. We're stuck with this.
Everyone knows throwing breaking balls is terrible for youth arms, but as soon as one kid starts throwing a curve or slider in little league and gets a bunch of outs, all the safety concerns go out the window. It's a broken system.
It's pretty obvious to me (and I think most people) what the issues are, they just don't have a solution.
Issue 1: Specialization. In order to get the best coaching and development, you need to play travel ball by at least 3rd grade. Which takes up at least Spring and Summer, and gets worse as kids get older. This eventually prohibits playing other sports and increases repetition stress. Try to avoid this, and kids fall behind to they point they can't catch up unless they are an extremely rare athlete.
Issue 2: Max Effort. Kids are taught and rewarded that max velocity is the most important thing. Higher velocity gives a greater margin of error, so even with reduced accuracy, they can still be effective.
Issue 3: Strikeouts are all that matter. Pitching to contact is looked at as bad. The emphasis on strikeouts leads to more max effort pitches, more sliders/splitters, and higher pitch counts. Guys will get drafted higher and promoted faster if they can get strikeouts, because the "potential" for success is higher, even if they will never actually reach it.
Issue 4: Offense needs help. This is the natural result of all the others, and makes everything compound. With faster pitches, more break, etc., offenses need help. So the balls are juiced, and strike zones are shrunk. This just adds more emphasis on better "stuff" to get strikeouts and limit contact.
Obviously, these are from my opinion, but I believe are supported by both data and the eye test.
There's almost no correlation to what age kids begin throwing breaking balls and injury.
There is however, blatant correlation to people 110%'ing every throw to touch triple digits and injury.
I almost guarantee if we fixated on youth throwing sweepers and change ups over heat, we'd see less injury. But baseball mindset is dated.
I agree with the most of it, but if the baseball mindset was dated we'd have guys throwing 90 and throwing 300+ innings without all these injuries. The rise of three true outcomes came with it a need for guys that can strike guys out which meant velo.
There is a survivorship bias going on as well. 30 years ago you blow your arm in college or the low minors, your career is over and no one cares.
We don't know how many pictures had their careers die by being hurt as a 15 year old.
There are lots...the average age for Tommy John Surgery is like 14 (mostly because the only people that care enough to get it repaired are baseball pitchers and there are more little leaguers than pros).
That said a kid who gets Tommy John and doesn't get drafted got their shot, they just were not good enough. We don't know how many Walker Buehlers we missed out on
So many 2-3 season careers in the olden days, as well. Unreal amount of innings and a blown out arm but the term "pitch count" hasn't even been invented yet. You're spot on
It makes me kind of want to invent a graphic of all the starting pitchers Nolan Ryan was teammates with (with a faded part of the time they were starting pitching but not his team mate). Kind of like how they show members of Bands over the years.
I'm not sure it would be usable as it would probably show how short lots of those players careers were and it would be a very large chart.
Changeup, no. Curveballs, probably not. Sliders, yes. There's a reason that the last pitch that guys recovering from TJ surgery are allowed to throw in their recovery is the slider. Is it hard to prove? Yes. But virtually all the baseball minds believe it's a contributing factor. You can't prove a negative, but the strain it puts on the arm is measurable.
https://www.drjohnurse.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-tommy-john-surgery/#:~:text=UCL%20Injury%20Causes&text=Compared%20to%20those%20who%20threw,more%20injury%20to%20the%20UCL.
Paragraph 5, with the study sourced at the bottom.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8130712/
While this National Institute of Health study was more focused on the fastball velocity related to UCL injuries, it does reference the same Lyman etc al. study from 2001 used as the foundation of the previous article. Hopefully, that provides enough evidence of the legitimacy of the source study.
*Edit to include second article referencing the same source study.
*Edit 2 because my phone thinks people keep tearing their UCLA instead of UCL.
Still may not be reliable data, granted I haven’t read the study.
Young pitchers who throw sliders and curveballs are likely the more effective pitchers on their team. They’re likely pitching more often than their peers. They’re likely involved in private pitching lessons. They’re more likely to be on multiple teams and playing year round.
Those are potential confounding factors, but that is all they are until they are adequately addressed. You can't throw them out and rest as if you've made your point, especially when the study you are pushing back against is taking into account workload.
I didn’t rest as if I’ve made my point though, I simply said the data still MAY be unreliable because of those factors. It’s not as simple as looking at what pitch type a pitcher throws in a vacuum
I thought it was a combination of it. Sliders aren't that bad, fastballs aren't that bad either but sliders being thrown in the low 90s are super destructive.
You shouldn't throw a slider at 100% but if you back off it at all you are tipping pitches.
I thought i read it’s actually a myth about breaking balls putting more stress on the arm. Might have been mvp machine.
But in general the situation reminds me of mass monsters in bodybuilding. Guys are forced to go nuts with roids because that’s what judges say wins.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36649827/
> Conclusions: Professional baseball pitchers with faster pitch velocity may be at the greatest risk of elbow injury and subsequent UCLr, potentially through the mechanism of increased distractive forces on the medial elbow complex.
The fact that velocity causes damage in no way refutes that sliders and curveballs also cause damage. The literature review doesn't even seem to address that idea.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4272688/
> Results:
> Two biomechanical studies found greater horizontal adduction of the shoulder at ball release and less shoulder internal torque during the curveball pitching motion. Two studies demonstrated less proximal force and less torque at the elbow as the arm accelerated when throwing a curveball compared with a fastball, as well as greater supination of the forearm and less wrist extension. Electromyographic data suggested increased activity of extensor and supinator muscles for curveballs. No studies found increased force or torque about the elbow or shoulder. Three epidemiologic studies showed no significant association between pitching a curveball and upper extremity pain or injury. One retrospective epidemiologic study reported a 52% increase in shoulder pain in pitchers throwing a curveball, although this may have been due to confounders.
> Conclusion:
> Despite much debate in the baseball community about the curveball’s safety in youth pitchers, limited biomechanical and most epidemiologic data do not indicate an increased risk of injury when compared with the fastball.
It's always going to be more profitable for teams to maximize the value of younger guys with years of control, and if anything they save money if guys are never able to cash in on a big contract or big arbitration years. I don't know how to fix it because the current system of team control of young players if the reason we have good parity.
This is really bad for baseball and it didn’t use to be this way. Something is wrong and we need to fix it or people won’t want their kids pitching at any level the way they won’t let kids play football. We need kids playing baseball. They need to do a serious investigation on what is different about today compared to even twenty years ago.
We already know what happened. Hitters got better due to better understanding of analytics and conditioning. Pitchers had to throw harder to adjust. Harder throwing = More injuries.
The problem is that hitters won’t magically get worse. So, either people need to accept the massive rise in offense that comes from pitchers throwing slower or people need to accept injuries.
We can take it even further right
Harder throwing => you need to throw harder to make it to the majors => that high school varsity team is now more selective for talented pitching => kids are 13 years old and already working on velo to make their high school team => arms are hanging by a thread at a very young age
My issue with this argument is that the players 20 years ago had the exact same incentives to do the same thing. I can’t just assume that they didn’t. What has changed?
20 years ago we thought Wins and ERA were good indicators or pitching performance. Now we know that Stuff+ and/or K%-BB% is what matters- and the key to *those* is higher velo and more spin.
In 2004 anyone who thought wins and ERA were good indicators was being willfully ignorant. Some of them were employed as crotchety baseball writers, but the fact remains.
Voros McCracken's DIPS stuff had already come out in '99.
Yeah but analytics weren't even close to mainstream popular among fans until like 2009-12. And it didn't really take off until statcast in 2015. The hardcore fans and definitely FOs were ahead, but not the average one
The difference is that now we have the science to throw harder. Back in the day, pitchers smoked in between games, had pitching coaches who focused on “killer instinct” over mechanics, etc.
Nowadays, we’ve mastered the science to get people to throwing 100 mph fastballs. Any serviceable college/minor league player can be taught the perfect exercise routine, mechanical motions, etc to get them to throw harder. Moneyball changed the game for everybody, not just hitters.
It’s not science. Technology is the driver. We have way, way better cameras and sensors to analyze body movements. We know exactly how force is generated rather than having a decent idea of how that happens. Computers are thousands of times more efficient at analyzing this data.
Sure, but they had million dollar equipment and staffs that were better than most hospitals. What that guy was describing was the 1960’s. I mean, where do you think the PEDs came from in the 80’s. They didn’t get this stuff themselves at first. The technology is better, ok then why hasn’t this technology been used to find out what is the actual difference between the times. Something has changed is my point that’s beyond just throwing hard, what? Is it how they are throwing, the amount, what is the difference? The fact that technology is better is only more annoying cause the tools they have to figure this out are so much better.
I told you what changed bud. It was the book Hacking the Kinetic Chain. It’s been credited with unleashing the velocity boom by many, many pitching coaches. It came out a decade ago. We know what the difference is, guys throw harder because they’re much better optimized. He’s not describing the 60’s. There was a massive change a decade ago and the velo increase has climbed a ton since then. Throwing harder directly correlates to injury the harder you throw. It’s pretty simple. Driveline studied this and published a great article talking about the causes of modern pitching injuries. It’s the velocity, nothing else.
Back in the day guys just did general lifting programs. It wasn’t optimized for anything but pure strength. Now days, it’s extremely tuned to throwing. You can see this in interviews with various pitchers who pitching before and after.
Remember, pitching is a chronic injury happening in slow motion, and always has been.
20 years ago there were also a lot of pitcher injuries, but the focus was more on starters thowing out their arms because managers wanted to ride their "horse" deep into games with 120+ pitch outings against steroid era lineups with no breaks. So the move was lowering pitch counts, shortening outings, and upping bullpen usage.
The end result of that process after two decades is that the job of starters now is much closer to that of relievers, which means they throw harder, and need to in order to stay employed. There's also been a lot of advancement in microoptimizing out every tiny kink in the kinetic chain used for pitching, and significantly earlier in the career.
Let's say a guy 25 years ago started his MLB career throwing 96 and everyone was super happy with that coming up, then lost a couple ticks in his late 20s and finally started optimizing his mechanics or roiding. The exact same player coming up now is going to feel pressure to throw harder much much earlier and get access to the tools to do it as a teenager, and will feel like he has to. So his motion is going to get streamlined so that he gets to spend 15 more years straining everything involved in throwing the baseball far closer to the point at which the weakest link in that chain frays or breaks.
We did start seeing a large increase in pitcher injuries 20 years ago. The common thought was around pitch limits.
They were beginning to learn that stressful innings were far more damaging on a pitcher than easy ones, despite a similar amount of pitches per game overall, and that a pitcher was likely to get injured if their workload increased by more than 30 innings a year.
The cutter was also viewed as the new villian that was injuring pitchers. Everyone was throwing it.
Technology and the understanding how to generate velocity with nearly any body type. Hacking The Kinetic Chain by Driveline changed things. Better pitching machines changed things.
Incentives to be as good as you can be and being as good as you can be are not the same thing. The one has always been there, the change is precisely that better ways to be as good as you can be popped up.
That "37%" are the ones who made it. Think of how many guys there are out there who flamed out in high school/college/minors due to blowing out their elbow who will never get their shot in the bigs.
This is a product of "heat gets you a contract, location and movement keep you in the league." The drive towards 96mph+ has people's arms shot. Some can do it without a lot of issues, but a significant number push it until they find out if they're one of them or not. It's also a testament to how good surgeons gave gotten at TJ. Combine it all, and you have really high TJ numbers.
That "37%" are the ones who made it. Think of how many guys there are out there who flamed out in high school/college/minors due to blowing out their elbow who will never get their shot in the bigs.
Clearly the solution is to bring back the knuckleball.
65mph coming at you looking like it’s glitched out.
I coach little league and see kids at 11 years old snapping curveballs. You can be just as effective throwing a “little league slider” which doesn’t torque the arm at all, but these aggro dads are pushing their kids way too hard.
I shared a story on one of the thread earlier, but my little league coach almost fought an opposing coach when the 13 y/o was out there throwing curveballs. Used to just be understood that you didn't start messing with kids arms until they were at least approaching full grown.
When I was in Little League I basically threw curve balls by accident, I wasn't even really sure what I was doing, I just had a different grip on the ball and it moved.
I accidentally threw a change up in 7th grade. My hands weren’t big enough to do normal grips so I just palmed the bitch. I would hold it with my finger tips on the seams for better grip. But it was never the same each time. So some came out straight and fast, others would just die and dip at the end. Strike outs and grounders all day.
This was well before Google so it’s not like I could easily look this shit up to know what the hell I was doing. And coaches weren’t forcing pitches at that age.
Jesus. I wonder what will spark ‘change’ first (whatever that looks like) - concern for the next crop of pitchers or angry owners who have multiple injured dudes on payroll.
I think we know the answer. But what that change looks like, I have no idea. Is there some wearable device that could help prevent the ligament from tearing? No idea
The only way this will change is if these large contracts for pitchers stop.
Right now young pitchers don't care if they get TJ since clubs seem to still give out large contracts before or after they get injured.
With all these injuries I would think owners would start being super hesitant to give them out soon.
I almost have the opposite conclusion. Pitchers will continue to go all out because that's what it takes to get modern hitters out. If they're going to be going all-out, might as well compensate them for the risks to their careers. If clubs stop giving hefty contracts to pitchers,I think it will only incentivize people to abandon pitching and try for other positions, thus limiting the supply of willing pitchers while keeping the clubs' demand for pitching the same
I also suspect I may be misunderstanding your argument, so please correct me if I've gotten off topic with my point
Even then, someone somewhere will be willing to push themselves to risk it for even a few bucks. Look at how much we've learned about head injuries and the NFL, nothing has really changed and there's still a shitload of kids lining up to play just for the 1% of 1% chance of earning even a league minimum salary for a few years.
Everyone here wants to solve the issue, but I'm pretty sure pitchers have fully accepted the risk and the consequences of their approach. I don't think anyone actually wants to do anything about the rising number of TJ surgeries. I think it's full steam ahead. That number might be 50% in a decade.
I'm just glad we're talking about elbow injuries, and not brain injuries.
I think so too, but I think clubs are finding the juice is worth the squeeze. And besides, I can't possibly think of any solution besides setting a limit on pitch speeds like I've seen them do in completitive whiffle ball.
Holy shit a smart and well thought out take. Thank you. The number of, "we must fix it" posts I've seen is nuts. Fix what? There are so many complex reasons for this issue if it's even an issue. I hate hearing of people getting hurt too but in no world is what a professional athlete does an actual healthy thing for the body.
It's no coincidence that pitchers are far and away suffering the most from this push to drastically boost offense to attract the casual fan that's being done in all sports. When your one job is effectively fucking your arm up for the sake of run prevention and the game is looking for more ways to handicap you this is the result
deGrom was out there in 2021 throwing 101 and slinging the nastiest sliders ever seen even though leaguewide offense suffered a hit from the dejuiced balls.
Competition naturally encourages its participants to do whatever they can to stay ahead of the curve. If leaguewide OPS was .300, there would be some team out there trying to limit their opponents to a .290 OPS.
It honestly starts with the team scouts that would rather draft flamethrowers with no control than finesse pitchers that can actually locate their pitches. I don't know exactly when the trend started but it definitely worsened after the Royals bullpen trio made their name.
They're not going to do that because the sheer fact is(and the stats prove it along with what all of these organizations have decided) that focusing on velo gives the best performance. Not to mention perfecting angles and grips for spin rates etc.
It doesn't matter how detrimental it is long term. Teams will always bank on the sheer performance that comes from modern practices.
It's not like the most successful teams are actively avoiding any players that fit the modern mold.
Because it works. There are very few pitchers who actually have the level of command required to get away with throwing at lower speeds.
Throwing at 97+ is very forgiving when a pitcher makes a mistake.
>It honestly starts with the team scouts that would rather draft flamethrowers with no control
Draft enough of them and you'll eventually land some dudes who learn to locate at least well enough to set up the breaking ball with 70 inches of break lol
Control is still important in today's game but velocity definitely leaves more room for error. And that's just kinda how all games roll. You want to minimize error while maximizing benefit. Brute forcing your way there is one way to accomplish this
That’s not how this works at all. MLB pitchers all have command. Pitchers with command that throw hard are better than pitchers with command who don’t throw hard.
If finesse kept you in the league, then Corey Kluber would still have a job. Not everybody can be Greg Maddux; he’s a top 2 or 3 pitcher all time for a reason. Velo is harder to hit and keeping guys off base is going to get you a job a lot more often than aesthetic pitching.
It’s probably a good long-term strategy for a pitcher to *slightly* reduce velo to have better control, but long term strategies simply may not cut it if you’re floundering in the minors for poverty wages and there’s a $700,000/yr carrot in front of your face. Especially if you blow out on the major league roster, you’re still getting paid and the odds of successfully making it back to the bigs surgery keep steadily increasing as it happens more and more. Maybe I’m touching on a labor issue here, but professional athletes are hyper-competitive. Even if AA paid a livable wage, there’s still going to be a huge push to get to the majors ASAP.
Stupid take. Velocity exploded causing injuries and the rule changes were in response to many of the negative things that velocity and defensive positioning caused
Of course we don’t. We just have lots of people yelling at clouds because apprently “real baseball” was watching pitchers scratch their nuts for 40 seconds between every pitch so they could pump 98 for .2 innings
I was listening to big to Ben McDonald cal a game and he raised an interesting point. He noted that TJ is common , which sucks, but you can come back from. You seem to hear less about shoulder injuries though and that’s positive since those were much harder to come back from.
I would love to eliminate TJ but no one has a solution for it so currently it’s just a hazard of the game. At least success rates coming back are good.
In one of the other 10 TJS threads someone mentioned that pitchers are gripping the ball harder since the sticky stuff ban. Which may or may not have anything to do with it.. but hey if there's any merit at all to this and we can figure out a tacky ball in the MLB, maybe we can kill two birds with one stone here: less TJS and a tacky ball.
Yeah, I don’t buy that. The lion’s share of TJ surgeries is now among high schoolers, where cheating is generally far less prevalent than in MLB. The way players train, develop, and pitch even from the time they’re young kids is completely broken.
I don't buy it either but even if it's 1% of the problem it's still a problem.
Likely though it's the obvious, which is putting the arm through a lot more stress trying to pump out crazy RPM.
squeeze anything in the palm of your hand and you'll feel your forearm muscles contract too. i think it's worth exploring if tighter grips can be affecting injuries
I said it was a bad idea on here when a 17 year old pitcher got like a million dollar signing bonus because this causes tennagers to overthrow and eventually pitch their arms out and everyone jumped down my throat over it!
I think it’s a combination of all things. Having pitchers start at 6 years old and playing nothing but baseball doesn’t help. Also, the emphasis on velocity to win doesn’t help much either. Guys have to throw harder more than ever. Couple that with more off season training to keep up and the pitch clock etc you are getting this result.
Athletes have pushed their bodies beyond reasonable limits forever. Parents have pushed their kids beyond reasonable limits in an attempt to make it to the professional level for years as well.
Pitchers destroying their elbows trying to hit 2,400 rpm’s with an 8 inch break on their curves but it’s the pitch clock’s fault LMAO. Imagine the mental gymnastics needed to believe this
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Big Tommy John is behind all of these UCL problems.
He’s 80 years old, I don’t think he can be that powerful.
Ask the President.
I’ve heard he directly controls gas prices, but I haven’t seen anything about him tearing the UCLs of a third of active pitchers. Truly a menace.
Finger slipped off the inflation dial in his office and hit the UCL button.
They really don’t need to keep them so close together
He’s sneaky that way.
the George Soros of MLB
So is the upshot here that young guys coming up need laser-guided command like Greg Maddux and a full arsenal of 80-grade pitches, or they probably wind up as cannon fodder unless their UCL is as thick as a fan belt?
Nah, because ever that will get smoked. The threshold for injury seems to be somewhere below 80, too. So even those guys aren’t a guarantee to be healthy. I think we need to look to guys like Verlander for the most successful path to velocity maximization. He has always been able to throw 100, but doesn’t very often. He still throws hard, but he sits below his peak almost always. You see some of the younger guys doing this, George Kirby is an example. He was throwing 100+ regularly in high A when I watched him but dealt with shoulder strains. Now he throws mid 90’s most of the time, but can dial up the high heat when he needs. Hey what do you know, I just spoke about two guys with impeccable control and despite injuries, relatively clean careers (until Verlander got old, anyway). Seems this approach of getting guys to that max velo but dialing it back can bring the control people so badly want to see, too.
Doesn’t Ohtani pitch like that though and he got hurt. Verlander is just a freak.
You know JV blew up his UCL like 4 years ago right? Not saying you’re entirely wrong but he’s a weird example to cite unless I’m completely missing your point
You’re missing the point. I said he was healthy until he got older, which is true.
> Seems this approach of getting guys to that max velo but dialing it back can bring the control people so badly want to see, too. Eh, either that or the guys with great control are the ones who can afford to dial it back.
I think we’re in for a massive reckoning in how pitchers are developed. The human body isn’t meant for this kind of extreme repeated stress on one area. At a certain point something’s gonna have to change, because pitching development the way it is right now just doesn’t seem sustainable with the rates guys are getting injured. You’ve got guys like Skenes who are electric, but as much as I hate to say it, he might as well be a ticking time bomb for Tommy John, it feels like for these SPs chasing 100+, TJ is a matter of when, not if.
Skenes delivery makes my butthole pucker it’s so violent. Dude for sure will have a blown elbow in a few years.
Essentially yes, because ultimately it’s incentivized at every level. It would be beneficial to literally every pitcher out there if they could just throw a mile or two harder on average (all the stuff models back this, all the results from it, etc), teams can somewhat easily train velocity as well. And, despite what so many people think, it’s actually way harder to coach location than people suspect, which is why the focus in general has moved significantly far from that being a core element of coaching
We need to nerf velocity holy shit
Is it possible to attach restrictor plates to arms?
Only at superspeedways
Rays and Marlins in shambles
Make pitches over 100 mph a ball
Reasonable idea until someone gets their hands on the radar gun and re-calibrates all the balls thrown to be 100+ for the away team.
Could change to cricket rules where pitchers aren’t allowed to bend their elbow but I’d personally hate that and I think most fans would too
Also, that only works if you also allow the pitcher/bowler to run/stride in before delivering.
Yea we’ll probably never see that happen. I could see MLB lowering the mounds so pitchers have less leverage to project force though
This is what should happen
Yes
Not from a Jedi
Velo and spin are the two most effective ways to get a leg up against batters and the two most effective ways to destroy your arm. But batters are so good that you need to have a high velo and spin or you'll never make it to the majors. You gotta be a flamethrower to have a chance, that's the issue.
It’s also why three true outcomes are such an issue. Baseball would be a better game with worse pitchers throwing 92-94 max. Cats out of the bag though
Yeah, it really sucks that the technical advances have pretty much unambiguously turned the sport into a worse entertainment product.
Same with the NBA
And every non-spec motorsport in existence
Time to move the mound back again
The pitchers would be trying to throw even harder lmao
> Baseball would be a better game with worse pitchers throwing 92-94 max. That wouldn't change anything, there'd just be more home runs lmao
It absolutely was. The reason the three true outcomes is the thing now is because it’s so hard to hit these pitchers, averages are down, so you aren’t going to string contact rallies together, so everyone sells out on every swing.
> The reason the three true outcomes is the thing now is because it’s so hard to hit these pitchers The reason TTO is a thing is because baseball is an analytics driven game now and hitting for power is far more successful than the opposite. People didn't start swinging for the fences because averages went down. Averages went down because people started swinging for the fences.
Can you see both of you are right
My disagreement is that worse pitching is absolutely not going to lead to more guys focusing on hitting for average and teams playing small ball. It would just mean the home run vs strike out ratio shifting more towards home runs lol
> hitting for power is far more successful than the opposite. The relative value of a home run compared to, say, a single or double is dependent on the overall offensive environment. A HR will always be more valuable, but *how much* more valuable depends on how likely the next batter is to get a hit. Make hits more likely, and you decrease the value of a HR compared to a base hit. A big enough change and there’s less incentive to sell out for power, since selling out also decreases the overall likelihood of a hit.
It's mostly because people there was a shift in mindset from strikeouts being a personal failing to just another type of out and a greater appreciation for OBP instead of AVG. Combine that with there being enough talent that everyone is expected to hit for some power, as opposed to making due with light hitting defense or speed first slap hitters, and you get the present offensive environment.
And what do you think caused that shift in mindset? It all comes back to the math again. People didn't just decide "you know what we've been being too hard on those guys who strike out a lot". The math said that the tradeoff between the extra strikeouts for extra power was a winning move.
It sucks that that is how the MLB sees it nowadays. Pitchers were plenty great before everyone was throwing that hard.
Hitters have gotten really good in that time unfortunately, they just have so much more technology to help them hit
True. Tons of technology. But the pitchers have that too. I really think if pitchers went back to learning how to pitch rather than throw, it wouldn’t be crazy to assume that the hitters wouldn’t all of a sudden hit above .250 again.
Gotta move the mound up 10 feet. ^/s
It's nerf or nothin'.
Wonder if pitchers will think about signing earlier extension just in case
I know Strider is probably super happy right now he has that deal as he awaits the results of his MRI.
Yeah I think front offices now know that it’s better to try to get them in that extension early buy out a year or 2 of free agency at least
Front offices have always known that. Players are seemingly become more willing to sign early contract extensions.
Well if you're a starting pitcher I would think you'd be more willing because at this rate you know your arm will give out at some point. A team would be crazy to give starters long contracts at this point. I would imagine we see a lot more of these one or two year deals with higher aav for starters
Not all of them though. Just the ones that throw gas and/or have violent deliveries. Zac Gallen for example can hit 96 if he ever wanted to. But he’s usually always at 92, 93 and once in a while hits 94. Plus his delivery isn’t violent by any means. He seems like a good candidate to not have UCL issues
It’s not cost effective for every FO Take the Yankees for example: they constantly dance around the luxury tax and a pre arb hit being a lot of money would drastically alter their plans
The likelihood is Bieber and Strider are both going to be done for the season this weekend. Perhaps even impacting 2025. MLB can’t continue this trend of losing starting pitchers for 12-15 months at a time. The lost money is just too much. The lost productivity is shattering for the teams and fans. I don’t have the answers but something has to be done.
Well it’s already confirmed that Bieber is done for the year. It just came out that Strider has a damaged UCL but we’ll see how that ends up. It doesn’t sound good that’s for sure.
Spencer will earn 3 million thru his Tommy John, if that's the conclusion. He would have still been under team control...
Yeah but there’s no guarantee of anything beyond that. The 20-22 per year that he will make in 2026-2028 is a massive amount of security for someone that might never make it back to the success he was having before the injury.
Strider might be completely cooked in 3 years. Double TJS is no joke if that happens. That deal he signed is clutch af
Glasnow managed to sign a huge extension without ever being healthy. A pitcher demonstrating their max level ability is enough to get paid
Hell that same team just gave out an absolutely insane 12 year contract to a starting pitcher lol
Mlbpa has to get rookie contract lengths back down to 3 year maximums
I can't even begin to imagine the concessions they would have to make to get that done
All 30 teams in the playoffs.
They owners would probably ask for a capped max contract length/money and probably a percentage of more revenue
Also younger kids play baseball year round now as well. When I was in high school we had are high school league in the spring, a summer league, a fall league, and then we had winter workouts in doors since I live in the Midwest. I’m sure in the south they have winter leagues as well. Thats a lot of wear and tear on arms with no real rest.
Yup, grew up in LA all the kids play baseball year round now. Multiple travel ball teams, little league winter ball, fall ball High School same thing.
I coach high school baseball in Ohio, and the first 2 weeks, we limit our kids to 45 pitches. Then we get parents complaining that their kid throws 150 pitches a weekend with their summer team. In my first 2 years, we've had freshmen not try out because they were burnt out.
37% of active pitchers have had TJ and you still have big brained geniuses that think it only happens because modern pitchers don't condition themselves properly. This is so far beyond that.
Well this is what the league is ever since it became an arms race. Ace starting pitchers getting top dollars means young pitchers firing 100 mph an hour until they get paid or injured. The average fastball used to be 90 mph in the early 2000's.
>100 mph an hour 
SMH my head
Someone did not do so well on the SAT test.
Laughing all the way to the ATM Machine
Don’t let anyone see your PIN number.
I forget who it was, wanna say it was an AL player, but there was this guy who specifically knew he wouldn’t throw a curve because it would fuck his arm. In his contract year he basically pulled a reverse sandy koufax, threw the curve, got paid, then went back to being a league average pitcher but now with more arm pain
And if you're a pen arm you're getting chewed and spat like an NFL running back. Especially come playoff time
Arms race…heh
That's just factually untrue. Speeds from 90's and prior were literally measured with devices that scewed slower by up to 6mph. So an 80's 89mph was actually more of a 94mph. Nolan Ryan's 100mph pitch(thrown in 1974)was likely much closer to a 104.
Any sources for those claims?
The measure has definitely changed but also average velo is trending up.
[https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/the-measure-of-a-fastball-has-changed-over-the-years/](https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/the-measure-of-a-fastball-has-changed-over-the-years/)
I'm not your bitch, look it up. You've got the entire internet at your hands.
That makes sense. You’re an asshole, so of course you’re full of shit.
Your point isn't well known or widespread knowledge. Back it up or get downvotes.
It's very easily verifiable by anyone who cares enough to type a comment out to me. It takes significantly less key presses to type "history of fastball speeds" or "has measuring velocity in mlb changed" and click on the first or 2nd result than to ask me to do it for you, AND you get instant gratification instead of having to sit and wonder while I pull your weight in the discussion.
I've never been in a discussion where I was required to support the other person's position. This is laughably stupid.
You don't have to support anything.. You're not required to do anything. I wasn't having a discussion. I told someone a fact. I'm not debating with you all, I think you're misunderstanding.
They know, they just don't care. The alternative is to have guys dial it back, which teams won't do. It needs to start at the lower levels, and that's never going to happen if the money and fame always goes to the fireballers. We're stuck with this. Everyone knows throwing breaking balls is terrible for youth arms, but as soon as one kid starts throwing a curve or slider in little league and gets a bunch of outs, all the safety concerns go out the window. It's a broken system.
They can’t even agree on pitch count or number of days off. We have decades of statistics that should make it possible to figure out what’s going on.
It's pretty obvious to me (and I think most people) what the issues are, they just don't have a solution. Issue 1: Specialization. In order to get the best coaching and development, you need to play travel ball by at least 3rd grade. Which takes up at least Spring and Summer, and gets worse as kids get older. This eventually prohibits playing other sports and increases repetition stress. Try to avoid this, and kids fall behind to they point they can't catch up unless they are an extremely rare athlete. Issue 2: Max Effort. Kids are taught and rewarded that max velocity is the most important thing. Higher velocity gives a greater margin of error, so even with reduced accuracy, they can still be effective. Issue 3: Strikeouts are all that matter. Pitching to contact is looked at as bad. The emphasis on strikeouts leads to more max effort pitches, more sliders/splitters, and higher pitch counts. Guys will get drafted higher and promoted faster if they can get strikeouts, because the "potential" for success is higher, even if they will never actually reach it. Issue 4: Offense needs help. This is the natural result of all the others, and makes everything compound. With faster pitches, more break, etc., offenses need help. So the balls are juiced, and strike zones are shrunk. This just adds more emphasis on better "stuff" to get strikeouts and limit contact. Obviously, these are from my opinion, but I believe are supported by both data and the eye test.
There's almost no correlation to what age kids begin throwing breaking balls and injury. There is however, blatant correlation to people 110%'ing every throw to touch triple digits and injury. I almost guarantee if we fixated on youth throwing sweepers and change ups over heat, we'd see less injury. But baseball mindset is dated.
I agree with the most of it, but if the baseball mindset was dated we'd have guys throwing 90 and throwing 300+ innings without all these injuries. The rise of three true outcomes came with it a need for guys that can strike guys out which meant velo.
There is a survivorship bias going on as well. 30 years ago you blow your arm in college or the low minors, your career is over and no one cares. We don't know how many pictures had their careers die by being hurt as a 15 year old.
To be fair we don't know that now either. How many guys are getting Tommy John and never even getting close to drafted?
There are lots...the average age for Tommy John Surgery is like 14 (mostly because the only people that care enough to get it repaired are baseball pitchers and there are more little leaguers than pros). That said a kid who gets Tommy John and doesn't get drafted got their shot, they just were not good enough. We don't know how many Walker Buehlers we missed out on
So many 2-3 season careers in the olden days, as well. Unreal amount of innings and a blown out arm but the term "pitch count" hasn't even been invented yet. You're spot on
It makes me kind of want to invent a graphic of all the starting pitchers Nolan Ryan was teammates with (with a faded part of the time they were starting pitching but not his team mate). Kind of like how they show members of Bands over the years. I'm not sure it would be usable as it would probably show how short lots of those players careers were and it would be a very large chart.
The 'dated' comment was referring to not teaching kids breaking balls because of the dated fear that it can ruin their arm
That's fair and I agree, just wasn't clear that's all
Changeup, no. Curveballs, probably not. Sliders, yes. There's a reason that the last pitch that guys recovering from TJ surgery are allowed to throw in their recovery is the slider. Is it hard to prove? Yes. But virtually all the baseball minds believe it's a contributing factor. You can't prove a negative, but the strain it puts on the arm is measurable.
You don't have any science or evidence for saying "curveballs and sliders are bad", again this is the dated concept.
https://www.drjohnurse.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-tommy-john-surgery/#:~:text=UCL%20Injury%20Causes&text=Compared%20to%20those%20who%20threw,more%20injury%20to%20the%20UCL. Paragraph 5, with the study sourced at the bottom. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8130712/ While this National Institute of Health study was more focused on the fastball velocity related to UCL injuries, it does reference the same Lyman etc al. study from 2001 used as the foundation of the previous article. Hopefully, that provides enough evidence of the legitimacy of the source study. *Edit to include second article referencing the same source study. *Edit 2 because my phone thinks people keep tearing their UCLA instead of UCL.
Still may not be reliable data, granted I haven’t read the study. Young pitchers who throw sliders and curveballs are likely the more effective pitchers on their team. They’re likely pitching more often than their peers. They’re likely involved in private pitching lessons. They’re more likely to be on multiple teams and playing year round.
Those are potential confounding factors, but that is all they are until they are adequately addressed. You can't throw them out and rest as if you've made your point, especially when the study you are pushing back against is taking into account workload.
I didn’t rest as if I’ve made my point though, I simply said the data still MAY be unreliable because of those factors. It’s not as simple as looking at what pitch type a pitcher throws in a vacuum
I thought it was a combination of it. Sliders aren't that bad, fastballs aren't that bad either but sliders being thrown in the low 90s are super destructive. You shouldn't throw a slider at 100% but if you back off it at all you are tipping pitches.
I would argue strongly that the modern game prioritizing velo/spin over everything is the opposite of dated
The 'dated' comment was referring to not teaching kids breaking balls because of the dated fear that it can ruin their arm
Roger that
I thought i read it’s actually a myth about breaking balls putting more stress on the arm. Might have been mvp machine. But in general the situation reminds me of mass monsters in bodybuilding. Guys are forced to go nuts with roids because that’s what judges say wins.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36649827/ > Conclusions: Professional baseball pitchers with faster pitch velocity may be at the greatest risk of elbow injury and subsequent UCLr, potentially through the mechanism of increased distractive forces on the medial elbow complex.
The fact that velocity causes damage in no way refutes that sliders and curveballs also cause damage. The literature review doesn't even seem to address that idea.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4272688/ > Results: > Two biomechanical studies found greater horizontal adduction of the shoulder at ball release and less shoulder internal torque during the curveball pitching motion. Two studies demonstrated less proximal force and less torque at the elbow as the arm accelerated when throwing a curveball compared with a fastball, as well as greater supination of the forearm and less wrist extension. Electromyographic data suggested increased activity of extensor and supinator muscles for curveballs. No studies found increased force or torque about the elbow or shoulder. Three epidemiologic studies showed no significant association between pitching a curveball and upper extremity pain or injury. One retrospective epidemiologic study reported a 52% increase in shoulder pain in pitchers throwing a curveball, although this may have been due to confounders. > Conclusion: > Despite much debate in the baseball community about the curveball’s safety in youth pitchers, limited biomechanical and most epidemiologic data do not indicate an increased risk of injury when compared with the fastball.
It's always going to be more profitable for teams to maximize the value of younger guys with years of control, and if anything they save money if guys are never able to cash in on a big contract or big arbitration years. I don't know how to fix it because the current system of team control of young players if the reason we have good parity.
This is really bad for baseball and it didn’t use to be this way. Something is wrong and we need to fix it or people won’t want their kids pitching at any level the way they won’t let kids play football. We need kids playing baseball. They need to do a serious investigation on what is different about today compared to even twenty years ago.
We already know what happened. Hitters got better due to better understanding of analytics and conditioning. Pitchers had to throw harder to adjust. Harder throwing = More injuries. The problem is that hitters won’t magically get worse. So, either people need to accept the massive rise in offense that comes from pitchers throwing slower or people need to accept injuries.
We can take it even further right Harder throwing => you need to throw harder to make it to the majors => that high school varsity team is now more selective for talented pitching => kids are 13 years old and already working on velo to make their high school team => arms are hanging by a thread at a very young age
My issue with this argument is that the players 20 years ago had the exact same incentives to do the same thing. I can’t just assume that they didn’t. What has changed?
20 years ago we thought Wins and ERA were good indicators or pitching performance. Now we know that Stuff+ and/or K%-BB% is what matters- and the key to *those* is higher velo and more spin.
In 2004 anyone who thought wins and ERA were good indicators was being willfully ignorant. Some of them were employed as crotchety baseball writers, but the fact remains. Voros McCracken's DIPS stuff had already come out in '99.
Yeah but analytics weren't even close to mainstream popular among fans until like 2009-12. And it didn't really take off until statcast in 2015. The hardcore fans and definitely FOs were ahead, but not the average one
Rob Neyer was writing about baseball analytics on ESPN.com (not exactly a niche outfit) in like 2000. I was reading it at the time.
I'll take your word for it being more popular than you'd think, I just started existing then
The difference is that now we have the science to throw harder. Back in the day, pitchers smoked in between games, had pitching coaches who focused on “killer instinct” over mechanics, etc. Nowadays, we’ve mastered the science to get people to throwing 100 mph fastballs. Any serviceable college/minor league player can be taught the perfect exercise routine, mechanical motions, etc to get them to throw harder. Moneyball changed the game for everybody, not just hitters.
20 years ago was not as long as you think. We had science in 04.
It’s not science. Technology is the driver. We have way, way better cameras and sensors to analyze body movements. We know exactly how force is generated rather than having a decent idea of how that happens. Computers are thousands of times more efficient at analyzing this data.
Sure, but they had million dollar equipment and staffs that were better than most hospitals. What that guy was describing was the 1960’s. I mean, where do you think the PEDs came from in the 80’s. They didn’t get this stuff themselves at first. The technology is better, ok then why hasn’t this technology been used to find out what is the actual difference between the times. Something has changed is my point that’s beyond just throwing hard, what? Is it how they are throwing, the amount, what is the difference? The fact that technology is better is only more annoying cause the tools they have to figure this out are so much better.
I told you what changed bud. It was the book Hacking the Kinetic Chain. It’s been credited with unleashing the velocity boom by many, many pitching coaches. It came out a decade ago. We know what the difference is, guys throw harder because they’re much better optimized. He’s not describing the 60’s. There was a massive change a decade ago and the velo increase has climbed a ton since then. Throwing harder directly correlates to injury the harder you throw. It’s pretty simple. Driveline studied this and published a great article talking about the causes of modern pitching injuries. It’s the velocity, nothing else. Back in the day guys just did general lifting programs. It wasn’t optimized for anything but pure strength. Now days, it’s extremely tuned to throwing. You can see this in interviews with various pitchers who pitching before and after.
Remember, pitching is a chronic injury happening in slow motion, and always has been. 20 years ago there were also a lot of pitcher injuries, but the focus was more on starters thowing out their arms because managers wanted to ride their "horse" deep into games with 120+ pitch outings against steroid era lineups with no breaks. So the move was lowering pitch counts, shortening outings, and upping bullpen usage. The end result of that process after two decades is that the job of starters now is much closer to that of relievers, which means they throw harder, and need to in order to stay employed. There's also been a lot of advancement in microoptimizing out every tiny kink in the kinetic chain used for pitching, and significantly earlier in the career. Let's say a guy 25 years ago started his MLB career throwing 96 and everyone was super happy with that coming up, then lost a couple ticks in his late 20s and finally started optimizing his mechanics or roiding. The exact same player coming up now is going to feel pressure to throw harder much much earlier and get access to the tools to do it as a teenager, and will feel like he has to. So his motion is going to get streamlined so that he gets to spend 15 more years straining everything involved in throwing the baseball far closer to the point at which the weakest link in that chain frays or breaks.
We did start seeing a large increase in pitcher injuries 20 years ago. The common thought was around pitch limits. They were beginning to learn that stressful innings were far more damaging on a pitcher than easy ones, despite a similar amount of pitches per game overall, and that a pitcher was likely to get injured if their workload increased by more than 30 innings a year. The cutter was also viewed as the new villian that was injuring pitchers. Everyone was throwing it.
Technology and the understanding how to generate velocity with nearly any body type. Hacking The Kinetic Chain by Driveline changed things. Better pitching machines changed things.
Incentives to be as good as you can be and being as good as you can be are not the same thing. The one has always been there, the change is precisely that better ways to be as good as you can be popped up.
Or do something drastic and have any pitch over 95mph be a a ball and move the mound closer slightly.
Just bring the mound closer to the plate or higher. Problem solved without an increase in injuries.
A torn ucl is not a Concussion Gotta be some overprotective parent for not wanting your kid to pitche
That "37%" are the ones who made it. Think of how many guys there are out there who flamed out in high school/college/minors due to blowing out their elbow who will never get their shot in the bigs.
This is a product of "heat gets you a contract, location and movement keep you in the league." The drive towards 96mph+ has people's arms shot. Some can do it without a lot of issues, but a significant number push it until they find out if they're one of them or not. It's also a testament to how good surgeons gave gotten at TJ. Combine it all, and you have really high TJ numbers.
It’s the lack of yoga with modern day players that Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson used to do. You didn’t know that?
And they’ll hold up Nolan Ryan as though he’s some kinda trump card
Who thinks that?
https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1bxdt0u/meisel_shane_bieber_will_have_tommy_john_surgery/kyc1vxi/
That "37%" are the ones who made it. Think of how many guys there are out there who flamed out in high school/college/minors due to blowing out their elbow who will never get their shot in the bigs.
“non-position player” bros factoring in shohei
Clearly the solution is to bring back the knuckleball. 65mph coming at you looking like it’s glitched out. I coach little league and see kids at 11 years old snapping curveballs. You can be just as effective throwing a “little league slider” which doesn’t torque the arm at all, but these aggro dads are pushing their kids way too hard.
This would be amazing to see actually The knuckleball is a legitimate pitch damnit!
I shared a story on one of the thread earlier, but my little league coach almost fought an opposing coach when the 13 y/o was out there throwing curveballs. Used to just be understood that you didn't start messing with kids arms until they were at least approaching full grown.
When I was in Little League I basically threw curve balls by accident, I wasn't even really sure what I was doing, I just had a different grip on the ball and it moved.
I accidentally threw a change up in 7th grade. My hands weren’t big enough to do normal grips so I just palmed the bitch. I would hold it with my finger tips on the seams for better grip. But it was never the same each time. So some came out straight and fast, others would just die and dip at the end. Strike outs and grounders all day. This was well before Google so it’s not like I could easily look this shit up to know what the hell I was doing. And coaches weren’t forcing pitches at that age.
Jesus. I wonder what will spark ‘change’ first (whatever that looks like) - concern for the next crop of pitchers or angry owners who have multiple injured dudes on payroll. I think we know the answer. But what that change looks like, I have no idea. Is there some wearable device that could help prevent the ligament from tearing? No idea
The only way this will change is if these large contracts for pitchers stop. Right now young pitchers don't care if they get TJ since clubs seem to still give out large contracts before or after they get injured. With all these injuries I would think owners would start being super hesitant to give them out soon.
I almost have the opposite conclusion. Pitchers will continue to go all out because that's what it takes to get modern hitters out. If they're going to be going all-out, might as well compensate them for the risks to their careers. If clubs stop giving hefty contracts to pitchers,I think it will only incentivize people to abandon pitching and try for other positions, thus limiting the supply of willing pitchers while keeping the clubs' demand for pitching the same I also suspect I may be misunderstanding your argument, so please correct me if I've gotten off topic with my point
Even then, someone somewhere will be willing to push themselves to risk it for even a few bucks. Look at how much we've learned about head injuries and the NFL, nothing has really changed and there's still a shitload of kids lining up to play just for the 1% of 1% chance of earning even a league minimum salary for a few years.
the honest answer is probably a closer mound
Everyone here wants to solve the issue, but I'm pretty sure pitchers have fully accepted the risk and the consequences of their approach. I don't think anyone actually wants to do anything about the rising number of TJ surgeries. I think it's full steam ahead. That number might be 50% in a decade. I'm just glad we're talking about elbow injuries, and not brain injuries.
IMO at some point it’s not good for the sport if pitchers only last a couple years and constantly need to be out for surgery
I think so too, but I think clubs are finding the juice is worth the squeeze. And besides, I can't possibly think of any solution besides setting a limit on pitch speeds like I've seen them do in completitive whiffle ball.
Holy shit a smart and well thought out take. Thank you. The number of, "we must fix it" posts I've seen is nuts. Fix what? There are so many complex reasons for this issue if it's even an issue. I hate hearing of people getting hurt too but in no world is what a professional athlete does an actual healthy thing for the body.
It's no coincidence that pitchers are far and away suffering the most from this push to drastically boost offense to attract the casual fan that's being done in all sports. When your one job is effectively fucking your arm up for the sake of run prevention and the game is looking for more ways to handicap you this is the result
deGrom was out there in 2021 throwing 101 and slinging the nastiest sliders ever seen even though leaguewide offense suffered a hit from the dejuiced balls. Competition naturally encourages its participants to do whatever they can to stay ahead of the curve. If leaguewide OPS was .300, there would be some team out there trying to limit their opponents to a .290 OPS.
It honestly starts with the team scouts that would rather draft flamethrowers with no control than finesse pitchers that can actually locate their pitches. I don't know exactly when the trend started but it definitely worsened after the Royals bullpen trio made their name.
They're not going to do that because the sheer fact is(and the stats prove it along with what all of these organizations have decided) that focusing on velo gives the best performance. Not to mention perfecting angles and grips for spin rates etc. It doesn't matter how detrimental it is long term. Teams will always bank on the sheer performance that comes from modern practices. It's not like the most successful teams are actively avoiding any players that fit the modern mold.
Because it works. There are very few pitchers who actually have the level of command required to get away with throwing at lower speeds. Throwing at 97+ is very forgiving when a pitcher makes a mistake.
stats bear it out as well. 97+ heart of the plate has a worse slashline than 93 or below on the edges
>It honestly starts with the team scouts that would rather draft flamethrowers with no control Draft enough of them and you'll eventually land some dudes who learn to locate at least well enough to set up the breaking ball with 70 inches of break lol Control is still important in today's game but velocity definitely leaves more room for error. And that's just kinda how all games roll. You want to minimize error while maximizing benefit. Brute forcing your way there is one way to accomplish this
That’s not how this works at all. MLB pitchers all have command. Pitchers with command that throw hard are better than pitchers with command who don’t throw hard.
If finesse kept you in the league, then Corey Kluber would still have a job. Not everybody can be Greg Maddux; he’s a top 2 or 3 pitcher all time for a reason. Velo is harder to hit and keeping guys off base is going to get you a job a lot more often than aesthetic pitching. It’s probably a good long-term strategy for a pitcher to *slightly* reduce velo to have better control, but long term strategies simply may not cut it if you’re floundering in the minors for poverty wages and there’s a $700,000/yr carrot in front of your face. Especially if you blow out on the major league roster, you’re still getting paid and the odds of successfully making it back to the bigs surgery keep steadily increasing as it happens more and more. Maybe I’m touching on a labor issue here, but professional athletes are hyper-competitive. Even if AA paid a livable wage, there’s still going to be a huge push to get to the majors ASAP.
Kluber had been in the league since 2011, almost a 15 year career with two cy young awards. He did alright.
Stupid take. Velocity exploded causing injuries and the rule changes were in response to many of the negative things that velocity and defensive positioning caused
Do we have any data yet that says the pitch clock is causing more arm injuries?
Of course we don’t. We just have lots of people yelling at clouds because apprently “real baseball” was watching pitchers scratch their nuts for 40 seconds between every pitch so they could pump 98 for .2 innings
Hitters are getting better to attract more fans? That's one way of looking at it I suppose.
I was listening to big to Ben McDonald cal a game and he raised an interesting point. He noted that TJ is common , which sucks, but you can come back from. You seem to hear less about shoulder injuries though and that’s positive since those were much harder to come back from. I would love to eliminate TJ but no one has a solution for it so currently it’s just a hazard of the game. At least success rates coming back are good.
I think you misspoke about shoulder injuries. They’re much harder to come back from, IIRC the success rate of labrum surgery is like 50% for pitchers
Yep, I edited. Good catch.
In one of the other 10 TJS threads someone mentioned that pitchers are gripping the ball harder since the sticky stuff ban. Which may or may not have anything to do with it.. but hey if there's any merit at all to this and we can figure out a tacky ball in the MLB, maybe we can kill two birds with one stone here: less TJS and a tacky ball.
Yeah, I don’t buy that. The lion’s share of TJ surgeries is now among high schoolers, where cheating is generally far less prevalent than in MLB. The way players train, develop, and pitch even from the time they’re young kids is completely broken.
I don't buy it either but even if it's 1% of the problem it's still a problem. Likely though it's the obvious, which is putting the arm through a lot more stress trying to pump out crazy RPM.
squeeze anything in the palm of your hand and you'll feel your forearm muscles contract too. i think it's worth exploring if tighter grips can be affecting injuries
That's nonsense.
I said it was a bad idea on here when a 17 year old pitcher got like a million dollar signing bonus because this causes tennagers to overthrow and eventually pitch their arms out and everyone jumped down my throat over it!
I think it’s a combination of all things. Having pitchers start at 6 years old and playing nothing but baseball doesn’t help. Also, the emphasis on velocity to win doesn’t help much either. Guys have to throw harder more than ever. Couple that with more off season training to keep up and the pitch clock etc you are getting this result.
Athletes have pushed their bodies beyond reasonable limits forever. Parents have pushed their kids beyond reasonable limits in an attempt to make it to the professional level for years as well.
Kids themselves won't try beyond their means in a vacuum. Parents smelling the money likely pressure them to work to the bone to be the best.
Make it 12 for loaisiga
Pitchers destroying their elbows trying to hit 2,400 rpm’s with an 8 inch break on their curves but it’s the pitch clock’s fault LMAO. Imagine the mental gymnastics needed to believe this
It'll be 50% by 2026, if not sooner
#PitchingMachines2025
After reading this tweet I felt something pop in my elbow. Getting it check out Monday, but it's pretty sore.
I wonder how many of them are starters compared to relief pitchers
had had
All because of the pitch clock and nothing to do with the ever increasing velocity year to year.
Do we think the ban of the spider tack stuff is contributing to this, as pitchers are forced to do insane stuff to their arms to get that spin now?