OT: MLB pitchers and increased injuries

[XXtwindad]

Originally Posted by zzy

More pitchers had Tommy John surgery in 2023 than in the entire 90s.

Wow. That’s shocking. If there’s a basketball equivalent, it’s probably connected to incorrect landing technique after dunking. Which is why players who operate “below the rim” usually have much longer careers.

[XXtwindad]

Originally Posted by peanutgallery

Would a Greg Maddox make it thru the development process to make the bigs in today's game? He'd have to fight the metrics that define "success"

I feel the metrics take away from the gadget pitchers that have unique abilities to throw an interesting ball. Off speed, release and all the other dark arts that have been around since the game was invented

Hopefully it is a fad

Good point. Maddux was an artist.

[twolve]

I was listening to Tyler Glasnow's opinion is that pitcher injuries have been on the rise since they have banned sticky substances and umpires are actually following through and checking pitchers.

Without the sticky substances and with changing baseball manufacturing, pitchers have to grip the ball harder to throw faster pitches and have higher spin rates. Now pitchers are having to grip tightly on pitches they used to want a light grip with, fastballs and curveballs. This causes much more strain on ligaments during the pitching motion. I'm not a doctor, but this seems like a huge change to MLB pitching and makes sense to me.

Baseball wants more scoring which isn't meshing with keeping pitchers healthy.

[Alistair]

The youth stuff is pretty insane. Good friends have a 5th grader who pitches in Little League and travel ball.

Normal week is something like...
Sat - Little League game, pitch counts are tracked/enforced

Sun - travel ball double-header, pitch counts are not enforced - up to coach to manage

Team practices 2-3x/week

Private pitching coach 1x/week

My son played football* (which I coached), and youth league was capped at 3 team meeting/week - pre-season that was 3 practices and the main season 2 practices and a game. To my knowledge, none of the kids doubled-up with a second league. And any of the kids that tried to double up with baseball or another sport quickly found themselves on the bench (because they'd always end up missing a practice or game at some point). Some of the kids did have private conditioning coaches to work on explosiveness and sprinting technique, but we didn't see any injuries from that.

* in the era before CTE was known

[yinzerniner]

Originally Posted by XXtwindad

Good point. Maddux was an artist.

Maddux would have been fine in todays game because of his control and movement, two things which todays metrics value more than velocity. But whether he’d be able to develop his control and movement instead of being forced to improve his velocity early in his career is a valid debate

As for increased pitcher injuries, see it as a confluence of all factors, not just a consequence of one.
1-speeding up of pitcher mound routine and reset with the clock
2-increased emphasis from scouting/coaching on movement and spin
3-inconsistency of the baseball and grip material manufacturing

If any single one of these were changed during the last 10yr period it most likely would have lead to a small injury uptick, but merge all 3 and you have a perfect storm

Also I wonder how youth baseball is going to handle this. I remember back in the day (old man yells at cloud) the babe Ruth league didn’t allow any pitches except for fastball and change up, and that extended to roughy age 14 or 8th grade year. Travel/elite teams could do what they want, but nowadays it seems like every team is just a travel/elite team specifically designed to feed a sense of accomplishment to (and coax a bunch of money out of) needy parents who must live vicariously through their offspring.

Seems similar to what’s now occurring with Zipp and their hookless wheels. Any single risk tolerance percentage would probably not lead to a fault, but combining tire sizing, pressure gauge, rim interface, rim design and etrto/iso standard inconsistency has been less than ideal.