Be warned: By the time you finish reading this article, another Major League Baseball pitcher may have suffered a significant arm injury. Unlikely? Well, consider this: Just as I started jotting down this article, word came that 26-year-old Nationals pitcher Josiah Gray is out for who knows how long with a right forearm/flexor strain. A little later, we learned that Red Sox pitcher Nick Pivetta had hit the shelf with a similar injury. They join baseball’s growing list of injured pitchers: Gerrit Cole, Spencer Strider and Shane Bieber are just a few of the big names who have made trips across the country to have their MRIs evaluated and their arms examined.
Of course, we all want to know exactly why this is happening. Of course, this is difficult to define. And yes, there are many competing theories out there, including some from two of the sport’s oldest rivals: players and owners.
For one, Tony Clark, head of the MLB Players Association, said Sunday that after the field clock was installed last season and reduced this season, “our concerns about the health impacts of reducing recovery time only have intensified.”
The commissioner’s office, which was less than pleased with this statement, responded by saying that the MLBPA “ignores empirical evidence and the much more significant long-term trend, over several decades, of increases in speed and spin that are highly correlated with injuries On the arm”.
Meanwhile Cole will be back in Yankees pinstripes sometime between May and 2025 thinks none of these fights are particularly useful, and one that certainly won’t help cure baseball’s ongoing arm rot anytime soon. And that’s true: sport, also suffering from redesigned uniforms that show players’ private partsIt is a gambling scandal that affected baseball’s only global superstar, Shohei Ohtani, could really use its governing entities to try to figure things out. Because they need to figure out how to turn a pastime that mostly dissolves into an unpleasant, nine-inning, starless parade of overcharged future surgery candidates, who give in early to disposable BB-throwing relievers, back to the game as we knew it. The sport with pitchers who created performances we couldn’t wait to watch.
Bill “The Spaceman” Lee, then of the Expos, had one such performance on May 30, 1979, throwing a six-hit complete game over the Phillies at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. After the game, Lee told CBC: “I struck out the side in the first inning, I don’t think I’ve done that since probably my pony league days. Typically, when you strike out the first batter of a game, you’re in trouble: it means you’re throwing too hard. But after the third inning I lost my fastball and started pitching and did really well.”
“Throwing too hard” is not a concept anyone in baseball today seems to have given much thought to lately. Lee, one of the most colorful players in the history of the game, had an excellent 14-year career despite striking out just 703 batters in 1,944.1 innings – that’s 3.3 strikeouts per nine innings. There’s virtually no chance a pitcher like Lee will get a look today.
How did we get here? Well, baseball, like humans, has an over-engineering problem. Our species has a habit of producing things we like but don’t always need, which can eventually cause extraordinary harm. Maximum effort, high velocity and a high spin rate pitch fit perfectly into this category.
In 2017, Mets star pitcher Noah Syndergaard was coming off an All-Star season and arrived at camp wanting to throw even harder. He regularly hit 90 mph on his four-seam fastball, 90 mph on his two-seam ball and, incredibly, 90 mph on his slider. In May, he suffered an injury that virtually ended his season. Asked about Syndergaard’s injury and pitching in general, Dwight Gooden, who set the rookie strikeout record in 1984 with the Mets, said: “I think they’re training to get bigger, throw a little harder, but to me , pitching is about mechanics, changing speeds, reading bat speed.”
The latest injury should have been a sign that Syndergaard’s physical makeup and his desire to throw with such power and consistency were not working for his body. He made 57 appearances over the next two seasons, but in 2020 Syndergaard underwent elbow surgery. Today, the pitcher who was once expected to be an all-time Met is 31 years old and out of the bigs.
Few players, general managers, managers, pitching coaches, owners, junior-level coaches, and the increasingly controversial “pitching labs” have been able to recognize and adjust, despite the abundance of cautionary tales like Syndergaard’s and, in To a lesser extent, that of his former Mets teammate Jacob deGrom. The two-time Cy Young winner figured out how to keep increasing his speed, but he couldn’t figure out that the added stress on his arm was harming his health. And so, a pitcher who at times looked like one of the greatest to ever play the game, who increased his strikeouts in nine innings from 8.7 in 2016 to 14.3 in 2022, also fell victim to early-season elbow surgery. last.
Remarkably, all of these injuries occurred at a time when football clubs coddled and coddled pitchers to the point where getting more than five innings as a starter seems like something to celebrate. There are two reasons for this: one, because the bean counters upstairs have determined that pitchers cannot handle an opposing lineup the third time around, and two, because more innings and more maximum-effort pitches that they throw today constitute a risk of injury.
We know that all this “protection” did absolutely nothing to help pitchers like Eury Perez. The 21-year-old was supposed to be the kind of phenom that energized baseball fans, regardless of their interest. In 2023, he played 19 games and struck out 108 batters in 91.1 closely monitored MLB innings. Before being promoted, he pitched 36.2 innings of AAA ball, recording an electric 13.3 strikeouts per nine innings. And despite averaging less than 81 pitches per game and less than five innings per game, Perez’s elbow ruptured under the pressure.
Baseball has a habit of jumping from crisis to crisis, but this pitching cataclysm is threatening the sport like never before. Not only do we have a generation of pitchers who can’t stay healthy, but we also have those who are left averaging 5.1 innings per game in 2023, an all-time low. Not only have we lost talent, but we have also lost the ability and desire to allow pitchers to perform deep in games, a star-making attribute that has been disappearing for years.
There are currently seven injured Cy Young Award winners, representing 13 of the last 26 plaques given out. Blake Snell is one of the last survivors, a pitcher who represents the current lack of draw off the pitching tee. Snell is one of seven players to win the Cy Young in both leagues. But despite his achievement, Snell doesn’t come close to moving the needle like others who have: Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez. Snell is not box office. He’s a five-inning pitcher. And that. That’s all you get. Maybe that’s why Snell didn’t make it long-term deal your agent wanted. Maybe the owners have discovered that five-inning, maximum-effort, injury-prone pitchers aren’t worth it, no matter how many strikeouts they record. If so, the sport is lost. If so, half the game will become even more anonymous than it is with each passing day. If so, baseball must act, and not be afraid to install rules that encourage both longer games and player health, restoring half the game and its lost art before it is too late.
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