Let me start out by saying I am old school when it comes to sports, especially baseball. As I age and watch major league baseball pitchers suffer arm injury after arm injury, I think back to a time, not too long ago, when starting pitchers regularly pitched between seven and nine innings a start. Nowadays, they are praised for making it five innings.
Let me share with you some of my thoughts on the demise of the pitching arm.
Baseball is now in a phase where pitching is all about velocity. Has anyone ever wondered if the human arm is not capable of throwing a ball over 100 MPH on a regular basis?
What this has led to is pitchers overworking themselves during the offseason in attempts to optimize their velocity. So now we have pitchers not resting their arms during the offseason like pitchers did 20-plus years ago. Fastballs back then were in the high 80 MPHs. Now we have high school pitchers going all out to throw over 90 MPH. The term now used for what pitchers train to do is “chasing velocity.” It is quite simple. Velocity means money.
In an attempt to possibly minimize injury risk, teams now limit the workload pitchers endure during the season. Hence, starters now pitch between 100 to 150 innings a season. It was not long ago when reaching 200 innings was the norm. Meant to protect pitchers, reduced workloads might actually be contributing to injuries. Pitchers tend to use max effort even more when they know they won’t be in the game very long.
I am not a doctor but I do believe in logical thinking. Chasing velocity at a young age has to be a contributing factor to the rising number of injuries as well. Year-round training at a young age cannot be a good thing when it comes to developing a major league arm.
The velocity keeps going up, guys are getting bigger and stronger. As they keep getting stronger, I have to wonder if their ligament doesn’t necessarily get stronger. There are stories out there of kids ripping the bone off their elbow because their growth plate is weaker than the ligament. Instead of the ligament failing, the bone breaks off.
You can count on there being more research done on this issue within the sport. What we have now is a system where virtually every pitcher on a team suffers at least one arm injury a season and missed time. Team owners, eventually, may get tired of paying guys who are injured and unavailable during the season. Fans are getting tired of team running out of pitching and having to use guys who do not have major league skills.
Some day the game may return to a time when all outs do not have to come from strikeouts. I may be old school but I would prefer watching a great defensive play in the field over a strikeout.
