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Spencer Strider, Shane Bieber, Shohei Ohtani, Sandy Alcantara, Jacob DeGrom, Robbie Ray, Shane McClanahan, Lucas Giolito and Gerrit Cole.
Here is a partial list of star pitchers currently on the MLB injured list with elbow issues.
Their names are associated with Tommy John surgery and the procedure has hung like a sword of Damocles over the heads of every exceptional pitcher in the world of baseball.
Seeing the infirmaries filling up at this rate, we no longer wonder if pitchers will get injured during their career, but rather when they will have to miss a season in order to go under the knife.
This is the scourge that is shaking the foundations of major league baseball right now and everyone is pointing fingers at each other without really bringing a solution to the table.
A hot potato
Since the start of the season, the Players’ Association (MLBPA) and Commissioner Rob Manfred have been publicly passing the buck when it comes to addressing the growing number of elbow injuries among pitchers.
On the one hand, Tony Clark, executive director of the MLBPA, denounced changes to the shot dial this winter that reduced the time between two throws with runners on the trails from 20 to 18 seconds.
A measure, in the eyes of the Association, which does not take into consideration the health of the players in an obsessive quest to reduce the duration of matches.
Manfred, faced with accusations, defends that the introduction of the shooting dial in 2023 is not a cause of the increasing number of injuries and no study points in this direction.
The players, when questioned on the subject, send the debate in all directions. But one big theme emerges: the velocity and movement of the shots.
According to some, we have reached the theoretical limit of technological advances when we talk about optimizing techniques to increase the speed and movement of shots. For what? Because the human body, specifically the elbow and all the tendons involved in the movement, is not built to withstand so much stress.
And this is where it becomes difficult to simply place a lid on the already overflowing pot.
A predictable scourge
Since 2008, with all the data available in the MLB, it has been established that the average speed of fastballs thrown in games has increased from 90.5 MPH to 94.0 MPH in 2023. A jump of almost 4 miles per hour in 12 years is gigantic.
At no time during this compilation of statistics did the average go down from one year to the next.
This steady increase in average fastball velocity indicates that the new generation of pitchers are strongly encouraged to use their maximum force often, if not all the time, during games.
In the process, Johan Duran almost touched the 105 MPH mark with his fiery bullets in 2023, before he also fell in combat with an elbow injury.
In this same window, Stan Conte of Conte Performance Group compiled minor and major elbow surgical procedures among MLB players.
Here too, as with speed, we notice a constant increase with an oddly alarming peak in recent years.
From 103 surgeries in 2010, we are now at 263 in 2023. The worst year, 2021, saw 316 different operations on the elbows of MLB pitchers. That’s almost two per day over an entire MLB season. We have essentially tripled the number of elbow surgeries in less than fifteen years.
Not for nothing are we going to the barricades to save the future of pitchers in major baseball.
Another very worrying observation: the harder a pitcher throws, the more likely his arm is to fail early in his career.
When you rank MLB starting pitchers by the average speed of their fastballs, you quickly notice that the vast majority of the fastest have gone under the knife.
Here is an overview of this list:
- Jacob DeGrom (99.2 MPH) – 2nd Tommy John surgery in 2023
- Hunter Greene (98.9 MPH) – Tommy John Operation in 2019
- Spencer Strider (98.2 MPH) – 2nd Tommy John Operation in 2024
- Sandy Alcantara (98.1 MPH) – Tommy John surgery in 2013
- Noah Syndergaard (97.8 MPH) – Tommy John surgery in 2020
- Gerrit Cole (97.8 MPH) – Elbow injury in 2023
- Nathan Eovaldi (97.5 MPH) – 2nd Tommy John Operation in 2016
- Eury Perez (97.5 MPH) – Tommy John Operation in 2024
- Grayson Rodriguez (97.4 MPH) – Nothing yet
- Shohei Ohtani (97.3 MPH) – 2nd Elbow Surgery in 2023
- Zach Wheeler (97.2 MPH) – Tommy John surgery in 2015
- Luis Castillo (97.1 MPH) – Nothing yet
- Drew Rasmussen (97.1 MPH) – 3rd Elbow Surgery in 2023
- Tyler Glasnow (97.0 MPH) – Tommy John Surgery in 2021
Of the 14 pitchers averaging over 97 MPH on their fastballs, only two have yet to have their elbows repaired.
You don’t need to have completed hard math to understand that there is a problem here.
“The way you throw has changed so much”
This is Justin Verlander’s point when asked about the subject. The veteran pitcher, at 41 years old, with three Cy Young trophies in his collection and two World Series rings, knows what he’s talking about. He led the American League in strikeouts five times and also had Tommy John surgery in 2020 instead of hanging up his cleats after 15 years in the MLB.
“Everyone throws the ball with all their might,” he says. In addition to adding maximum effect. It’s a double-edged sword for pitchers. »
This culture of maximum speed is something that starts well before reaching the MLB.
Protect young people
Since 2015, MLB has supported USA Baseball, the organization behind minor league baseball in the United States, with the Pitch Smart program which aims to reduce the physical wear and tear of young players during their formative years.
Especially as teenagers, the best players are often catapulted from one team to another without a real off-season when we want to get noticed by MLB scouts from the outset.
Several policies are in effect to limit the speed of shots, the use of sliding and curved balls as well as the number of innings pitched.
There is a real desire to let youth develop, especially when the imminent doctor James Andrews, a leading authority in the field of ligament reconstructions, emphasizes in every forum offered to him that the human body does not reach its full potential. maturity before the mid-twenties, around 26 years old.
Therefore, subjecting the elbow ligaments to this much stress is the equivalent of stretching an elastic band to its maximum force until it slowly tears.
This same Doctor Andrews also noticed, before retiring, that his clientele was increasingly younger and he was already worried, ten years ago, about the reconstructions required by young people of 16, 17 or 18 years old whereas the body, at this age, recovers from virtually anything with a cold water compress.
Even with measures to protect young people, one reality remains unavoidable: to get noticed by MLB scouts, you must achieve a minimum speed on the radar. Otherwise, you don’t even receive an invitation to sell your salad.
It’s that simple. With thousands of young players dreaming of landing one of the positions available in the MLB, the first screening is often done with the help of the speed radar and the higher the number, the better for the future.
Except that it is this very speed which can reduce, or even destroy, careers.
The examples are unfortunately too numerous.
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Learn from the past
This spring, after a long period of hesitation and questioning, Washington Nationals star pitcher Stephen Strasburg confirmed his retirement from the MLB.
A 2019 World Series winner and first overall pick in the 2009 draft, the electrifying pitcher was considered a generational talent when he entered the league and the Nationals did everything they could to protect him and build the team around him.
Unfortunately, injuries hampered his full potential although, at the peak of his form, he dominated in the 2019 postseason en route to the only World Series in team history.
The example of the 35-year-old gunner is convincing since he signed a monstrous contract extension of $245 million after the Nationals championship. But since that deal, he has only pitched 31 innings in four years. A financially catastrophic situation for the team. It was also the accumulation of injuries that forced retirement in his case, despite his undeniable talent.
If the best hope of his generation, according to many, is not able to have a career worthy of his talent, there is reason to worry about the future of baseball.
Not that the sport is in danger of no longer existing, but perhaps exceptional athletes will look in another direction before putting their arm in the gears leading to a career in the NBA.
Star NFL players like Patrick Mahomes and Kyler Murray, to name a few, had to choose early in their sporting career between football and baseball since they excelled in both sports. If a pitching career is haunted by the specter of Tommy John, it wouldn’t be surprising to see top arms try their luck elsewhere.
As baseball is increasingly a sport of young phenoms, this is worrying.
Solutions?
Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg case when looking at the pitching injury problem.
You can’t really go back in time to a time when the quest for power wasn’t as quantified. Yes, power launchers have always attracted attention, but we didn’t reduce their performance in an Excel spreadsheet. We knew that Randy Johnson was knocking out the corners of the plate and that was enough.
Nowadays, hitters have also increased their performance. Slower shots end their trajectory in the stands. Since pitchers see their compensation depend on the victories they help to obtain, it’s hard to tell them to live with the fact that today’s hitters are ball-destroying machines that don’t have superhuman spin.
The MLB could, on the other hand, increase the number of players for each team in order to absorb the work. But on the other hand, a few fewer innings in a season and a few more days off won’t change the fact that the human arm, fundamentally, is not designed for such violence.
This situation, as distressing as it is, seems hopeless unless we find a way to strengthen human ligaments.
And that’s more in the realm of science fiction than professional sport.
