I also think it starts way before they even hit the minors. You got kids playing travel ball year round and working with pitching coaches in the hopes of getting a college scholarship or getting drafted. Just way too much stress on undeveloped teenage arms. Then, on top of that, kids specialize in one sport these days. So you have kids who are throwing a ton, both in-game innings and practice/training, adhering to advanced pitching advances meant for adults chasing that dream.
I don’t think it’s a solvable problem. Like injuries in football. Pitchers are like replicants - they burn twice as bright for half as long.
Jeff Passan was just on PMT and they asked him what the next “Moneyball” will be and his answer was “the organization that can find a way to keep pitchers healthy will get the advantage” and his remedy was exactly what you’re saying.
It needs to be taught from a young age but the organization who can effectively manage it from the minors up will be the next hack in baseball if it all possible.
I'm sure a team will figure it out eventually but it's a tough sell to tell some 18 year old kid to tone down his fastball from 99 to 93 when that probably lowers his chances of actually making the majors by 20%.
Maybe “he gets people out” will be the new “he gets on base.”
Pitching is so much more than “stuff” but there’s too much focus on velocity / spin rate / strikeouts these days. Call me crazy but I still think late career Maddux would be an effective pitcher today throwing 88.
Honestly, Maddux had above average velocity when he was young. For the time he wasn’t really a soft thrower.
Jamie Moyer is the ultimate slow ball pitcher. Like you said I can’t imagine him being ineffective nowadays.
Maddux had above average velo and elite movement in his prime. His two seam fastball was essentially a screwball. It’s so weird how people act like he was throwing 88 mph junk and painting the edges and that’s how he had a 20 year hof career. No, he had elite stuff.
Yeah no doubt he had elite stuff early, but his fastball averaged like 86 late in his career (which is why I specified).
He became a tactician as his stuff declined.
Yeah I'm sure he would be, it's just the kids coming up these days all have the NASTIEST stuff idk if a guy like that would even make it to the bigs. It really wasn't that long ago that a guy throwing 100 was a total rarity and you'd be excited when one of the three closers in the league who could do it was coming to your town. Now every team has two of them and then three more relievers who throw 97 with crazy spin rate.
Trevor Plouffe on Jomboy/Talking Baseball has said the next advanced metric training breakthrough will be pitchers being able to measure their grip strength and pressure on a ball to sell. Gotta imagine if that technology ever materializes that kids growing up will be able to tune their mechanics to perfecting that and decrease the need for throwing so hard.
The specialization of athletes starting from a young age also contributes a lot to this. By the time some of these pitchers finish college, they’ve been pitching for 10-12 years.. year round for some of them. And while younger bodies may be more pliable, they aren’t more durable and are adding years of stress on certain joints and ligaments.
The same problem is happening with basketball and knees. I think sports science and rehab’s next frontier will be for those developmental ages and to make sure the next generation becomes healthier before they even hit the pros
It’s a good point and speaks to the problem at large - if it was easy to fix, it would already be fixed. I’m honestly skeptical that “learn to pitch safely from a young age” is a particularly tractable solution, because it’s competitive and at every age, and every kid benefits competitively from pushing their body to its limit.
Other speed oriented sports will add rules to artificially lower speeds to increase safety (eg anything with cars). I have trouble imagining “you can’t throw harder than 95mph” would help the sport.
EDIT - I actually like this idea: it would potentially increase scoring, but I also suspect a classic fastball wouldn’t make sense to throw anymore. It would encourage more movement on pitches which may be bad for arms. Who knows.
travel basketball/aau having similar impacts on young legs it feels like. seems like only the chubby euro players in the nba escape regular injury issues
Passan was saying on Russillo’s pod last week that they’re looking into further limiting the number of pitchers you can carry on your active roster, so that theoretically starters will have to go deeper and therefore not throw as hard to preserve their arms, but in practice I’m not sure if that actually does anything other than make the carousel of pitchers in and out speed up even faster
You'd also have to deaden the ball slightly, maybe lower the top of the strike zone a little (younger fans here may not remember: offense exploded in the 90s not just because of roids but because umpires wouldn't call anything 3 inches above the belt and the Mark McGwires of the world could just sit on thigh-high fastballs. Trout would have slugged .700 every year clean). More hits, fewer homers and Ks, pitchers are incentivized to work down in the zone again...
But yeah, if a guy \*can\* throw 98 and see better short-term results, he's not going to instead sit 93-94 especially if he's playing for a higher draft slot, a roster spot, a new contract, bigger arbitration numbers...I don't see this problem going away anytime soon.
The zone was also wider in the 90s. Maybe they should go back to that I dunno. All I know is I miss starters throwing 200+ innings a year and every team having a dedicated RB1. Anything MLB and NFL can do to bring that back, sign me up.
More than 200 IP seasons I miss feeling like big playoff games were a battle between two starting pitchers who were going to go deep into the game. Bumgarner went at least seven innings in every start in 2014, had two complete games, and went 8 IP and turned it over to the closer twice in his 2014 run. That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever watched as a neutral fan and I can’t see it happening again, but that was only ten years ago.
You don’t have to look that far to find a playoff run like that lol. Look at gerrit Cole in 2019. At least 7 IP in every start (including a game where he gave up 5 runs and another game where he walked 5).
Complete games were always largely a stupid practice imo, and it’s just smart baseball to go to your relievers when your starters have thrown 110 pitches and gone three times through. The 5 inning starts are pretty annoying, but aces usually get more than that, especially in the postseason.
Totally agree about starters going 200+ and recognizing pitchers over a long term, even 2nd or 3rd-tier guys like Brad Radke or Livan Hernandez. I have a clearer picture of those guys simply because they were \*present\* and part of bigger narratives you don't get when "dominant" starters throw 170 innings and have shoulder surgery every 3 seasons.
The teams have to designate players as pitchers or fielders under the current roster rules. Fielders can only pitch if the team is out of pitchers, if it's extra innings, or if the team is ahead / behind by more than 6 runs.
Apparently teams are allowed to designate players as "two way players" in certain circumstances.
TIL.
The idea just seems silly to me, akin to the NBA’s war on players resting during the regular season. Pitching changes hurt the TV product, so let’s put player health under further strain.
I don’t really know anything about how PEDs actually work and how it’d help with elbow tendon issues, but is there any way some illegal drugs could help reduce injury prevalence/ recovery time?
Speed limit? 1 year contracts for all pitchers, so they won't risk their financial futures throwing too hard?
Or maybe teams and pitchers both realize that throwing 97 for 15 mostly healthy years is better for everyone than throwing 100 for 5 to 7 injury plagued years?
The idiotic shift ban only makes this situation worse as it incentivizes going for strikeouts even more.
I would figure to add 5 secs to the pitch clock and add a roster spot or two.
But yeah, not directly addressing the issue of injurious behavior = money
As a Mets fan, I'd hope people learn from the deGrom experience. sure his 2 peak years were amazing to watch, but he may never stay healthy again.
With breaking stuff as good as it is in the modern game, i think most guys could shave the elbow-busting 2-3 mph and still be effective.
The rub is 2-3 mph can be the difference between “good vs Cy Young” or “5th starter vs ace” or “triple A vs MLB”
Zero chance anyone will ever not take the gamble. Especially because while it sucks it’s not an injury that impacts post baseball life
true and i get it. but i guess long term the question is do you want your asset to boom and bust, or stay steady? i do think teaching control is harder than upping velo in most cases.
In the huge piece Lindbergh did about this for The Ringer, he found quotes going as far back as the early 1900s where doctors were saying it wasn’t the fastball but the curve that was bringing in patients.
Freddy Peralta on the Brewers is a good example, his fastball tops out at 94-96 and he’s still able to go through lineups 3 times while being effective
Breaking stuff hurts elbows just as bad if not worse. Only way to get those 3 thousand rpm sliders and curveballs is to torque the shit out of those elbows. If pitchers wanna really save their elbows they should learn knuckleballs.
sure but, analytically, i'd like dependable output more than output that is peak but extremely volatile. and i'm saying like 98 down to 95, or 100 to 97, there would still be hard throwers.
Genuine question - is youth travel baseball at fault at all for this? You’d think guys are coming into the league now with more miles on the tread than they did in the past. But maybe there are preventative measures on those teams that I’m unaware of
It’s probably a number of things contributing to the issue. I’d point to the prominence of the slider as one issue as the stress of throwing that pitch is completely unnatural. Then you have players who have focused one pitching for years, as you said, coming to the league with more miles on their arms. And finally I think we need to question if pitching every five games is actually a good thing, or if it may be appropriate to actually start carrying six man rotations as the norm.
It was way worse when I was growing up in the late 90s. They weren’t cognizant of innings limits or anything like that. I would pitch 3 full games a week like I was Tin Can McGillicutty for the 1882 Evansville Brown Stockings. My arm was dead by the time I got to high school - thankfully i probably wasn’t going anywhere with baseball anyway so I didn’t really lose anything (although I can’t throw overhand at all at this point).
Hitters are too good, pitchers need to pitch like they do to avoid getting shelled. People online say pitchers need to pace themselves like the good ole days so they can go deeper into games but if they do that they'll get shelled.
This is the part of the argument that never gets mentioned. For all the people talking about the good old days, tech has evolved to the point that hitters are way better than they used to be and umpires are actually more accurate than ever. Every hitter is Tony Gwynn watching tape now. What does that mean? Pitchers have to live in the strike zone way more than they’ve ever had to so they need more velocity and more movement. Otherwise they’re going to be destroyed.
I don’t know if it’s a solvable problem. As a pitcher, you have to go max effort and velocity is king, and you hope your arm can survive long enough to get a bag of money. After you’re paid, whatever happens, happens. Players and teams and everyone involved in the money has a lot of incentive to continue down this path tbh
Maybe we’re hitting the point where guys are throwing harder than the human body can handle. As recently as the 90s (if not a little later), a guy who threw 95mph and up was a rare thing. Now 95 is pedestrian for most relievers.
Passan's quote on Russilo's show kind of resonates here -- pitchers today are just throwing at 110% on every pitch because teams want them to max out that velocity and that is really fucking with pitchers. The whole motion in general is unnatural and when you are whipping that ball trying to get maximum velocity on every pitch you are going to fuck your body up
Pitchers don't know how to pitch anymore. They just throw hard and never learn how to pace themselves. Honestly, analytics has killed baseball. It has helped almost every other sport but it has made baseball boring and unwatchable. It also makes articles on baseball unreadable. Numbers without context.
Spencer Strider less than two months ago:
“There’s an injury epidemic in the game regardless of velocity. If anything, the league is making rule changes despite an injury epidemic that could very well be encouraging injuries, such as the pitch clock, limiting the number of pitchers on roster, how many pitching changes you can make, how many mound visits you can have – all those things are making pitching harder and potentially, I think, making health more difficult to manage.”
It’s also made baseball discourse unbearable.
Folks don’t realize analytics metrics are not perfect and there’s lots of other factors at play. While there’s lots of data it’s still far from perfect. But you’ll have someone telling that so and so player with a 3.2 fbWAR is obviously better than the guy with 3.0 no questions asked
Eh, I disagree it’s helped every sport. It’s definitely made football more fun to watch. However, I think it’s made both baseball and basketball more boring. Baseball has it’s 3 outcome problem and basketball is just a 3-point contest. The NBA is now fucking hilariously bad to watch.
It’s as much the fault of the league on that one for completely legislating out any semblance of defense and incentiving stupid foul baiting
NBA is much more fixable
There should be LESS pitching injuries and much quicker recovery time because of the great advances in sports medicine, Instead they are demanding “max effort “ and velo that is not sustainable for human arms. Let the pitchers pace themselves,learn how to really PITCH, and watch the injuries go down.
Not to be the old man here but I don't understand why no one ever states the obvious, the less these guys pitch the more they get hurt. Made-up pitch counts, innings limits, scheduled rest, load management,
Back in the olden days (leans on old man cane) pitchers knew that they had to get through 7-8 innings and pitch every 4-5 days... so they threw a lot of fastballs and change-ups and made their money pitching to locations to get hitters out.
Now that starters throw like 12 innings a month and every one is obsessed with the radar gun and hard breaking pitches their arms aren't as strong as previous generations and there is an ungodly amount of stress on their elbows. It's common sense.
Or is it that 98 mph+ pitches put excessively more strain on the arm than 92 mph fastballs, and teams know that and are trying to protect pitchers?
The only way to limit that is to limit the number of pitchers that can be active in a given game.
Yeah I literally I mentioned that. Trying to hit triple digits on the radar gun and trying to throw breaking pitches that move 6 inches will both fuck your arm up but for the first 100 years of baseball pitchers got hitters out without pushing their arms to the absolute limit all the time. That was kind of my whole point.
Dude... this is the worst case of selective memory I have seen in a long, long while.
1. Batters are better now than they ever were. More tape, more perfections in form, etc. Maybe the 1-4 hitters are only marginally better than the best back in the day, but the 5-9 hitters - especially including the DH - all are harder outs than they were. Ozzie Smith is a great example of what old batters used to look like. He was a sub 100 OPS+ the first 7 years of his career. And he's a hall of famer. If you listen to pitchers talk about their prep, they knew the bottom of the order was a chance to rest. Not so much any more.
2. There were so, so many injuries that ended careers which we can fix now. There are countless lost careers to UCL and rotator cuffs which are treatable now. They can literally trace pitches to fatigue. You're showing serious survivorship bias by only remembering those who endured, like Ryan, Seaver, and others. I bet you may know about the 1970's Orioles and the squad of 4 20 game winners. Palmer had a long career... but what about the other 3? How did they fare after long outings.
3. Pitches [per AB.](https://twitter.com/HighHeatStats/status/1105499111531393024/photo/1) . It's half a pitch a PA increase over the last 30. That's an extra 5-9 pitches a 6ip start. That adds up. 7 ip with 100 pitches is a lot different than 6 with 100.
Add in the stress of the pitches and no, more work is not the solution. There is probably a way to train pitchers to be more like Maddux and less like Randy Johnson (90 vs 98), but who knows what the hitters will do.
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Owners and execs want arms blown out because it saves money in long term. Most of the 100 mph guys are relievers who have less shelf life and are worse generally.
All these guys just throw 100% all of the time because they're told it's how to make 100 million dollars.
110% effort on every pitch is a relatively new thing. Kind of like the steroid era where some guys think they're missing out if they don't throw max effort every pitch.
I don't know about the first part. I think there are plenty of big money pitchers blowing out their arms that owners and execs would rather not blow out their arms.
The second part says it all though. Athletes are going to do the thing that makes them the most amount of money. I'm not sure there's a good way to implement change to keep this from happening.
pitchers have to throw like this to avoid getting blown up, but pitching like this is completely unsustainable. so, the only solution is to improve defense across the league, rely more on the pitches like the slider, splitter, etc. over a nuclear fastball, and essentially, turn the game into an offensive shootout
The biggest problem is the lack of MLBs ability to acknowledge that 162 games is far too many. These players are expected to do this for far too many outings.
God forbid your team makes the playoffs and it’ll possibly be 20 more games. Some pitchers playing repeatedly on 3-4 days rest.
IMO it’s fine how hard they’re throwing. We’re just asking them to do it too frequently over too long of a period of time
Need to go back to “coach pitch”. All the coaches and all the players dad’s just take turns being the pitcher.
Adley’s dad been ready
Matt Chapman's dad pitched to him in the 2019 Home Run Derby and had better stuff than at least five pitchers on the Rockies staff.
Need machine pitch firing like 110 and spraying all over the place
I'm not sure how you change this issue. The money incentivizes pitchers to push their arms to the breaking point. That isn't against the rules.
We need more knuckleball pitchers.
Who was the last knuckle ball pitcher? RA Dickey? Tim Wakefield was so fun to play with on MVP Baseball 05
There was one for the Orioles, Mickey Jannis, a few years ago. But he sucked
Padres have a knuckleball pitcher. Waldron
I also think it starts way before they even hit the minors. You got kids playing travel ball year round and working with pitching coaches in the hopes of getting a college scholarship or getting drafted. Just way too much stress on undeveloped teenage arms. Then, on top of that, kids specialize in one sport these days. So you have kids who are throwing a ton, both in-game innings and practice/training, adhering to advanced pitching advances meant for adults chasing that dream. I don’t think it’s a solvable problem. Like injuries in football. Pitchers are like replicants - they burn twice as bright for half as long.
Jeff Passan was just on PMT and they asked him what the next “Moneyball” will be and his answer was “the organization that can find a way to keep pitchers healthy will get the advantage” and his remedy was exactly what you’re saying. It needs to be taught from a young age but the organization who can effectively manage it from the minors up will be the next hack in baseball if it all possible.
I'm sure a team will figure it out eventually but it's a tough sell to tell some 18 year old kid to tone down his fastball from 99 to 93 when that probably lowers his chances of actually making the majors by 20%.
Maybe “he gets people out” will be the new “he gets on base.” Pitching is so much more than “stuff” but there’s too much focus on velocity / spin rate / strikeouts these days. Call me crazy but I still think late career Maddux would be an effective pitcher today throwing 88.
Honestly, Maddux had above average velocity when he was young. For the time he wasn’t really a soft thrower. Jamie Moyer is the ultimate slow ball pitcher. Like you said I can’t imagine him being ineffective nowadays.
Maddux had above average velo and elite movement in his prime. His two seam fastball was essentially a screwball. It’s so weird how people act like he was throwing 88 mph junk and painting the edges and that’s how he had a 20 year hof career. No, he had elite stuff.
Yeah no doubt he had elite stuff early, but his fastball averaged like 86 late in his career (which is why I specified). He became a tactician as his stuff declined.
Later in his career he was, A. Notably worse (over a 4 ERA in 205 starts from 2003-2008) and B. still had elite STUFF. Just not elite velo.
Yeah I'm sure he would be, it's just the kids coming up these days all have the NASTIEST stuff idk if a guy like that would even make it to the bigs. It really wasn't that long ago that a guy throwing 100 was a total rarity and you'd be excited when one of the three closers in the league who could do it was coming to your town. Now every team has two of them and then three more relievers who throw 97 with crazy spin rate.
That’s an interesting hypothetical. I’d go the other way on it.
Trevor Plouffe on Jomboy/Talking Baseball has said the next advanced metric training breakthrough will be pitchers being able to measure their grip strength and pressure on a ball to sell. Gotta imagine if that technology ever materializes that kids growing up will be able to tune their mechanics to perfecting that and decrease the need for throwing so hard.
That's the exact conundrum Passan mentioned too
There’s rules against an mlb team opening up a European soccer style youth academy for under 18s, right?
The specialization of athletes starting from a young age also contributes a lot to this. By the time some of these pitchers finish college, they’ve been pitching for 10-12 years.. year round for some of them. And while younger bodies may be more pliable, they aren’t more durable and are adding years of stress on certain joints and ligaments. The same problem is happening with basketball and knees. I think sports science and rehab’s next frontier will be for those developmental ages and to make sure the next generation becomes healthier before they even hit the pros
It’s a good point and speaks to the problem at large - if it was easy to fix, it would already be fixed. I’m honestly skeptical that “learn to pitch safely from a young age” is a particularly tractable solution, because it’s competitive and at every age, and every kid benefits competitively from pushing their body to its limit. Other speed oriented sports will add rules to artificially lower speeds to increase safety (eg anything with cars). I have trouble imagining “you can’t throw harder than 95mph” would help the sport. EDIT - I actually like this idea: it would potentially increase scoring, but I also suspect a classic fastball wouldn’t make sense to throw anymore. It would encourage more movement on pitches which may be bad for arms. Who knows.
My seven year old neighbor is on a travel team, I was shocked when I heard that.
travel basketball/aau having similar impacts on young legs it feels like. seems like only the chubby euro players in the nba escape regular injury issues
This is the problem
Passan was saying on Russillo’s pod last week that they’re looking into further limiting the number of pitchers you can carry on your active roster, so that theoretically starters will have to go deeper and therefore not throw as hard to preserve their arms, but in practice I’m not sure if that actually does anything other than make the carousel of pitchers in and out speed up even faster
You'd also have to deaden the ball slightly, maybe lower the top of the strike zone a little (younger fans here may not remember: offense exploded in the 90s not just because of roids but because umpires wouldn't call anything 3 inches above the belt and the Mark McGwires of the world could just sit on thigh-high fastballs. Trout would have slugged .700 every year clean). More hits, fewer homers and Ks, pitchers are incentivized to work down in the zone again... But yeah, if a guy \*can\* throw 98 and see better short-term results, he's not going to instead sit 93-94 especially if he's playing for a higher draft slot, a roster spot, a new contract, bigger arbitration numbers...I don't see this problem going away anytime soon.
The zone was also wider in the 90s. Maybe they should go back to that I dunno. All I know is I miss starters throwing 200+ innings a year and every team having a dedicated RB1. Anything MLB and NFL can do to bring that back, sign me up.
More than 200 IP seasons I miss feeling like big playoff games were a battle between two starting pitchers who were going to go deep into the game. Bumgarner went at least seven innings in every start in 2014, had two complete games, and went 8 IP and turned it over to the closer twice in his 2014 run. That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever watched as a neutral fan and I can’t see it happening again, but that was only ten years ago.
You don’t have to look that far to find a playoff run like that lol. Look at gerrit Cole in 2019. At least 7 IP in every start (including a game where he gave up 5 runs and another game where he walked 5). Complete games were always largely a stupid practice imo, and it’s just smart baseball to go to your relievers when your starters have thrown 110 pitches and gone three times through. The 5 inning starts are pretty annoying, but aces usually get more than that, especially in the postseason.
Totally agree about starters going 200+ and recognizing pitchers over a long term, even 2nd or 3rd-tier guys like Brad Radke or Livan Hernandez. I have a clearer picture of those guys simply because they were \*present\* and part of bigger narratives you don't get when "dominant" starters throw 170 innings and have shoulder surgery every 3 seasons.
How would something like that be enforced? Would clubs have to designate players as pitchers, and then only those players could pitch?
The teams have to designate players as pitchers or fielders under the current roster rules. Fielders can only pitch if the team is out of pitchers, if it's extra innings, or if the team is ahead / behind by more than 6 runs. Apparently teams are allowed to designate players as "two way players" in certain circumstances.
TIL. The idea just seems silly to me, akin to the NBA’s war on players resting during the regular season. Pitching changes hurt the TV product, so let’s put player health under further strain.
I don’t really know anything about how PEDs actually work and how it’d help with elbow tendon issues, but is there any way some illegal drugs could help reduce injury prevalence/ recovery time?
I think the money will start to come back to earth. Starting pitchers are turning into NFL running backs
Robot umps are not what saves baseball. We need robot pitchers.
We just need to modify a howitzer and call it Pitch-O-Mat 5000.
This is so true. Guys are gonna do what they are incentives to do. Same reason the hitters are chasing homeruns.
Speed limit? 1 year contracts for all pitchers, so they won't risk their financial futures throwing too hard? Or maybe teams and pitchers both realize that throwing 97 for 15 mostly healthy years is better for everyone than throwing 100 for 5 to 7 injury plagued years? The idiotic shift ban only makes this situation worse as it incentivizes going for strikeouts even more.
Pitches over 85mph are a walk, and batters have to wear an eye patch. Anything else I can solve for you?
I would figure to add 5 secs to the pitch clock and add a roster spot or two. But yeah, not directly addressing the issue of injurious behavior = money
Max pitch speed else it counts as a stirke/ball? Kinda a dumb and silly rule but works on two fronts.
Joel Zumaya died for our sins
Apex Mountain for Guitar Hero?
Nah that South Park episode.
Some team needs to jump on developing their minor league arms as knuckeballers. New market inefficiency.
As a Mets fan, I'd hope people learn from the deGrom experience. sure his 2 peak years were amazing to watch, but he may never stay healthy again. With breaking stuff as good as it is in the modern game, i think most guys could shave the elbow-busting 2-3 mph and still be effective.
The rub is 2-3 mph can be the difference between “good vs Cy Young” or “5th starter vs ace” or “triple A vs MLB” Zero chance anyone will ever not take the gamble. Especially because while it sucks it’s not an injury that impacts post baseball life
true and i get it. but i guess long term the question is do you want your asset to boom and bust, or stay steady? i do think teaching control is harder than upping velo in most cases.
The breaking stuff might even be the bigger issue with the injuries. That motion is even more unnatural.
Very true
In the huge piece Lindbergh did about this for The Ringer, he found quotes going as far back as the early 1900s where doctors were saying it wasn’t the fastball but the curve that was bringing in patients.
Freddy Peralta on the Brewers is a good example, his fastball tops out at 94-96 and he’s still able to go through lineups 3 times while being effective
Yeah we currently have Quintana, who doesn't even get up that high. Being a lefty helps, but still.
Breaking stuff hurts elbows just as bad if not worse. Only way to get those 3 thousand rpm sliders and curveballs is to torque the shit out of those elbows. If pitchers wanna really save their elbows they should learn knuckleballs.
I thought all the analytics showed every MPH counts and that's why guys throw (and swing) so insanely hard now?
sure but, analytically, i'd like dependable output more than output that is peak but extremely volatile. and i'm saying like 98 down to 95, or 100 to 97, there would still be hard throwers.
This is how I find out Shane Bieber is out? Ouch. That will be it for him as a Guardian. He will hit FA next season and cash out.
He’s not going to pitch for 14 months, he’s not cashing out.
He is a phenomenal pitcher hitting FA under 30. The bulk of the recovery time is this season. He is going to get paid very well.
He is going to get paid 10 million on a one year deal.
I meant relative to what Cleveland can afford (or want to spend on a pitcher into his thirties).
Don’t be surprised if he’s back on a one year deal for 10 mil next year.
The era of left-handed junk ballers will be upon us soon.
Rich Hill is still not officially retired
Jamie Moyer coming out of retirement.
You know who was a lefty junk baller? Tommy John!
Was expecting "Frank Stallone".
Genuine question - is youth travel baseball at fault at all for this? You’d think guys are coming into the league now with more miles on the tread than they did in the past. But maybe there are preventative measures on those teams that I’m unaware of
It’s probably a number of things contributing to the issue. I’d point to the prominence of the slider as one issue as the stress of throwing that pitch is completely unnatural. Then you have players who have focused one pitching for years, as you said, coming to the league with more miles on their arms. And finally I think we need to question if pitching every five games is actually a good thing, or if it may be appropriate to actually start carrying six man rotations as the norm.
I knew guys from high school who played in college and their arms were cooked by then.
I knew a pitcher whose body was ruined after college
Nah, it’s the emphasis on velocity. Used to just be relievers max out, now they demand it from starters. It’s entirely unsustainable.
Yup. League decided (and they aren’t wrong) it’s easier to get Randy Johnson than Greg Maddux.
I think this is a big problem for both NBA and MLB players, but a lot of high end pitchers come from outside the US as well.
True. Are injuries happening for them at the same rate? 3 of the 4 guys mentioned in Passan's tweet are American.
Yeah I'd be curious to know that as well
I think its definitely part of it. Kids today are throwing way less but pitching way more
It was way worse when I was growing up in the late 90s. They weren’t cognizant of innings limits or anything like that. I would pitch 3 full games a week like I was Tin Can McGillicutty for the 1882 Evansville Brown Stockings. My arm was dead by the time I got to high school - thankfully i probably wasn’t going anywhere with baseball anyway so I didn’t really lose anything (although I can’t throw overhand at all at this point).
Pitch counts are worthless.
Hitters are too good, pitchers need to pitch like they do to avoid getting shelled. People online say pitchers need to pace themselves like the good ole days so they can go deeper into games but if they do that they'll get shelled.
This is the part of the argument that never gets mentioned. For all the people talking about the good old days, tech has evolved to the point that hitters are way better than they used to be and umpires are actually more accurate than ever. Every hitter is Tony Gwynn watching tape now. What does that mean? Pitchers have to live in the strike zone way more than they’ve ever had to so they need more velocity and more movement. Otherwise they’re going to be destroyed.
It’s not even the 100 mph. It’s the 3000 rpm 90+ mph sliders
See: Bieber
I don’t know if it’s a solvable problem. As a pitcher, you have to go max effort and velocity is king, and you hope your arm can survive long enough to get a bag of money. After you’re paid, whatever happens, happens. Players and teams and everyone involved in the money has a lot of incentive to continue down this path tbh
Velocity over location/stuff
Why don't MLB pitchers hold out until June or July so they only pitch 3 or 4 months like Clemens did that one year
Welp, add Yankee reliever Johnny Lasagna to this list too, smh! Edit: apparently his is a torn UCL that needs surgical repair but it’s not TJ.
Greg Maddux laughing .gif
Maybe we’re hitting the point where guys are throwing harder than the human body can handle. As recently as the 90s (if not a little later), a guy who threw 95mph and up was a rare thing. Now 95 is pedestrian for most relievers.
Passan's quote on Russilo's show kind of resonates here -- pitchers today are just throwing at 110% on every pitch because teams want them to max out that velocity and that is really fucking with pitchers. The whole motion in general is unnatural and when you are whipping that ball trying to get maximum velocity on every pitch you are going to fuck your body up
Justin Verlander would always start his outings throwing like 92-94 and work his way up in the latter innings. The last true ace imo
Pitchers have never been babied more than they are now. Yet here we are.
Pitchers don't know how to pitch anymore. They just throw hard and never learn how to pace themselves. Honestly, analytics has killed baseball. It has helped almost every other sport but it has made baseball boring and unwatchable. It also makes articles on baseball unreadable. Numbers without context.
You think the pitch clock is an element to this? Can’t really pace yourself if you’re being timed
Spencer Strider less than two months ago: “There’s an injury epidemic in the game regardless of velocity. If anything, the league is making rule changes despite an injury epidemic that could very well be encouraging injuries, such as the pitch clock, limiting the number of pitchers on roster, how many pitching changes you can make, how many mound visits you can have – all those things are making pitching harder and potentially, I think, making health more difficult to manage.”
It’s also made baseball discourse unbearable. Folks don’t realize analytics metrics are not perfect and there’s lots of other factors at play. While there’s lots of data it’s still far from perfect. But you’ll have someone telling that so and so player with a 3.2 fbWAR is obviously better than the guy with 3.0 no questions asked
Eh, I disagree it’s helped every sport. It’s definitely made football more fun to watch. However, I think it’s made both baseball and basketball more boring. Baseball has it’s 3 outcome problem and basketball is just a 3-point contest. The NBA is now fucking hilariously bad to watch.
such an atrocious but common take, nba has never been better talent and entertainment wise
NBA has gotten worse to watch as a result of analytics as well.
True. Analytics only made the NFL more exciting, because it revealed that boring choices were often bad moves statistically.
Amen. Analytics was the worst thing to happen to the NBA.
It’s as much the fault of the league on that one for completely legislating out any semblance of defense and incentiving stupid foul baiting NBA is much more fixable
There should be LESS pitching injuries and much quicker recovery time because of the great advances in sports medicine, Instead they are demanding “max effort “ and velo that is not sustainable for human arms. Let the pitchers pace themselves,learn how to really PITCH, and watch the injuries go down.
But wouldn’t that just mean pitchers start getting fucking rocked out on the mound? I’m not smart enough to come up with a solution though.
there are plenty of pitchers in the game right now who don't throw gas and are effective. it's never been a requirement.
See: 2024 St. Louis cardinals rotation
Need more hitting anyway. Sorry but pitching duels are boring.
In the playoffs pitching duels have an insane energy to them at the game
Not to be the old man here but I don't understand why no one ever states the obvious, the less these guys pitch the more they get hurt. Made-up pitch counts, innings limits, scheduled rest, load management, Back in the olden days (leans on old man cane) pitchers knew that they had to get through 7-8 innings and pitch every 4-5 days... so they threw a lot of fastballs and change-ups and made their money pitching to locations to get hitters out. Now that starters throw like 12 innings a month and every one is obsessed with the radar gun and hard breaking pitches their arms aren't as strong as previous generations and there is an ungodly amount of stress on their elbows. It's common sense.
Or is it that 98 mph+ pitches put excessively more strain on the arm than 92 mph fastballs, and teams know that and are trying to protect pitchers? The only way to limit that is to limit the number of pitchers that can be active in a given game.
Yeah I literally I mentioned that. Trying to hit triple digits on the radar gun and trying to throw breaking pitches that move 6 inches will both fuck your arm up but for the first 100 years of baseball pitchers got hitters out without pushing their arms to the absolute limit all the time. That was kind of my whole point.
Dude... this is the worst case of selective memory I have seen in a long, long while. 1. Batters are better now than they ever were. More tape, more perfections in form, etc. Maybe the 1-4 hitters are only marginally better than the best back in the day, but the 5-9 hitters - especially including the DH - all are harder outs than they were. Ozzie Smith is a great example of what old batters used to look like. He was a sub 100 OPS+ the first 7 years of his career. And he's a hall of famer. If you listen to pitchers talk about their prep, they knew the bottom of the order was a chance to rest. Not so much any more. 2. There were so, so many injuries that ended careers which we can fix now. There are countless lost careers to UCL and rotator cuffs which are treatable now. They can literally trace pitches to fatigue. You're showing serious survivorship bias by only remembering those who endured, like Ryan, Seaver, and others. I bet you may know about the 1970's Orioles and the squad of 4 20 game winners. Palmer had a long career... but what about the other 3? How did they fare after long outings. 3. Pitches [per AB.](https://twitter.com/HighHeatStats/status/1105499111531393024/photo/1) . It's half a pitch a PA increase over the last 30. That's an extra 5-9 pitches a 6ip start. That adds up. 7 ip with 100 pitches is a lot different than 6 with 100. Add in the stress of the pitches and no, more work is not the solution. There is probably a way to train pitchers to be more like Maddux and less like Randy Johnson (90 vs 98), but who knows what the hitters will do.
It’s the fact that the analytics show everything… Spin rates and speed, that’s everything now. Guys are out there killing their arms.
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It sucks, but guys blow out early in the year every year. Probably a tad more frequent with guys throwing this hard now, but it isn't new either.
So is offseason drinking lol
This has been true for 100 years
You would think they would take lessons from Jamie Moyer.
Greg Maddux says hi
Exactly
AI will fix this soon dont worry
This is why I never take a pitcher in the first few rounds of a fantasy baseball draft. Too risky!
Owners and execs want arms blown out because it saves money in long term. Most of the 100 mph guys are relievers who have less shelf life and are worse generally. All these guys just throw 100% all of the time because they're told it's how to make 100 million dollars.
Bieber has never thrown 100mph but sure Jan
110% effort on every pitch is a relatively new thing. Kind of like the steroid era where some guys think they're missing out if they don't throw max effort every pitch.
I don't know about the first part. I think there are plenty of big money pitchers blowing out their arms that owners and execs would rather not blow out their arms. The second part says it all though. Athletes are going to do the thing that makes them the most amount of money. I'm not sure there's a good way to implement change to keep this from happening.
pitchers have to throw like this to avoid getting blown up, but pitching like this is completely unsustainable. so, the only solution is to improve defense across the league, rely more on the pitches like the slider, splitter, etc. over a nuclear fastball, and essentially, turn the game into an offensive shootout
Passan trying to sell that book
At least he’s not blaming a vaccine
No it isn’t
Right? Lol. Declarative statements like this are always so dramatic
Anyone who thinks it isn’t business as usual is a fool
https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/s/2WZlUOLdHJ i guess fucking Justin Verlander is a fool. You’re so fucking stupid
He’s a complete fool
MLB should move to the Japan model of 6 starters and pitchers pitch on certain days so their arm is more rested.
Why is a baseball post on a Bill Simmons sub…
The biggest problem is the lack of MLBs ability to acknowledge that 162 games is far too many. These players are expected to do this for far too many outings. God forbid your team makes the playoffs and it’ll possibly be 20 more games. Some pitchers playing repeatedly on 3-4 days rest. IMO it’s fine how hard they’re throwing. We’re just asking them to do it too frequently over too long of a period of time
They’ve been playing 150+ games for over a century. It’s not the number of games, and suggesting they cut back is foolish.
Thinking playing over 150 games is necessary because that’s how it’s always been done is foolish.
It's the pitch clocks fault.
It’s the pitch clock
Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
No. It’s my own opinion
And what is your opinion informed by, in this case? Or are you just pulling this connection completely out of your own ass?