OT: Why do we limit Major league pitchers innings and pitches?
Interesting article in the WSJ on pitch limiting, using the top Dodgers prospect as an example. As any baseball fan knows, teams are now strictly limiting pitch counts and innings pitched, in the effort to avoid arm injuries, especially Tommy John surgery. As fans of baseball history know, it was only in the last 25 years or so that we adopted five man rotations, before that pitchers started every fourth day, and pitch counts were very rare. We are now much more concerned with the health of pitchers, so we limit them to 100 pitches or so, and monitor innings pitched very closely.
There is only one problem with this: there is literally zero evidence that any of that works. There are MORE Tommy John surgeries now than there were 20 years ago before we started taking better care of pitchers arms, and pitching injuries are also above where they were before teams started doing this. Baseball is adanced stats crazy (and I agree with this) but for some reason teams when taking care of pitchers rely on pure superstition with no facts underneath them.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-julio-urias-dilemma-baseball-babies-its…
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Maybe because what they do with their arms and shoulders approaches and sometimes exceeds the physical limits of what the connective tissues can sustain? See also "Why we don't all have Formula 1 engines in our street cars."
It was just as true in the 1980's, when there were fewer pitching injuries right?
I haven't read all of the data or anything, but you don't need to have an MD to know that limiting your use of something typically lowers the chance that you injure it or wear it out. Pitchers are throwing harder than they were 50 years ago as well, and I'm sure that contributes to the increase.
I also think a part of the pitch count monitoring isn't just about long-term issues, but to determine when a pitcher becomes fatigued within a game. This varies from pitcher to pitcher and we see that. It's not incommon for a pitcher to start missing pitches once he's thrown between 90 and 110 pitches in a game.
He never put a limit on the pitchers and encouraged frequent (daily if I recall) workouts in the bullpen. However, he taught his guys to throw at 85-90% "cruising" speed.
Nowadays, he says everyone is taught to throw at 100% all the time and the practice is shredding arms.
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but there was a study done with a west coast track team, I believe San Jose State, where for practice one day they were told to run each even at 85%. More PRs and SRs were set that day than any other day, because it was theorized that attempting to try harder eventually leads to a break down in form and ability. I think that possibly may apply here.
Pitchers have always been injury prone. The game was approached differently back in the day and if you don't think folks like Bob Feller or Walter Johnson or Bob Gibson felt the consequence of pitching that much you're crazy. There is also data that correlates stressful pitches to injury when a pitcher has a long inning with men on base and lots of pitches.
is that more than half of Tommy John surgeries are now on teenagers.
Great interview with Jeff Passan on NPR recently, talking about his new book The Arm. it comes down mostly on the side that it's not so much the use at the MLB level that's the problem, but that kids are throwing earlier and harder than ever before, and that actualy does have statistical correlation with surgery later on.
Worth a listen or a read of the transcript:
http://www.npr.org/2016/03/31/472541597/injuries-increase-as-pitchers-t…
Adding a blurb on the mechanics and physiology for those interested (clipped from interview linked above)
PASSAN: The way that throwing anything not just the ball but any overhand throwing works is through something called the kinetic chain. And the kinetic chain is essentially the building up of energy because every part of your body is intertwined and all of that energy loading into a particular place. And when you're throwing something overhand, it starts down at your feet, your ankles up through your backside, all the way up your back, and the energy goes into the shoulder. And when the energy is in the shoulder, imagine a rubber band being pulled back as far as it possibly can and as tight as it actually can. That's what happens when your foot lands and when your hips start to turn. Your arm almost lays back flat and parallel to the ground. And at that point, once it reaches as far as it can go, the motion going forward is the fastest movement the human body can make. It is 8,000 degrees per second. It's faster than an eye blink, and that's called the internal rotation of the shoulder. When the shoulder is internally rotating, all of that energy goes down the arm and into the elbow and onto this ulnar collateral ligament which is just a 2-inch triangular band of flesh. And unlike shoulder muscles which can be strengthened, ligaments cannot be. And so all of this pressure going onto the ligament time after time after time will wear you down. The harder you throw, the more force is going down there.
I think the earlier development is the issue. The speeds kids throw along with the pitches hurts the game.
It is overuse of young arms as they are developing.
It used to be kids played a ton of different sports. Now kids specialize at a young age and, in some climates, play year round. So superstar pitchers start throwing, hard, at a young age and never stop, ever. They rack up TONS more use before they get to the pros than they would have 40 yeras ago.
Ideally, you wouldn't put a ton of stress (meaning high IP for a year) on a pitcher's arm until their mid-20's, if you could avoid it.
the rubber band analogy is one i always used to describe the situation. but i think about it this way: nowadays pitchers throw at or near 100% effort on practically every pitch. that is very much like expanding a rubber band to its limit. doing that over and over again will eventually make that rubber band fail.
now, if you go back decades, it's a well known fact that pitchers used to "coast" (not throw near max effort) until they got into trouble (ie. a few men on base). then they would apply max effort to get out of the jam. you could stretch a rubber band to 90% capacity all day long. think about when you were a kid, you could play catch with a buddy for hours; or several hundred throws.
the jury is still out on whether there is any merit to 100 pitch counts. are the tendons/ligaments more likely to fail after 100 pitches? i don't think we know yet. if the 100 pitch count was some magic number then, theoretically, a relief pitcher would never blow out his ligaments and never need tommy john surgery.
just my two cents.
Question: what pitcher has the most MLB wins after having tommy john surgery?
Answer: tommy john. yep, the original guinea pig still holds the record. pretty amazing if you think about it. i always love asking that question.
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So more injuries today means pitch counts don't work? Limiting pitch counts would be flawed only if high pitch counts were the sole causation of injuries. Today pitchers might be pitching heavier work loads earlier in life (like pre-teen years) and that shows up in injuries down the road. They could also be throwing harder every pitch. If you have to pitch 9 innings in two days you aren't going to be throwing hard late into the game so it'd be dumb to throw 95+ in the 7th, 8th, 9th inning like you see some starters do. Pitchers might throw more sliders/curves that torque the arm differently making it more likely to be injured. Pittchers might be stronger (to throw faster) and that means they put more wear and tear on the shoulder when they go against their arm strength by rotating the shoulder (slurves do this). You are fighting against a stronger resistance force than less players that didn't do weights 20-30 years ago. Also, Tommy John used to a much more serious surgery so more players may have been steered away from surgery to things like physical therapy.
All in all, pitch counts might be limiting injuries but other factors are overwhelming the benefit pitch count limits bring.
snd it would be wrong to limit it to just one factor--except the reason for pitch and inning counts is specifically listed by every single manager and front office exec as protecting pitchers from injury. It is not doing that, that is a fact. I also think you way over-rate the differences in pitching now and 20 years ago, they are far fewer than you believe.
I dunno what baseball was like in the 70s and 80s, but I think it's less the number of pitches and more the kind of pitches. Triple digit fastballs, sliders, slurves, etc. are all murder on a pitcher's arm. I dunno how prevalent those kind of pitches were back then.
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is a very violent act upon the muscles and ligaments of the arm and shoulder. While some pitchers have an "easier" pitching motion than others, the fact remains that arms did not evolve in such a way that allows for throwing objects overhand over-and-over again at 90+ mph.
I've sometimes wondered what would have happened early in the evolution of the game of baseball (19th century) if pitchers had instead adopted a throwing motion similar to that of fastpitch softball, which is much easier on the arm.
early baseball did throw underhand. it evolved into throwing overhand. i assume because they could throw harder and make the ball move more.
hell, in the early days, batters could call for a high or a low pitch and that is how umpires called balls/strikes.
Pitch counts and innings pitched are just statistics.
/Devin Funchess says hi!
Yeah, cause the procedures barely existed 20 years ago and those types of injuries would've ended a prospects career and you never would've heard about them. Or since the success rate has been fairly high, more pitchers are opting to have surgery rather than resting/rehabbing it (not to mention some having pre-emptive surgery in the hopes they'll come back throwing harder)
All pitching injuries are up, all of them.
Are the injuries up? Or are more players seeking treatment rather than hiding it?
Isn't it super weird that Tommy John needed Tommy John Surgery, and Lou Gehrig had Lou Gehrig's Disease? Also, Achilles was killed by getting shot in the Achilles Heel with an arrow. I just blew my own mind...
Holy smokes, you're right. I'm calling my wife immediately to tell her we're no longer naming our next some Alzheimer. We'll just donate that monogrammed pillow to charity or something.
I really regret the decision to name my first born Raging Hepatitis C. But, no going back...
Knowing nothing about pitching, I always thought that the injury issues stemmed from throwing curveballs too young.
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considerations are a big part of it, I would think. You have guys like Clayton Kershaw being paid an incredible amount of money. Like it or not, baseball players are depreciating assets. There are not many things a ball club can do to protect its investment, but pitch counts are one. The efficacy of it might be questionable, but it gives ball clubs a feeling of control.
throw A LOT harder - with maximum effort every pitch - across the board than they used to. Combine that max effort on every pitch with some questionable training tactics and you are going to have injuries. The thoery says there is a finite number of pitches an average human can execute at the major league level in their career. Teams have decided spreading out those pitches is the smart way to go.
The framing of this issue highlights an important pitfall with respect to obsessions over "data-driven" decisions. Obviously, it's better to know more about the world than less, and we should use real knowledge to do smarter things. But good (less charitably: non-useless) empirical work can be *really* hard. As highlighted in this thread: there are a million things -- changing body types, different training methods, different approaches to pitching intensity -- that confound and are likely endogenous to pitch counts. Teasing out all the different causal pathways to pitcher injury rates would be an enormously difficult thing to do well. Which is not to say that we shouldn't try to do it, or that it wouldn't be useful if we did. But the absence of solid empirical evidence in favor of pitch counts doesn't count as evidence against them. More generally: there are other good reasons to do things besides overwhelming empirical evidence.
We've become soft and coddle our stars.
Now get off my lawn.
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You forgot gluten, vaccines and Monsanto
Also the correlation with chronic masturbation. TJ surgeries significantly increased with the popularity of internet porn. And ISIS.
This is a good point. Chris Young's stuff seems benign but he gets guys out because of his height and the subsequent slope of his pitches.
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