Pitchers at greater risk of injury if and when baseball resumes
A shorter baseball season will place more importance on each game, which is the last thing pitchers coming off an abbreviated second spring training, held in the summer, need to be thinking about when delivering a pitch.
Spring training lasts six weeks because that’s considered the optimum period of time for starting pitchers to prepare their arms to last well into nine-inning games and to build their arms in a way that minimizes risk of injury. Cut that preparation time in half and the risk of injury grows.
Which teams have pitchers who have used the lockdown time wisely could play as big a part in pennant races as the amount of talent on the rosters.
Dr. Joshua Dines, an orthopedic surgeon from the Hospital for Special Surgery, shared his thoughts about the baseball-related health risks of a shortened season.
“A big concern for me is that
kind of acute vs. chronic workload ratio, where even if you’ve been doing a little, if you ramp up too quickly over a short period of time, that’s where you become at the highest risk for injury,” Dines said. “If you haven’t been pitching much over the last three months, and now there’s a big spike in your activity, that’s where you really set yourself up for injury. Teams are aware of that, which is good, but really monitoring the acute vs. chronic workload ratio is going to be very important.”
A short season will test the patience of managers.
“How are pitchers going to be used early in the season?” Dines wondered. “Are managers going to be smarter and kind of almost institute sort of lower pitch counts for a longer period of time, even at the potential expense of winning games to protect the players’ health? That’s where I’ve got concerns as well. When you start really high-loading it, you start pushing with adrenaline, pushing it a little, that’s maybe where injuries get exposed. And that is a concern.”
Managers will be under orders from the front office to proceed with extreme caution with pitchers, especially those in whom ball clubs have tens of millions of dollars invested. That likely will lead to liberal use of openers, at least in the opening month of the season, which could be another way of saying the first half of the season, depending on what agreement the owners and players reach in ongoing labor negotiations.
If managers go the openers route in the early weeks of the season, pitchers will need to exercise discipline to make that work. Here’s how that could backfire: A starting pitcher knowing he’s scheduled to pitch three innings, instead of pacing himself as he would in a start twice as long, defeats the purpose of the shorter load by maxing out on every pitch and blows out his arm.