Baseball is hurting our kids
Youth baseball in the United States does not typically involve the militaristic training regimes common among elite youth players in Japan. But the number of arm injuries among American kids is still alarming. A study published last year in The American Journal of Sports Medicine found that from 2007 to 2011, nearly 57 percent of Tommy John surgeries here were performed on 15 – to 19-year-olds.
Baseball has evolved into a yearround sport. Options are bountiful: school teams, multiple travel teams and indoor training centers. If your kid wants to play at an elite level, the pressure to play 12 months a year is immense.
For pitchers in particular, this is a recipe for disaster. According to a study by the American Sports Medicine Institute, kids who pitched competitively more than eight months a year were five times as likely to hurt their arms than those who limited themselves to fewer than eight.
There have been efforts in youth leagues for some time to limit the number of pitches thrown per game. But per-game pitch counts alone are not an effective solution – not with pitchers throwing more games per year, and with the increasing use of radar guns, which prompt pitchers to intensify their velocity. And this is to say nothing of the showcase circuit, a group of events put on throughout the year by a company called Perfect Game, in which 11 – to 18-year-olds throw as hard as they can – the older ones to impress Major League scouts, the youngest for no good reason.
Major League Baseball started a program called Pitch Smart in November 2014. It offers guidelines on safe and effective practices for pitchers of different age groups. For pitchers 8 and younger, for example, Pitch Smart recommends pitching fewer than 60 innings per year, as well as taking at least four months off from pitching.
This is a proactive step by a league that for too long ignored the problem. At the same time, Pitch Smart suggests that an 8-year-old may throw up to 50 pitches per game. Though that is 25 pitches fewer than the limit that Little League Baseball provided when it implemented pitch counts in 2007, I have no intention of letting kids on my son’s team get anywhere near that threshold. The boys who pitch will throw a maximum of one inning at a time, once a week, 30 pitches tops. The rationale behind my rules is simple: These boys have got years to build up arm strength. Until research shows more conclusively what is – and what isn’t – a safe amount of pitching for still-growing arms, no harm comes from babying them.
My own excess of caution is not a national solution. Major League Baseball must recapture the youth development apparatus from the showcase industry, which profits from year-round baseball. Coaches must better educate themselves on the perils of too much pitching. And starry-eyed parents must understand that college baseball scholarships or professional signing bonuses are almost always pipe dreams.
The day I visited Mamizuka’s office, I saw another boy, who was 9 years old. Two months earlier, he had surgery to place a pin inside his elbow. His arm remained splinted. Mamizuka inspected it and nodded. Then he asked a question of the boy. “Still like baseball?” he said.
“Yes,” said the boy, and the determined look on his face was so familiar to me. Parents and coaches fall prey to it every day. The kid who wants to keep going, who can pitch through the pain, who wants to impress with his toughness.
My son loves baseball, too – so much he wants to play sunrise to sunset. He knows better, though, because I tell him the dangers. It’s incumbent on other parents and coaches to start doing the same.
Jeff Passan, a baseball columnist at Yahoo Sports, is the author of ‘The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports.’