NEEDING A SAVE
With more star hurlers added to the injured list daily, MLB and its union must protect ballplayers from further pain
SHOHEI Ohtani is the best-paid and most important player in MLB. He also is not pitching this season after undergoing Tommy John surgery. He is tied — at minimum as the unwitting moneyman — to the largest gambling story in the sport since Pete Rose. He daily wears the amateurish softball uniforms that apparently no one is responsible for, yet every player must wear. He is part of a union that just warded off one of the most spineless coup d’état attempts in history. Ohtani is pretty much playing for the Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas A’s away from filling the whole Bingo card of baseball malfeasance that has pervaded the first week-plus of the 2024 season. Just as an aside here, if neither the league nor any of his fellow magnates are going to hold A‘s owner John Fisher to even a modicum of decency and professionalism, can’t they at least demand he wear one of those Nikedesigned, Fanatics-manufactured, MLB-sanctioned uniforms so we can see just how much he sweats on those rare occasions when he spins publicly about his bad stewardship? Then, just as a kicker, FanDuel can have set an Over/Under for how much the sweat-filled jersey and seethrough pants weigh after a nonsense-filled press conference. But I digress.
On the crisis-o-meter, I am returning to a subject I wrote about last Sunday in a column that began:
“There is an epidemic in baseball. Everyone involved in the game knows it exists.” I was focusing on pitching injuries. Before a pitch was thrown in the 2024 season, there were 166 players on the injured list and 132 were pitchers, or 79.5 percent. The totals have been rising annually, and, again, this was prior to a ball being delivered to a hitter. Before the second weekend of the season had concluded, it was learned that one of the best young starters in the game, the Marlins’ Eury Perez, needed Tommy John surgery, as did 2020 AL Cy Young winner Shane Bieber of the Guardians, as might the Braves’ dynamic Spencer Strider. Yankees reliever Jonathan Loaisiga needed season-ending UCL surgery.
The way this season is progressing, the Cy Young awards may go to the last pitchers standing — or more aptly, throwing.
Twenty pitchers received Cy Young votes between the two leagues last year. If Strider needs Tommy John surgery, he would join Baltimore closer Felix Bautista, who already underwent the procedure, among that group to have the surgery. Then we have Gerrit Cole, Kodai Senga, Kyle Bradish and Sonny Gray who had yet to throw a pitch this season. Only Gray (hamstring) was absent due to a non-arm ailment, and he made his 2024 debut on Tuesday. Justin Steele lasted one start, during which he suffered his own hamstring injury that landed him on the IL. Kevin Gausman missed time in spring training due to a shoulder injury and was throwing with considerably less velocity on Saturday night while being pummeled by the Yankees.
At this point, when your pitcher “only” blows out a hamstring, you let out a sigh of relief — or should that be a Cy of relief ?
Because they would fight over whether the word “fight” begins with an “f,” the Players Association and MLB put out contentious statements Saturday regarding the pitching injury plague. Union executive director Tony Clark issued a missive that blamed MLB for not listening to player disenchantment about reducing the pitch clock further this year — from 20 to 18 seconds with men on base. He said MLB had created an “unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset — the players” by not doing further study on the impact of less recovery time between pitches.
MLB countered with “an independent analysis by Johns Hopkins University that found no evidence to support that the introduction of the pitch clock has increased injuries,” adding the league is in the midst of a larger study to examine why pitching injuries are becoming more frequent.
MLB noted that even before the pitch clock was introduced, longterm trend lines showed an increase in injuries concurrent with the extreme chasing of velocity and stuff, particularly over the past decade.
I am not here to say the pitch clock cannot be a contributing factor to injuries. I am with Cole, the most thoughtful person with whom I speak about pitching, when he said to dismiss the clock as a potential contributing factor without more years to study the impact is “irresponsible.”
But I think we have to get to the core issues causing these injuries. And, unfortunately, I am old enough to remember a sport from the 1970s80s when pitchers were throwing a pitch probably every 10 seconds. But what they weren’t trying to do is maximize stuff — velocity and movement — on every pitch. If you do that and increase the frequency with which you throw, well, that can’t be a great combination.
I thought Aaron Boone was good on the subject.
“Throwing is not the most natural motion,” the Yankees manager said. “Velocity is certainly part of it [increased injury numbers], but it’s just stuff overall. Breaking stuff or whatever it may be, guys have come so far in their training. It’s why you see so many people with so much quality stuff. And then it becomes a bit of an arms race. If you want to pitch nowadays, it’s hard not to chase what your competition is doing. So there’s no easy answer for it. It is disturbing the amount of injuries that are happening. I’d say in a lot of ways we’re getting better about how you build guys up, but the amount of stuff across the board that guys have now I’m sure [is a big factor].”
Like so much during the Moneyball age, analytics has figured out how to maximize performance while minimizing the enjoyment factor of the product. There is no doubt that increasing velocity and movement makes it far tougher to hit.
But so much bad came out of that — notably:
1. If it is difficult to string together hits because of the quality of the stuff, then of- fenses are going to hunt the quickest way to score — which is to hit it over the fence. But with that swing-for-the-fences philosophy comes more strikeouts especially, more walks and less on-field action.
2. The grip-it-and-rip-it-on-every-pitch generation has led to the diminishing importance of the starting pitcher. You basically can’t sprint a marathon. You can’t maximize velocity or spin on every pitch and expect to last. And it is not as if the modern team wants the pitcher to go deep into the game. Better to bring in one grip-it-and-rip-it reliever after another, which, again, is tough to hit, but lousy to watch.
What is lost? So much. Such as fewer and fewer starting pitcher matchups that attract fans to games. Yes, the “win” was an overinflated stat for most of the history of the game. But it gave something for fans to care about as a favorite pitcher, say, moved toward 20 wins. No fan is tracking on a daily basis whether his favorite pitcher is moving toward 4.0 Wins Above Replacement. Also, to gain a win, a starter had to work at least five innings, usually more. It left fewer outs and less work for bullpens, which are so routinely overworked now.
3. Injuries. There are technologies and training methods now that will help increase velocity and movement. But it has begun to remind me of the Jeff Goldblum character in “Jurassic Park” who, upon learning about the rebirth of the dinosaurs, says, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
The average fastball velocity this season is 93.9 mph. Last year, it was 94.1. When FanGraphs first began tracking the stat in 2007, it was 91.1. Now add so many pitchers finding devilish “sweep” on their breaking balls and power on their changeups by, among other items, using technologies to maximize the pitch. But all of this demands greater strain on arms.
So is this good? Is this the game we want? It certainly is not the injury output desired — not by the league or the players.
“We have the ability to teach more break and teach new pitches, and we have the ability to teach it within one month,” Cole said. “But what kind of effect does that have on a pitcher going forward? Like, in terms of one year out, two years out, three years out? We don’t really know. What we do know is when guys were more healthy, we weren’t able to go into a pitching lab and concoct a new pitch, and then use that at a 35 percent clip for the next six months and only have practiced it two months before we roll it out. We have no data on that.
“So to say that’s not contributing to people getting hurt, I don’t think that’s an accurate statement. I’m not necessarily saying that it is. But it’s certainly a variable that’s out there along with the importance of spin and the importance of velocity and the importance of location. They’re all contributing factors as far as I’m concerned.”
Cole mentioned his disappointment that the mounting injuries brought out the worst in the union and MLB, both going instantly into attack-dog mode against the other. Cole noted we did not reach this moment because of a single decision or item and, thus, solving a problem that goes all the way down to how youth baseball players are training and what they are prioritizing will not be easy or likely spurred by a single magic bullet.
Ultimately, it is going to take both sides (despite the hatred and mistrust) to fix this. Look, the clock was a success. The quicker pace was popular with fans. Thus, unless an unmistakable link to throwing the ball with shorter rest periods is shown as the central cause of injuries, there is no going back.
Like with the clock, the league office might have to be the adults here. Teams did not care how boring and long games had gotten, not when their reward system is based on winning. If that meant an endless parade of power-throwing relievers taking interminable times between each pitch, so be it.
Ultimately, people follow rewards. And MLB is likely going to have to come up with a way to reward teams for having starters last longer in games, and generally the only way to last longer is not to go max effort on every pitch. Perhaps that will mean lessening the number of pitchers allowed on an active roster — if teams have fewer relievers to use, the value of the starter going longer will rise.
Perhaps it will be tied to having the designated hitter available as long as a starter stays in the game.
The league is in the midst of a study independent of the Johns Hopkins research, which it says began last October. It is canvassing personnel — on-field, coaching and medical — at all levels of baseball to try to better understand the pitching injury epidemic.
But I actually think the union, particularly the pitchers within the Players Association, need to become more involved in finding solutions. Because if this paradigm persists, why in the world would any team give lucrative long-term contracts to pitchers? Why wouldn’t every organization follow a path similar to the Rays of basically maximizing stuff, getting what you can out of a pitcher and either trading him or, when he breaks, just creating the next version?
Or why not just pay a lot for a short period? That was done with Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander mainly due to their age. It happened to Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery because the long-term deals at the levels they sought never materialized. But if the sport is not going to change a style that is chewing up and spitting out pitchers, what hurler would you guess is likely to be able to pitch through a five-year or six-year or seven-year contract?
Thus, it is in the best interest of pitchers — especially starting pitchers — to help drive the game back to a style that favors a greater level of craft and keeping something in reserve for a third and even fourth time through a lineup.
Cole noted that in 2017, his last season with the Pirates, he made 33 starts and pitched to a 4.26 ERA over 203 innings. Today, he said, he would not be permitted to reach 203 innings with an ERA that high — he would be encouraged to peak in the early innings and trust there are relievers behind him to prevent runs on the back end.
“The league is demanding that you throw your best pitch every single time because the hitters are better, the strike zone is smaller, the balls are different, the bats are different,” Cole said. “We evolved into just a higher-performance product.”
At times of an epidemic, cooperation and thoughtfulness are needed. I doubt that MLB and the union will ever get to that place. But it is so in their best interests to figure out a way to better protect pitchers.