Baseball’s dangerous infatuation with speed
Too fast, too hard ... and too much?
As the baseball week commenced, there were 172 players on the injured list, 111 of them pitchers. On Tuesday, there were 196, 124 of them pitchers. By Thursday, it had swollen to 213, meaning that by the All-Star break, the injured list could qualify for its own census.
The Pirates and the San Diego Padres, currently entangled in a four-game weekender in California, had a combined 24 players on this list when the series started, enough to field a third team in the Rehab League.
The New York Yankees, despite being virtually unrecognizable outside of an injured list with 13 names, were taking a quantum of solace from their eternal tradition of not wearing names on the backs of their uniforms because, with their amount of roster flux, no one could ever do that amount of sewing.
“I think of these players as race cars,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone explained to the New York media. “When something is a little off, that can affect why they’re special.”
Preserve that thought, as it will soon be elaborated upon in this very space by Pirates GM Neal Huntington, who has somehow kept Pittsburgh relevant in the National League Central Division race despite more pit stops than a NASCAR Sunday.
Arm and shoulder injuries are all too common in this sport, but the 2019 big leaguer is injured head to toe, as the helpful paragraph that follows will show, using the revered sports journalism protocol of putting a body part in parenthesis after a player’s name.
Head to toe then, Buster Posey (brain/concussion), Brock Holt (cornea), Luke Farrell (jaw), Jacob Stallings (neck), Erik Gonzalez (collarbone), Corey Dickerson (shoulder), David Price (elbow), Tyler Glasnow (forearm), Travis Shaw (wrist), Victor Caratini (hand), Trea Turner (finger), Lucas Duda (back), Aaron Judge (front/oblique), Michael Hermosillo (groin), Jake Lamb (quadriceps) Jason Vargas (hamstring), Justin Pedroia (knee), Lonnie Chisenhall (calf), Eloy Jimenez (ankle), Greg Bird (foot), Miguel Sano (heel), Justin Upton (toe).
Has the game become this hazardous or is the new 10-day injured list too hard to resist for an overly cautious cabal of managers, general managers, medical professionals, agents, and, oh yes, players.
“Not an easy answer,” said Huntington. “It’s a wide-ranging number of causes. The 10-day injured list makes it easy, and we are apt to use it out of an abundance of caution more than ever. We’re more able to diagnose and diagnose much more quickly. Guys used to throw through soreness on a much more consistent level. Guys used to throw out their arms and fade away, now they have surgery. There are stressful deliveries, bad genetics, overuse of the slider that makes people bound, in some cases, to get hurt again.
“Another component is well-intentioned parents who sometimes don’t realize there’s a limited number of pitches in every arm. There are too many highstress pitches being thrown at young ages. Little Johnny used to play shortstop and pitch and then go away and play nothing for a while and then maybe play soccer or football in the fall and then play basketball in the winter, and then pick up a baseball in February. Now he’s on two baseball travel teams and he’s visiting his pitching guru twice a week and they do that year-round. The stress load is great and, even though parents and coaches mean well, more damage is being done at a young age.”
Would this be a good place to mention that this week also brought the 101st anniversary of Walter (Big Train) Johnson winning a 1-0 game in which he threw all 18 innings, and that his opponent that day, Lefty Williams, also went the distance? I thought not. If both pitchers worked into the 18th inning today, there would be a line of ambulances encircling the field.
While this space has spent too many Sundays over the years telling you that baseball is too slow and growing slower by the hour, allow me now to say the opposite, that too many things about it are, in fact, too fast. The pitches are too fast, the spin rates are too fast, the arm speeds are too fast, the exit velocities are too fast, and all of it is causing too many injuries to too many people. Average pitch velocity is now so fast that, as soon-to-be Hall of Famer Jayson Stark recently pointed out, everybody is throwing like Nolan Ryan.
Not for long, but still. Furthermore, the supersonic baseball is hurting more than pitchers. It’s hurting catchers (more two-strike fouls than ever), umpires (same), fielders (dangerous exit velocities), and even hitters, who are swinging harder to launch the ball past over-shifted defenses.
“The ball’s comin’off [the bat] a lot harder now,” former Pirates utility man Sean Rodriguez once explained to me. “Velo[city] is up, so homers, walks and strikeouts come hand-inhand with a lot of velo. It’s hard for guys to control that much velocity. And then naturally, if you hit it, it’s gonna go.”
Which is why homers are at a post-PED era high.
“I would say velocity is absolutely part of the reason [for injuries],” Huntington said. “Early studies from the American Sports Medicine Institute’s biomechanical labs showed that one of the biggest predictors of potential injury was maximum-effort deliveries that put the body in harm’s way. You look around and everywhere it’s maximumeffort delivery, because velocity is what gets recruited, gets drafted and gets signed. And there are guys who have picture-perfect deliveries that still get hurt.
“We teach our scouts that it’s comparable to driving the most expensive car in the world. You can have all the best components, but jamming on the brakes every time you stop is going to make the brakes break down. The arm is the brake pad.”
Thus brake pads are strewn across the Pirates clubhouse floor in an alarming metaphoric arrangement. Reliever Nick Burdi collapsed to the mound in pain on the way to the 60-day injured list April 22 and was joined there Monday by Jameson Taillon, the very cornerstone of Huntington’s rotation. Chris Archer has been on the 10-day list, and, to the surprise of no one, Trevor Williams was placed there after leaving the game in the fourth inning Thursday night in San Diego with “discomfort.”
Pitching is the primary foundational value of every major league organization, and thus its primary investment. It is possible, you wonder, that protecting the investment has eclipsed the importance of developing the arm at the pro level?
“That’s a really interesting thought process, but I don’t think so,” Huntington said politely. “We can be blamed for coddling and overprotecting pitchers, there’s no question; it’s why pitch counts exist and why we need to be careful with our relievers working three days in a row. But we’ve been around long enough that we lived through the era of baseball Darwinism. Pitchers who could throw 300 innings were allowed to do it, but that young starter who was endangered by throwing 200 just blew out his arm and was never heard from again.
“Nobody is 100-percent sure how close they’re coming to problems, but we’re much better at estimating it and much more business savvy about it. No one wants to find out that Pitcher X can’t pitch 225 innings without damaging himself; we’d much rather fall just short of it.”
It’s almost to the point of embarrassment that the baseball media spends so much time in the spring fretting over who the fifth starter is, who’ll nail down the final bullpen slot, who’ll get the last utility role, because this isn’t about 25 guys anymore. It’s about the organization’s next 25 guys, or 35. More than ever, players are going to get hurt, and some who don’t are going to get shut down anyway because you don’t want them to get hurt.
Saw a picture this week of Tigers superstar Miguel Cabrera sitting in the dugout with his mouth taped shut. He had been ejected a night earlier and was clowning the umpires, trying to ensure he would stay in the game.
At some point, the tape had to come off.
So now I’m watching the injured list for Cabrera, lip laceration, out until at least May 30.