Every Spring and April baseball loses some of its best pitchers for an extended period. For the lucky ones, they avoid catastrophe and can return after a couple of months. For the majority, their season ends before it can even get going.
Tommy John (aka UCL reconstruction surgery) isn't a new injury for pitchers, but this year feels different. Every time a pitcher is scratched from a start or leaves a game early, the immediate thought is "he just tore his UCL, we're screwed."
Early season injuries are common amongst both pitchers and position players, as players' bodies aren't fully ready to meet the physical demands of playing baseball nearly every day for 6 months. However, it's hard to remember a time when this many pitchers have gotten this severely injured in this short a period.
We're not even 20 days into the baseball season, and big names such as Shane Bieber, and Spencer Strider join Kyle Bradish, and Eury Perez as the latest to have their seasons ended due to a sprained UCL. Reigning AL Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole seems to be one of the lucky ones, and might only miss two months of his season.
Let's not let these newest additions to the all-star roster currently on the IL due to elbow injuries make us forget that we've missed out on watching studs like Jacob Degrom, Shohei Ohtani, Sandy Alcantara, Shane McClanahan Lucas Giolito, Felix Bautista (and more!) compete every five days.
The players association was quick to blame the pitch clock (which the MLB immediately said was incorrect), but pinning what future hall-of-famer Justin Verlander calls a "pandemic" on one issue is too rash a reaction. Frankly, pitcher injuries have consistently increased for years.
"The game has changed a lot" - Justin Verlander
Getting outs isn't the main priority for a pitcher anymore. Getting strikeouts is. Hitters can hit nearly any pitch out of the park for a home run, and pitching to contact is seen as a dangerous game before considering the unpredictability of a ball in play. Even bottom-of-the-lineup guys who were primarily defensive players and seen as easy outs a decade ago can be dangerous. Hitters have evolved, so pitchers had to evolve as well.
Pitchers have never been harder to hit than they are now. A two-foot-breaking pitch isn't rare anymore. Throwing 95 mph or more isn't unique and is more of a requirement. Starting pitchers aren't valued on going deep into games like they used to be, as analytically speaking pitchers give up more hits and runs the third time through the order, with the emphasis now being placed on throwing maximum effort to get through the order twice.
How have pitchers evolved to this point? What has changed from the 00s to now? The answer to this question is simple, pitchers have learned about the importance of spin.
Spin is king.
More spin leads to more breaks on breaking balls and more ride-on fastballs, which in turn leads to more strikeouts. There are only two ways to get more spin on your pitches. The first way is to use a foreign substance to get a better grip on the baseball, a tactic that is illegal and now enforced in the MLB after the outbreak of pitchers taking advantage of the lax enforcement to gain a competitive advantage.
The second way is simply to throw harder. Velocity is a double-edged sword. The act of throwing harder not only makes your pitches travel to plate faster, giving hitters less time to react but also creates the late and large breaking sliders and sweepers that generate ugly swings. However, throwing at or near maximum effort puts extra stress on the body. Throwing 95 mph requires generating and transmitting force from the whole body into the ball. This force puts serious stress on a pitcher's body and is typically centralized in the elbow and forearm, as these are the smallest muscles and ligaments involved at the end of the kinetic chain and therefore transmit the greatest amount of force.
This is where Scherzer and everyone else pointing at the pitch clock comes in. The body needs time to recover after going through a stressful event like this. Some players naturally have a higher recovery rate than others, but forcing pitchers to immediately get set and repeat this process at a much higher rate could certainly lead to more injuries.
The argument is incredibly sound, and it was foolish of the MLB to immediately discredit the argument, but it's too early to tell the total effects of the pitch clock on a pitcher's body. It just hasn't existed long enough yet.
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