MINNEAPOLIS — It’s happening again.‘’
Pitchers – front-line starting pitchers, in particular – are going down with injuries at an alarming rate. And the overall trend line for pitcher injuries has been going up for years now.
Former Cy Young winner Shane Bieber and emerging Miami Marlins right-hander Eury Perez are likely headed to the operating table for Tommy John surgery. Atlanta Braves flame-thrower Spencer Strider will likely have to have his second Tommy John surgery. Reigning American League Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole and Houston Astros ace Framber Valdez are out with elbow injuries.
The list of pitchers already sidelined and recovering from elbow surgeries includes two more former Cy Young winners, Sandy Alcantara and Robbie Ray, past All-Star Game starter Shane McClanahan and Baltimore Orioles closer Felix Bautista (relievers are not immune). Washington Nationals right-hander Josiah Gray is out with a flexor strain (often a precursor to surgery). The Dodgers have three pitchers – two-way star Shohei Ohtani, Walker Buehler and Dustin May – recovering from their second elbow surgeries.
And it’s not just elbows that are breaking. Clayton Kershaw and Brandon Woodruff are recovering from shoulder surgeries. The New York Mets’ Kodai Senga and the Astros’ Justin Verlander are also sidelined with shoulder injuries.
“I hope we don’t wait too long (to address the problem),” Verlander said recently – ironically after a rehab start. “Because right now, it’s a pandemic.”
How to address the rising rate of pitcher injuries is something no one has been able to identify. Pitchers throw fewer innings than they did in the past, are protected more from the moment they sign their first professional contract – and yet are getting hurt more often than ever.
“I really don’t have any solutions to it,” Buehler said on the Just Baseball podcast this week. “I could go on and on about the pros and cons of everything. But it just kind of sucks.”
The players’ union escalated the debate by releasing a statement pointing to the pitch clock instituted last season as a factor in the increased injury rate. The consensus reaction to that, however, was that it was more about the union’s displeasure with MLB for unilaterally trimming two seconds off the pitch clock this season than about any evidence that the clock was really contributing to injuries.
“If I had to guess, these guys that are getting hurt were not feeling great last year,” Dodgers reliever Daniel Hudson said. “They went into the offseason, got through the offseason ‘Oh, I’m feeling better.’ Then they got into spring training, got into the season and ‘My elbow’s starting to bark again.’ I don’t think it’s just this year because they took two seconds off the pitch clock.”
But Ohtani did agree that the pitch clock has added stress to pitching.
“I’m sure there’s some added pressure just to the body in having to maintain a workload in less amount of time,” he said through his interpreter this week. “So just personally, I’m sure there could be (a connection), but nothing concrete to be able to say that it is the sole reason why.”
The only thing everyone agrees on is that there is no single cause. Buehler called it “super-nuanced” and pitchers cite among the reasons the crackdown on “sticky stuff” in 2021 as well as inconsistencies with the baseball and the change in offseason throwing programs.
Dodgers right-hander Tyler Glasnow was vocal in his criticism of the midseason crackdown on sticky stuff, blaming the elbow injury that led to his Tommy John surgery on having to change his pitch grips.
“I had to put my fastball deeper into my hand and grip it way harder. Instead of holding my curveball at the tip of my fingers, I had to dig it deeper into my hand,” Glasnow said at the time.
“I’m choking the (expletive) out of all my pitches.”
Glasnow tempers that criticism now, saying “my elbow was probably already hanging on by a thread” and pointing to multiple factors involved with the increasing injury rate.
Verlander strongly points to changes in the baseball that started in 2016 forcing pitchers to change their approach, going more for strikeouts and less pitch-to-contact approaches. Buehler agrees that “Major League Baseball really needs to take a look at creating a consistent baseball.”
“The ball is definitely different than when I first came into the league,” said James Paxton (Tommy John class of ’21). “It is traveling further. That’s fine. But I do think it changes the way you pitch. I think you throw the ball with the intent of getting swing and miss. You’re not going for as much soft contact. You’re going for swing and miss. It’s a little different intent and a little different intensity on each pitch. And it adds up over time.”
Any discussion of pitching injuries inevitably turns to another upward trend in MLB – velocity and spin rate and the way pitchers go all out, all the time chasing both.
“If I have an opinion on it, it’s probably just that guys go max effort all the time,” said Hudson, a two-time Tommy John survivor. “There’s an emphasis on spin and stuff – which is good. But if it’s full throttle for five, six innings at a time it’s probably not great for a guy’s elbow. I don’t really know how you combat that anymore. I don’t really know that there’s an answer to that unless you make everybody a bullpen pitcher and throw one inning at a time.
“When I came up, when I was going through my stuff (those surgeries in 2012 and 2013) … gosh, the average starter’s fastball was probably around 90 mph. I was sitting 92 to 94 and I was probably above average. Now you’ve got guys like Bobby (Miller) and Glas who sit 96 to 100 for six innings at a time. Guys spin more breaking balls now than they ever have. Back in the day, I got yelled at if I threw too many offspeed pitches the first time through the order. … Now it’s strike everybody out from the get-go. That’s how you get paid and that’s how you stay in the game.”
That’s also how you break. Buehler estimates “the focus on velocity and spin is probably 80 percent of the (injury) issue.” But telling pitchers to back off is not practical.
“Just personally, pitchers want to throw the best possible pitch that they could throw,” Ohtani said. “It’s not like I could go into a game and just throw less quality pitches.”
Verlander agrees.
“How can you tell somebody to go out there and not do that when they’re capable of throwing 100?” he said during his interview this week. “This young guy comes up and throws a pitch 95 and gives up a big homer. Then everybody’s, ‘What the hell, man?’”
In response to the MLBPA’s release regarding the pitch clock, MLB countered by saying it was conducting a “significant comprehensive research study into the causes” of the ongoing increase in pitcher injuries.
“By the time they figure that out, I won’t be playing anymore,” the 37-year-old Hudson said with a laugh.
