Justin Verlander speaking on the rise of pitching injuries

[liveforoctober]

I usually don't like starting new topics on this page to try and do my part to keep it uncluttered... But I thought his response here was too good and could lead to about 8 different discussion points on the topic, especially the second half of the answer. 

From the change in the baseball, to incentivizing speed and spin vs location and strategy, to the trickle down affect to youth baseball, to pitch clock, etc there is a lot to unpack here.

Very interesting topic.

[MrTPlush]

Spin ball hard, throw ball hard, and start before you are a teenager. End of story and yah...the ball changing probably is a big part of why that happened. Though I think analytics is a lot to do with it anyway. 

It is broken and you aren't going to fix it. Guys aren't going to stop throwing hard or reduce spin rate....even if you deadened the ball. Why would you? Swings and misses will still make you better off.

Smart teams will start investing in more pitching. Extending guys will become more and more risky on the pitching side. I wouldn't depend on some incentives to get guys to take care of their arms better, 

[kestrel79]

It is 100% the whole throw as hard as you can and spin the ball as much as you can every pitch, and it trickly down to basically the middle school level now.

All these traveling teams, camps, indoor baseball facilities where you are throwing year round and who knows how many pitches. Lots of stress on young not fully developed bodies. It's still crazy to me that EVERYONE throws hard now. Remember Sheets when he came up and he had a mid 90's fastball as a starter? That was unreal to me compared to previous Brewers pitchers and now it's common.

I used to laugh playing MVP Baseball 05 in college when you'd play franchise mode for a few years with the computer created players being your draft picks and you'd draft a guy who could throw a 99 mph sinker or cutter, or 2 seamer. That would never happen in real life! And now it does and it's crazy. 

[Jopal78]

It’s about the money. In ten years a major league player can earn the generational wealth which would take all but the most successful business people a lifetime to amass.
 

Look at when the explosion of salaries in baseball occurred (Robin Yount was MLB’s highest paid player in 1990 at 3.2 mil) and I would bet it tracks the proliferation of baseball camps, clinics, travel teams, as well as the beginnings of the increases in pitching velocity and even size/mass of the players. 

[Fear The Chorizo]

When the people who made performing TJ surgeries famous are flat out saying it's because pitchers are starting out far too young trying to max out velocity and spin rates of breaking balls, I don't really see the need to keep digging much deeper looking for other root causes.

In a way it's similar to when football players were first wondering how bashing heads together constantly somehow led to CTE - unnatural physical actions performed either too often or too hard lead to those body parts breaking.

A generation ago many of these guys who throw upper 90s would've been down around 90 mph, based on how they learned to pitch without going max effort in order to stay healthy and durable given the innings load that was going to be expected of them - particularly starters.  The progressive expansion of MLB pitching staffs, including having a 26 man roster, has also led to teams having no issue stockpiling a ton of high 90s arms and just churning through them as they get injured or prove that they can't get MLB hitters out - to the point where most starting pitchers aren't expected to log much more than 125 innings pitched in a healthy season.

[snark infested waters]

37 minutes ago, Fear The Chorizo said:

A generation ago many of these guys who throw upper 90s would've been down around 90 mph, based on how they learned to pitch without going max effort in order to stay healthy and durable given the innings load that was going to be expected of them - particularly starters.  The progressive expansion of MLB pitching staffs, including having a 26 man roster, has also led to teams having no issue stockpiling a ton of high 90s arms and just churning through them as they get injured or prove that they can't get MLB hitters out - to the point where most starting pitchers aren't expected to log much more than 125 innings pitched in a healthy season.

I think this is about right. Also, the talent identification process (and coaching informed by analytics and biomechanics) has gotten much more sophisticated to the point where teams probably don't feel a need to tell a reliever to ratchet it down a few notches when there's a handful of essentially replacement-level guys throwing 98 mph gas in AAA or available on waivers.

As the game is currently constructed, players - especially fringe relievers - have strong incentives to give maximal effort on every pitch. I'm not sure how to work around that problem without making the game less compelling to watch.

[wiguy94]

4 hours ago, kestrel79 said:

It is 100% the whole throw as hard as you can and spin the ball as much as you can every pitch, and it trickly down to basically the middle school level now.

All these traveling teams, camps, indoor baseball facilities where you are throwing year round and who knows how many pitches. Lots of stress on young not fully developed bodies. It's still crazy to me that EVERYONE throws hard now. Remember Sheets when he came up and he had a mid 90's fastball as a starter? That was unreal to me compared to previous Brewers pitchers and now it's common.

I used to laugh playing MVP Baseball 05 in college when you'd play franchise mode for a few years with the computer created players being your draft picks and you'd draft a guy who could throw a 99 mph sinker or cutter, or 2 seamer. That would never happen in real life! And now it does and it's crazy. 

It's not just pitchers either. You have high school age position players getting TJ now because they have been playing baseball year round for like a decade by the time they are 18 years old.

[owbc]

Awesome take by JV.

I'll give an optimistic take -- for as long as I can remember it's been near impossible to get any reform in MLB despite the rapid changes that everyone has experienced. Both the league itself and its fans have leaned toward the "traditionalist" take of letting the game evolve without intervention and the result of that was that the product on the field changed into something that people didn't really like and it wasn't until that evolution had swung completely out of whack that anything was done about it. And even so, the changes that went into effect in 2023 were highly controversial prior to implementation although it only took maybe a week or two into the season until they were widely lauded. Theo Epstein deserves a ton of credit for that -- the changes that did get implemented prior to Theo coming on board were done poorly (e.g. replay/challenges) and nobody trusts Manfred or MLBPA to act in the broader interest of the game. Plus, some new rules like the "Manfred runner" remain unpopular. 

So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the 2023 rule changes are only step one of what is probably going to be a half dozen major rule updates that are needed to correct the game, not to mention additional ones to correct problems that we can't even conceive of yet. 

The reason I'm optimistic is that I think the "traditionalist" mindset of baseball fans still largely dominates, but instead of advocating for things to be left alone, the majority of media and fans are pushing for rule changes. Nobody likes a parade of relief pitchers and everyone is pushing for starting pitching to return to prominence -- but as Verlander noted it's going to take a long time to unwind the current state of the game. 

Interestingly, it seems the one area where traditionalist beliefs go away is an acceptance of technology. Once we had Pitch F/X and especially Umpire Scorecards, it was inevitable that people would eventually start clamoring for ABS. 

[MrTPlush]

Here is the problem and why change is almost surely impossible:

Making the MLB and your arm imploding day 1 or day 3,000 is better than never making the MLB at all. Expecting to tell kids, college guys, etc to take it easy or they might blow out their arm one day is just....not going to happen. We can look at Woodruff...or any other one of these guys and say, "See kids, this is why spin rate and all that travel ball is bad." is not going to be effective. Woodruff is still a guy who became one of the best pitchers in the game and will make tens of millions before he retires. Not to mention, who knows if Woodruff becomes anything if he doesn't start throwing 100mph. You can't baby your arm and watch some other guys get bonkers spin rates and throw 100mph+, that just isn't going to happen. All those guys will pass you up.

It is already nearly impossible to make the MLB level and stay there.