bWe warned: By the time you finish reading this piece, another Major League Baseball pitcher may have gone down with a significant arm injury. Unlikely? Think about this: Just as I started writing this piece, news came in that 26-year-old Nationals pitcher Josiah Gray will be out for who knows how long with a right forearm/flexor strain. Moments later, we heard that Red Sox pitcher Nick Pivetta ended up on the shelf with a similar injury. They join the growing list of injured baseball players: Gerrit Cole, Spencer Strider and Shane Bieber are just a few of the big names who have made trips across the country to have their MRIs evaluated and their arms examined.
Of course, we all want to know exactly why this is happening. It is of course difficult to capture that. And yes, there are many competing theories, including some from some of the sport’s oldest rivals: players and owners.
On the one hand, Tony Clark, the head of the MLB Players Association, said Sunday that after the field clock was installed last season and lowered this season, “our concerns about the health impacts of a shorter recovery time have only increased.”
The commissioner’s office, not liking this statement, responded by saying that the MLBPA “ignores the empirical evidence and the much more significant long-term trend, over decades, of speed and spin increases being highly correlated with arm injuries.”
Meanwhile, Cole, who will be back in Yankees pinstripes sometime between May and 2025, thinks this bickering isn’t particularly helpful, and that it certainly won’t cure baseball’s lingering arm rot anytime soon. And this much is true: The sport, which has also suffered from redesigned uniforms that expose players’ private parts and a gambling scandal that has hit baseball’s only global superstar, Shohei Ohtani, could really let its governing bodies use to figure things out. Because they have to figure out how to turn a largely solved pastime into an unappealing, nine-inning, starless parade of supercharged prospects for the future, conceding early to disposable BB pitchers, back into the game we used to know. The sport with throwers who achieve performances that we couldn’t wait for.
Bill “The Spaceman” Lee, then of the Expos, had one of those performances on May 30, 1979, pitching a six-hit complete game shutout over the Phillies at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. After the game, Lee told the CBC: “I struck out the first inning, I don’t think I’ve done that since probably my pony league days. Usually you’re in trouble if you retire the first batter in a ball game: it means you’re throwing too hard. But after the third inning I lost my fastball and started throwing and I did pretty well.”
“Throwing too hard” isn’t a concept anyone in modern-day baseball has been thinking about much lately. One of the most colorful players in the game’s history, Lee had a fine fourteen-year career despite striking out just 703 in 1,944.1 innings pitched – that’s 3.3 strikeouts per nine innings. There’s virtually no chance a pitcher like Lee gets a look today.
How did we get here? Well, baseball, like humans, has an over-technical problem. Our species has a habit of producing things we like, but don’t always need, and which can end up causing extraordinary damage. Max effort, high speed, and high spin rate pitching fall neatly into this category.
In 2017, flame-throwing Mets star pitcher Noah Syndergaard was coming off an All-Star season and arrived at camp wanting to throw even harder. He regularly reached 90 mph with his four-seam fastball, 90 mph with his two-sieve and, incredibly, 90 mph with his slider. In May, he suffered a lat injury that virtually ended his season. When asked about Syndergaard’s injury and pitching in general, Dwight Gooden, who set the rookie strikeout record for the Mets in 1984, said: “I think they train to get bigger, throw a little harder, but to me pitching is about mechanics, changing speeds, reading bat speeds.”
The lat injury should have been a sign that Syndergaard’s build and desire to throw so hard was not working for his body so consistently. He made 57 starts over the next two seasons, but in 2020 Syndergaard underwent elbow surgery. Today, the pitcher once expected to be a Met forever is 31 years old and among the greats.
Few players, general managers, executives, pitching coaches, owners, junior-level coaches and the increasingly controversial “pitching labs” have been able to recognize this and adapt, despite the plethora of cautionary tales such as Syndergaard’s and, to a lesser extent , that of his former Mets teammate Jacob deGrom. The two-time Cy Young winner knew how to continue to increase his speed, but couldn’t imagine that the extra strain on his arm was undermining his health. And so a pitcher who at times looked like one of the greatest players ever, who increased his strikeouts per nine innings from 8.7 in 2016 to 14.3 in 2022, also suffered elbow surgery early last season.
Remarkably, all of these injuries have come at a time when ball clubs have cradled and coddled pitchers to the point where getting more than five innings out of a starter feels like something to celebrate. There are two reasons for this: one because the bean counters above have determined that pitchers can’t handle an opponent’s lineup the third time around, and two because more innings and more pitches at the max effort they’re throwing today poses an injury risk.
We know that all this “protection” has done absolutely nothing to help pitchers like Eury Perez. The 21-year-old would be the type of phenom that would energize baseball fans regardless of their interest. In 2023, he pitched 19 games and struck out 108 batters in 91.1 closely watched MLB innings. Before being promoted, he threw 36.2 innings in AAA ball, good for 13.3 strikeouts per nine innings. And despite averaging fewer than 81 pitches per outing, and fewer than five innings per outing, Perez’s elbow tore apart under the pressure.
Baseball has a habit of jumping from crisis to crisis, but this pitching disaster threatens the sport like never before. Not only do we have a generation of pitchers who can’t stay healthy, but ones that leave us averaging an all-time low of 5.1 innings per start in 2023. Not only have we lost talent, we’ve lost the ability and desire to get pitchers to perform deep into games, a star-creating trait that has been disappearing for years.
Currently, seven Cy Young Award winners are injured, which amounts to 13 of the last 26 plaques handed out. Blake Snell is one of the last remaining players, a pitcher who represents the current lack of draw in pitching. Snell is one of only seven players to win the Cy Young in both leagues. But despite his achievement, Snell doesn’t come close to moving the needle like others who have done it: Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez. Snell is not a cash register. He’s a five-inning pitcher. That is it. That’s all you get. Maybe that’s why Snell got the long-term deal his agent wanted. Maybe the owners have figured out that five innings, maximum effort and injury-prone pitchers aren’t worth it, no matter how many strikeouts they record. If so, the sport is lost. If so, half the game will become even more anonymous than each passing day. If so, baseball must act and not be afraid to implement rules that encourage both longer outings and player health, restoring half the game and the art it has lost before it is too late.