I care less about pro players who hurt themselves, and more about the 16-21 year olds. Anecdotally, our area has a ton of travel baseball teams, which start at kindergarten. Highly competitive leagues. These kids tend to have daily practice starting in kindergarten.
There are three local high schoolers who have had Tommy John surgery. It's like they're proud of it.
An it's terrifying. If the pitch clock comes into these leagues (and it will because why not treat 6 year olds like they're pro-players so the dads can live out some weird fantasy) we will see more and more youth with injuries.
Pitch clock and similar rules are not coming to little league, that’s absurd. The pitch clock was implemented because pro games take 3+ hours. Children’s games don’t have time/clock issues, and kids don’t even start pitching their own games until they are 11ish.
Youth baseball is completely different than pros - kids throw way fewer pitches way less frequently. With the exception of extreme high school/college coaches, but those coaches will be extreme regardless.
>kids throw way fewer pitches way less frequently.
I would like to push back on that a little. It is very common (again, anecdotally at least with the 16 K-12 districts I work with regularly) for kids to be on multiple teams. They'll do a summer league, fall/winter/spring weekend league and weeknight league. It is not uncommon for kids to be on 2 teams through the school year, and 3 in the summer. So, while there are rules around how many innings one kid can pitch, and how many pitches they can throw, there is no governing board to oversee that. It's all honor system; parents are in control of that. It tends to be more flexible than the rules actually intend.
There's no evidence that the pitch clock has anything to do with these injuries.
The article goes into it, but the more likely culprits are starting pitchers throwing harder, throwing more sliders, pitching without foreign substances (so they grip the ball harder), and obsessing over spin rate.
Does anyone know of any studies on the long term health of children who go through programs like this? I see this sentiment a lot, and can even think of annecdotes of people this describes in my own life, but haven't seen much attempt at quantifying it.
A quick search is just showing studies on sports participation and children's health while they are still children (which seems to be resoundingly positive).
I don't know how you would even approach that due to the huge selection bias.
Any kind of relevant metric, such as future injury of health, academic success in a non-sports-scolarship program, future propensity to crime etc etc. are strongly influenced if you simply are the kind of person that is likely to enroll into sports.
We have this weird system where if you aren't good enough to become a doctor purely on academics we will also consider how good you are at baseball. It's quite insane on its face but it's how lots of midwits end up with "advanced" degrees. Those dad's are probably trying to make that happen.
Do advanced programs give athletic scholarships? I've never heard of a master's program offering that nor have I ever seen Yale Medical School's baseball team.
They're saying the schools accept (measure) applicants on both their academic and sporting prowess. I believe they are suggesting that, if a child is not very academic, a parent may try to get their child into a prestigious school by "encouraging" them in sports.
OK, but it's not like there's a section on the USMLE that says "by the way, how fast is your fastball? how many 3s can you make in a minute? what's your mile time?". The argument that being an athlete makes it significantly easier to become a doctor is weird, because getting into a good undergraduate institution is not the main hurdle to becoming a doctor.
I don't know about elsewhere but in the UK and Czech Republic, Medicine is a particularly challenging field of study that aggressively weeds out underperformers. You're not making it through unless you actually know what you're doing.
If studying medicine it's easy enough in the USA that the tough part is getting admission (which I doubt) then I think your priority would be to fix your degree courses rather than fiddling with the admissions process. It's still weird to me that you can get into university by throwing the ball good, but if someone can balance what is basically a unpaid professional athletics career and get a decent degree too then more power to them.
I mean, if you look at a slow-mo of any pro pitching, you'll have no questions why their elbows are getting messed up. While the speeds they achieve are an impressive feat, the amount of torque and the way it applies to the elbow is just insane. Everyone familiar with ballet for example knows that the dancers slowly but surely destroy their bodies for their art. The question we need to ask is if we want baseball to be the same way.
Sometimes my arm hurts just replicating some of their pitches in slow motion. I have a long held belief that the most talented pitchers of all time never made it to pro ball for exactly this reason. A less commonly acknowledged attribute is being enough of a genetic freak that one's arm doesn't slag out.
Or could it be that part of talent as sportsman is to have genes/body that is at extreme of the curve. There is talent to be able to throw one ball, but entirely an other talent to be able to keep throwing nearly as good balls. And later has much more value in professional setting.
That's basically my point. The ability to persist is undersold when people talk about required talent. The most physically gifted quarterback on the planet is worth nothing if he gets ripped in two the first time he's sacked.
This is almost universally true for any professional sport. Ultimately, it's personal preference, and the people at the top are committed to fighting to get to the top anyway.
It's about keeping danger to the athlete to a moderate level.
The line has to be drawn somewhere because a pro athlete will do the dumbest thing to gain an advantage. And with doping, we've nearly seen where this can end with pro bicycle riders like Bjarne with a hematocrit of 64%.
Some sports ban certain techniques to protect athletes, just some examples:
* Backflip in figure skating
* Sommersault in longjump
* Spinning javelin in javelin throw
* Cartwheel in shot put
True, and if anything I'm arguing for exactly that, keeping danger to a moderate level.
It's just that doping is only one way, so ignoring something like this which seems likely to cause lasting damage because 'destroying the body for sport is not unusual' is a bit weird when on the other hand athletes are subjected to incredibly invasive surveillance to avoid the temptation to use even the tiniest amount of substances.
I honestly believe that some forms of doping are less dangerous than professional sport per se. This isn't the fairest comparison but far fewer cyclists died of EPO than by trying to descend too quickly.
I wouldn’t compare these. While both are bad and should be addressed, there’s a difference between “moving like this repeatedly for 20 years might cause mobility issues” and “injecting this might cause a heart attack”.
There is doping and there is doping. I don't see why athletes over say 30 can't do some mild oral steroids to bring them back to the testosterone levels of a 25 year old. Would help with recovery and probably lessen the severity of injury.
Medical studies agree that steroid use reduces life expectancy, it's one of the core reasons why they're highly regulated. Not only does it reduce life expectancy, but time spent healthy is reduced as well, meaning that not only might you die a number of years earlier, you'll run into age related illnesses a number of years earlier as well.
Studies don't show that for mild oral steroid use after 30, I also gave reasons I suspect it would be net beneficial for health.
Men have lower testosterone levels than their grandfathers, there are many possible causes but the treatment I'm talking about only really brings you to a bit above where grandpa would've been.
I would dose based on testosterone levels, if they took steroids out of program that would show in the blood work and the dose adjusted to zero, after that you test for the now prohibited steroid use.
The goal isn't to get them to a superhuman level, just to level the best genetics produce.
Is this a new thing? When was the pitch clock introduced? The article doesn't say.
Sounds very similar to the knees and other parts of cricket fast bowlers. They get up to top sprinting speed then come to an immediate halt at the crease to deliver the ball at 90+ mph while keeping their arm straight, like a human trebuchet.
Only one pace bowler in the history of the game seems to have cracked it, James Anderson, now 41yo and still playing, though he bowls closer to the 82-85mph mark.
The pitch clock got introduced in September 2022 [1]. Their reasoning back then was that games would take 3-4 hours (or longer) and that fans were loosing interest by the bottom of the 9th. I remember being pretty exited when it got introduced as the general sentiment was "no more 4 hour games!". But it seems to me this is just another symptom of the problem of player injuries, I heard a podcast where they said the age of players getting the "Tommy John" surgery (UCL / Elbow Reconstruction) is going down. Before they said it would be rare to see a player in the MLB get the surgery, now they said even players at the high school level are getting it done.
Not to get too nitpicky, but the pitch clock actually came into effect in the majors in February 2023 (spring training) or March 2023 (regular season). It debuted much earlier in minor (2015), fall (2014), and college (2010) leagues.
I remember growing up it was such a rarity to see someone pitch 100mph. Now, it’s way more common. We’ve optimized things and seem to be at a limit in terms of speed, and arms are failing catastrophically. There’s no long term gradual wear and tear for this.
This has really impacted my enjoyment of baseball. It feels really hard to get invested in a pitcher when you know there is a large chance he’s just gone for a year+. Not sure what the solution is here
Raise the pitching mound? Make the ball dead? The back and forth between "keep the game interesting" and "make the game easier for pitchers" has been going on for decades.
Do any of these make make players throw the ball softer or with less spin? Because that's largely the issue. The severity of the pitching motion seems to be the main culprit; gameplay adjustments that don't address this won't help.
Anything that makes it easier for the pitcher to have an advantage over a batter or reduce the odds that a ball in play will be a successful hit means the speed/motion of the pitcher doesn't need to be as great. On the other hand people who like seeing more balls in play will point to tall pitchers throwing 100mph as the reason not to do this.
I don't really buy that- if every pitcher is 50% better, a pitcher still gets an advantage from speed/motion. Even if that advantage is lessened, players are still going to eke out every bit of performance that they can. IMO the root cause is really down to how hyper-optimized pitching is now, where players can absolutely maximize performance, but that also increases injury rate. How can you put the genie back in the bottle?
We’re seeing more frequent injuries in other sports too like golf and tennis. I think all the computer technology for analysis has allowed to hone in on and optimize specific things. This creates better performance but maybe pushes things to their limits.
Several credible theories are circulating, with the most convincing one suggesting that individuals are specializing in their respective fields and dedicating extended hours at a significantly younger age.
Professional athletes are now undergoing rigorous training from a much earlier age and are subjected to greater demands compared to previous generations. This plausibly accounts for the rising incidence of injuries as they progress in their careers.
Conversely, older athletes are extending their careers beyond what would have been the norm in earlier generations, which allows injuries to accumulate over time.
How much is misuse of steroids contributing? With how dirty a sport baseball is, it seems pointless if consequences of doping on injuries is not included in this discussion.
