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2024 MLB Season: Pitchers' Elbows Are Blowing Up...

Orioles calling up MLB #1 prospect Jackson Holliday (son of Matt Holliday). O's farm system is so loaded that scouts grade the Norfolk Tides (the O's AAA team) as better than multiple MLB teams.
 
From Wednesday's Wall Street Journal:


No one knows more about the pitcher injury crisis sweeping through professional baseball than Keith Meister.

He’s never thrown a baseball in the majors, and he never played anything above Little League. But as the physician for the Texas Rangers and one of the top elbow surgeons in America, Meister has seen more ravaged pitching arms than he can count. His office is lined with framed jerseys belonging to hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of baseball talent. His phone is full of Cy Young winners.

What Meister can say for certain is that he’s never seen anything like the slew of injuries felling pitchers right now. And to major-league elbow experts, it’s no coincidence that these are rising right as hurlers reach for more velocity and increasingly dramatic breaking pitches such as the sweeper every time they take the mound.

“We’re getting very recognizable tear patterns as a consequence of this,” Meister says. “You can look at a scan now and say, ‘Oh, this guy throws a sweeper.’”
On Monday afternoon, Meister examined the sore elbow of his latest high-profile patient: 25-year-old Atlanta Braves ace Spencer Strider.

Strider is the model of a modern pitcher. He throws a 96 mile per hour fastball, along with a sweeping slider that he throws roughly a third of the time. He struck out 281 batters last season, by far the most of any MLB pitcher. Now, in what should be the prime of his career, he could be headed for his second elbow reconstruction surgery in just five years.

The conventional wisdom among surgeons was once that one elbow repair surgery would last a player for the rest of his career. Then, it was expected to last them 10 years—a lifetime in pitcher years.
“Now five is a very solid number,” Meister says. “And really, three years is the number at which you see guys start to tear and break down.”

All-Stars and Cy Young winners filter in and out of Meister’s office at an alarming clip. In recent years, he’s operated on Jacob deGrom, Sandy Alcantara, and Robbie Ray. Meanwhile, baseball’s other busiest elbow surgeon, Neal ElAttrache, handled Shohei Ohtani, who will spend the first year of his $700 million contract in Los Angeles playing as a designated hitter while recovering from his second elbow ligament surgery.
Those heading to the operating table or nursing more recent elbow injuries, meanwhile, could make up their own all-star ballot.

Strider is the pitching centerpiece of the World Series favored Braves and, if he undergoes elbow surgery again, he will be out for all of this year and part of 2025. Shane Bieber, the 28-year-old former Cy Young winner in Cleveland, will undergo elbow surgery as well in the coming days. In Miami, 20-year-old Eury Pérez was set to be the rare bright spot on a miserable Marlins team. He’s already had his surgical procedure.

Astros ace Framber Valdez became the latest pitcher to miss an early season start due to elbow pain. And in New York, Yankees ace Gerrit Cole is out until at least late May as he attempts to recover from elbow nerve inflammation—and hopefully stave off a full ligament tear.

The growing consensus throughout baseball is that the velocity gold rush and obsession around “pitch design” has pushed players to a point where they must be willing to sacrifice their bodies to keep a major-league job. The dilemma has become obvious: Choose your elbow ligament, or choose strikeouts.

Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association are arguing over what’s making it worse, rather than working on ways to stop it. In response to the latest wave of pitcher injuries, Tony Clark, the head of the MLBPA, issued a statement criticizing baseball’s pitch clock, which gives pitchers 15 seconds to throw the ball when the bases are empty and 18 with someone on base. The league responded to Clark’s statement by blaming players’ obsession with velocity and spin rate.

“It’s like we have divorced parents,” Cole said Monday in an emotional plea that lasted 20 minutes inside the Yankees’ clubhouse.

In reality, there’s no longer much doubt over why pitchers are breaking down at an alarming pace. They are motivated to throw each pitch at maximum effort, over and over until their bodies give out.

Chris Langin, the director of pitching for Driveline Baseball, says that players are prepared to blow out their bodies in the pursuit of a few more ticks on their fastball or spin on their breaking ball.

“The ways that you would lower the injury risk are also the ways you’d be lowering the players value,” Langin said. “At the end of the day, that’s not the business we’re in.”

A pitcher who finds himself making $30,000 per year in Double A knows that he can accelerate his path to MLB (and to the minimum $700,000 per year payday) by throwing every ball as hard as he can. And where they used to hone their craft in the minor leagues, pitchers now aim to burn brighter and sooner, hacking their own bodies to make it to the majors.

As a result, everyone on a pitching staff feels the need to throw their hardest at all times instead of carefully picking their way through a batting order.

“In 2013, you could pitch to like 85% of the lineup with fastball away and have no threat of it leaving the park,” Cole said. “But in the modern game, power hitters can slug to the opposite field and, “it changes everything.”

Once a core principle for a viable major-league starter, long-term reliability has become an afterthought in a game that has allowed efficiency to overtake physical capabilities. Even the best pitchers in baseball can be replaced in the aggregate by a pool of willing hurlers who know that they, too, might blow out their elbows soon.

“We want higher performance,” Cole says, “but we also want durability.”
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DeacdeTejas said:
How is this not an infield fly?


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Only thing I can think of is “ordinary effort” - if the infielder has to come in and slide to make the catch, is that ordinary effort? I assume the pitcher doesn’t count as an infielder. I absolutely would have called infield fly there.
 
Wakelaw2006 said:
Only thing I can think of is “ordinary effort” - if the infielder has to come in and slide to make the catch, is that ordinary effort? I assume the pitcher doesn’t count as an infielder. I absolutely would have called infield fly there.
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Ordinary effort is the argument that was made but I guess I wrongfully assumed the pitcher counts as an infielder
 
DeacdeTejas said:
Ordinary effort is the argument that was made but I guess I wrongfully assumed the pitcher counts as an infielder
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Very strange call. Pitcher could have taken a few steps toward first and caught it easily with "ordinary effort." What's next? A "designated fielder" to stand at the back of the mound and field the pitcher's position?
 
Eh, I don't have a problem with that non-call. The pitcher coming off the mound is the lowest fielding priority on an infield pop up and is generally taught to stay out of the way for his safety and those around him. It's a lot different situation than a ground ball hit back at him.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
That dude's reasoning ignores the obvious. I've said it for the past few years, Perfect Game is killing baseball for the upcoming generation. Kids are pitching primarily to a radar gun and spin rate starting at 11 and 12 years old, instead of simply worrying about balls, strikes, and getting batters out. It's just a numbers game of how many arm blowouts that ultimately causes as pitchers get into their late teens and twenties. It used to be that TJ surgery was dominated by MLB; now, youth baseball makes up the highest percentage of TJ surgeries by far. Obviously, a lot of that is due to the lopsided numbers, but nobody had heard of a kid even needing TJ surgery until a few years ago. Velo (both pitching and exit) is the only thing that matters now.

I have a kid on my middle school team who is throwing 85 at 14 years old. It is cool to watch, but his arm will be done in a few years. But hey he got some cool PG hats and in a bunch of social media posts. My hardest task is getting him to throw in the 70s so he can throw strikes and actually get some outs if kids aren't just chasing him. I have another kid who has already had 2 arm surgeries at 14 from travel ball, so he can't pitch any more at all. But he got those cool plastic trophies, and PG made a shitton of money.
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And because of the 3 season travel ball schedules, I don’t see a lot of kids playing multi-sports in hs like they used to. Coming up in the late 60’s & early 70’s, the stars we would go watch as a kid might be the QB on the hs football team, point guard on bball team then a SS, CF and pitcher in the baseball team. Might even slide over and take some relays on track team.
My kid’s local hs which has several in the pros like Whit Merrifield (who was qb on JV football, pg on JV baskets and started as SS as a freshman on baseball) wants their kids now playing baseball all year. Coy James (2025) is their rising star and played U.S. baseball in the summer of soph year. Committed to Ole Miss after freshman year but probably won’t make it to college after the draft.
 
Another Dodgers rookie to watch... Andy Pages made his MLB debut yesterday. Lots of pop:

 
Keep an eye Nats' starting pitcher Jake Irvin. He is 6-6 235, can deal and his velo is up. Just shutout the Dodgers today (Irvin pitched the first six innings). For those that bet baseball, he is an auto-play until Vegas catches up that he is different than the rest of the Nats staff (with the exception of McKenzie Gore - he is also a value play).
 
From the game above, the A's ended up beating the Yankees today 2-0.

The A's closer is Mason Miller. In the 9th, striking out the side, Miller threw 8 fastballs at 100+. Including 4 in a row to strike out Juan Soto. To end the game, Miller blew a 102.5 mph fastball by Aaron Judge. The A's drafted Miller in the 3rd round in 2021 from Gardner Webb. In college, Miller was a starter; he actually started a handful of games for the A's last year. This year after being moved to the full-time closer's job, Miller is averaging 2Ks per inning.



Over his last 5 outings, all saves, Miller has 5 IP 0 H 1 BB 12 Ks, including two outings against the defending W-S Champs, and one against the Yankees. Game over when Miller enters.

There are good, sometimes great, players everywhere.

That said, unless he needs TJ, the A's will probably trade him as soon as he's arbitratione eligible.
 
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Pilchard said:
Keep an eye Nats' starting pitcher Jake Irvin. He is 6-6 235, can deal and his velo is up. Just shutout the Dodgers today (Irvin pitched the first six innings). For those that bet baseball, he is an auto-play until Vegas catches up that he is different than the rest of the Nats staff (with the exception of McKenzie Gore - he is also a value play).
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He's facing the Dodgers again today
 
DeacDaddy said:
He's facing the Dodgers again today
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Yep. Big test. It's one thing to shutdown the Dodgers once, but they have recent at-bats against Irvin now and hall of famers in their lineup. If Irvin pitches well again against that lineup, that would further legitimize him. Am a little nervous that the Dodgers get to him tonight, but Irvin's stuff is filthy.
 
Pilchard said:
Yep. Big test. It's one thing to shutdown the Dodgers once, but they have recent at-bats against Irvin now and hall of famers in their lineup. If Irvin pitches well again against that lineup, that would further legitimize him. Am a little nervous that the Dodgers get to him tonight, but Irvin's stuff is filthy.
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Would a play just on who’s going to win the first five innings be a smarter way to go about it
 
DeacDaddy said:
Would a play just on who’s going to win the first five innings be a smarter way to go about it
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Good angle. The Nats torched a big part of their bullpen last night when they couldn't hold on to a 1-0 leading heading into the 7th. Also, right now, the Nats have no left-handed relievers, which is incredible. The Dodgers have so many dominant left-handed hitters (Ohtani, Freeman, Muncy, Outman - who got the key hit last night against a RH reliever) that a foreeeable scenario is the Nats blowing another late inning lead. The thing is the Dodgers starter is a rookie making his second start, Landon Knack (the Nats beat him last week), the Nats now have that experience to further go to school on him.
 
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