Let’s hope Stephen Strasburg’s often brilliant, often injured, postseason-deadly career helps start solving pitching injuries the right way.
Allow me to begin by reaching for a magazine article. It’s one I wish would be read by those on social media or elsewhere where baseball is discussed and debated, particularly those who continue to kvetch about today’s pitchers being “babied” or “unable and unwilling to go the distance,” the way the real men did in the Good Old Days.
“[I]t’s a sad truth,” the writer began, “that, in recent years, and with increasing (and alarming) frequency, big winners have stopped winning with the abruptness of a stalled motor.”
. . . The principal reason why baseball has a sore pitching arm is that pitchers work harder today than ever before. Years ago, the baseball was a muffin, and pitchers paced themselves without fear of the big home run. Only when a runner reached second did the pitcher have to throw his best. And when he threw his best he was throwing at a larger strike zone.
Today the accent in baseball is on the score, big and quick. The ball is built for distance. Bats have the streamlined look . . . Fences are, if anything, closer. Anybody can hit a home run. No lead is safe, for five-run innings appear in box scores almost every day. So today’s pitcher must bear down all the time.
“Get out there and throw as hard as you can as long as you can,” the manager tells his starter. “If you get tired, we’ll bring in Pete from the bullpen.”
This approach to the game is murder on good pitchers, for if they last the full game, as they so often do, their arms undergo a severe strain.
“The pitching motion is a peculiar muscular activity,” said a team doctor to the writer. “It places an abnormal strain on the arm. Every time a man pitches hard, tendon fibers in his shoulder tear apart. It takes about three days for them to repair. That’s why pitchers can only work every fourth day, as a rule. When a pitcher throws too hard, or if he throws awkwardly—for instance, if he slips on the mound—the tear is apt to be bigger, causing a sore arm.”
“. . . [P]itchers are wearing out faster than ever, at a time when more pitchers than ever are being used, the search for new talent never ends,” the writer went on to say. “There are some baseball men who think that eventually pitchers will work only three innings at a time . . . In that same vein, others feel sure that the use of the relief man will be explored to such an extent that 20-game winners . . .will become extinct.”
The writer’s name was Walter Bingham. The magazine was Sports Illustrated, with the Yankees’ 1958 World Series MVP (and baseball’s third one-across-the-board Cy Young Award winner) Bob Turley on the cover. The issue was 4 May 1959. The team doctor Bingham quoted was Turley’s on the Yankees, Dr. Sidney Gaynor.
This weekend past, the Major League Baseball Players Association and MLB swapped barbs over the current crowd of pitcher injuries. The timing couldn’t have been more grave: Stephen Strasburg, brought down by thoracic outlet syndrome, finally formalised his long-enough-known retirement after ten full seasons and shards of three to come.
The MLBPA accused MLB of shoving and shortening the pitch clock to the detriment of pitchers’ health. MLB counter-accused the MLBPA of “ignor[ing] the empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trend, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries.” MLBPA chief Tony Clark put his name on their statement. No name appeared on MLB’s.
Strasburg’s TOS may have been a direct result of his longtime inverted-W arm-and-elbow positioning, both elbows above the shoulders as he cocked to throw, position which strains elbows and shoulders at once. I noted when discussing his original retirement decision, by way of longtime baseball analyst Allen Barra, that the inverted W’s arrival coincided with the little-by-little disappearance of the full windup from the pitching repertoire.
The full windup, Barra wrote in 2011, “took advantage of the momentum of [a pitcher’s] whole body to give velocity to the pitch.”
In recent decades, with pitchers more concerned about holding runners on base, the windup has largely gone the way of the two-dollar hot dog. The Inverted W is the result of a pitcher trying to add speed or finesse on a pitch by forcing the delivery—in other words, his arm working against his body instead of with it.
Sixty-five years after Bingham observed a major league pitching injury epidemic, ESPN’s Jeff Passan writes that, yes, pitchers have and will always get hurt, “but at the highest levels the causes have morphed from longer-term overuse injuries to shorter-burst, higher-intensity, muscles-and-ligaments-can’t-handle-it ones.”
Teams incentivize pitchers to throw in a way that many experts believe is the root cause of the game’s injury issues. As much as velocity correlates with injuries, it does so similarly with productivity. Throw harder, perform better. It’s a fact. It’s also bad for the health of pitchers — and the game.
At the same time, it’s not the only factor. The fact that the union wants more information on the pitch clock should matter to MLB. Even if the league did bargain for unilateral control over on-field rules changes during negotiations with the MLBPA, it can’t ignore what players continue to begrudge. This isn’t idle bellyaching. Pitchers want to understand why the extra two seconds shaved off the clock this year were so imperative. And why they aren’t entitled to one or two timeouts a game when they feel discomfort—a nerve sending a shock of pain up their arm, a muscle spasming and in need of a break. And why there still isn’t an accepted grip agent to help with balls they believe remain inconsistently manufactured. All issues of health.
If MLB wants evidence on its side, it should hark back to Bingham and toward Passan. If the MLBPA really cares about the pitching department of its membership, so should they. If both sides want to see fewer pitching injuries and longer pitching careers, they should hark especially to Keith Law, writing in The Inside Game four years ago:
Nolan Ryan is the ultimate survivor, the survivor ne plus ultra, the übersurvivor when it comes to survivorship bias . . . He is, however, an outlier, a great exception—not one that proves the rule, but one that causes many people to discard the rule. Most pitchers can’t handle the workloads that Ryan did; they would break down and suffer a major injury to their elbow or shoulder, or they would simply become less effective as a result of the heavy usage, and thus receive fewer opportunities to pitch going forward. Teams did try to give pitchers more work for decades, well into the 2000s, but you don’t know the names of those pitchers because they didn’t survive: they broke down, or pitched worse, or some combination of the above.
[The] pitching deity known as Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn started 73 games for the Providence Grays in 1884 and threw 678.2 innings, but survived to pitch another seven years beyond that. The game itself has changed dramatically in the last few decades, with pitchers throwing harder than ever, and hitters bigger and stronger than ever, but those outliers were even outliers in their own times—and they should not distract us from what we see from looking at all pitchers, not just the ones we remember.
. . . And stop saying “Nolan Ryan” like it’s some mic drop.
I saw one social media bonehead refer to Strasburg as “an orchid.” Charitably, that could be taken to refer to his early Tommy John surgery and to both cervical neck impingement and shoulder inflammation in 2018. Then, carpal tunnel syndrome in his pitching hand in 2020 followed by TOS surgery.
Maybe we should start saying “Stephen Strasburg” like it’s some mic drop.
He retires (as it should have been, no controversy) with no reduction in the annual average value of what’s left of that mammoth contract he signed not long after his 2019 World Series triumph. That Series MVP he won crowned a career in which he was so often brilliant and in which he was downright deadly come the postseason: 1.46 lifetime postseason ERA; 2.07 lifetime postseason fielding-independent pitching.
“Although I will always wish there were more games to be pitched,” Strasburg said in his formal announcement, “I find comfort knowing I left it all out there for the only team I’ve known.” He left more out there than even he might think.
Let’s hope he enjoys his second act of life while his career, among too many ended similarly, helps more than a few people start wising up. And, for further openers, maybe being allowed or encouraged to start winding up all over again.
Throneberry Fields Forever 