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Peter Gammons: Tommy John injuries a growing epidemic in baseball
April 3, 2014 by 0 Comments
Diamondbacks’ Patrick Corbin
But the first week of the 2014 season has been a cacophony of concerns about the ongoing process known as instant replay, five days in a three year project to try to get the highest possible percentage of calls correct. Look, the teams’ video coordinators need to speed up their decision-making and communication with managers. The biggest arguments have yet to come when the bases are loaded, a ball is hit down the right field line, it’s called foul, the call is reversed and they have to place the runners. Since Tony La Russa is a lawyer, perhaps he should handle the ensuing protests.
Instant replay will get better. But the biggest industry issue is the number of pitching injuries and the cost they have to clubs—not to mention the human beings who get hurt. Jason Collette reported that $415,422,175 is currently on the disabled list, which is 12.3% of industry payrolls.
Of those disabled players, 69% are pitchers. Collette reports that 68% of the $415,422,175 are comprised by pitchers. One club’s information is that in 2013, 31-to-33% of all the dollars spent on pitchers went to pitchers who were disabled.
Dr. James Andrews and Los Angeles Dodgers Director of medical services reported that 27% of the pitchers on major league rosters this spring have had Tommy John Surgery at some point in their careers. More than a quarter of all major league pitchers, and some beginning their ascent to the big leagues like Baltimore’s Dylan Bundy and Washington’s Lucas Giolito had Tommy John surgeries as teenagers.
The Braves have lost Kris Medlen, Brandon Beachy and Cory Gearrin for the season with TJ Surgery, and are hoping they get Gavin Floyd and Jonny Venters during the year, both coming off the same surgery. Oakland’s vaunted pitching depth was dealt a dual blown when Jarrod Parker and A.J. Griffin underwent elbow surgery. The Diamondbacks have lost their best starter, Pat Corbin, and power reliever David Hernandez to Tommy John. The Rangers have been beset by a plague of varied physical problems, the Dodgers have Kershaw and Brian Wilson on the DL. The Mariners opened the season with Hisashi Iwakuma, Taijuan Walker and Stephen Pryor disabled.
Suggestions have been made that teams sometimes try to rush pitchers back too quickly. If it did exist in the past, Dr. Andrews’ experts at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham feel the opposite is true today. “We find that trainers and rehab specialists are trying to give the pitchers more time to rehab,” says Dr. Richard Wilk. “It might have been 10 or 11 months at one point, but almost every trainer sets a minimum of 12 months for the rehab.”
Now, it is hard for trainers and rehab specialists to hold pitchers back. They’re human. The game fills them with insecurity. They often feel they are “way ahead of schedule” at eight or nine months, but they are not ready for the final three percent of effort that separates major league pitchers from the normal masses. “The general rule of thumb is that they often are ready to pitch at 12 months, but it isn’t until a year and a half after surgery that they have the feel for the ball, the location and the velocity that they had before having ligament or tendon problems.”
We all get it when club officials say there’s nothing they can do. But baseball takes little interest in the development of talent, which amounts to the players who play, the reason we pay so dearly to watch games. It’s not about promotions or videos that urge fans to “make noise,” it’s about the players. If you’re one of the few people in Florida who is a fan, you go to Miami to see Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Fernandez, Christian Yelich and Nate Eovaldi. Not the art; all that is the edamame before the meal.
Baseball has never addressed a way to get minority athletes scholarships to play college baseball.
And baseball doesn’t look at development, and the disturbing trend to teenagers being raised to play one sport year-round. Ask the experts at ASMI or the Kerlan-Jobe Clinic or Children’s Hospital in Boston and the subject comes back to the money-making world of showcases and travel teams. Instead of carefully constructed weekly and annual programs with rest and recovery major elements, kids in their teens are going to showcases from February to November trying to run up radar gun numbers to impress scouts, the scouting services and gurus.
When we were discussing this, Dr. Glenn Fleisig said, “you sound like Dr. Andrews without a southern accent.” The strain on tendons and ligaments in physically developing players is, in the experts’ chronicled judgments, a precursor to future problems because of the damage done to the fibers in the ligaments. And that’s before they get to some college programs known for abusing pitchers come May and June, when winning means money to the coaches. Dr. Andrews recently had to perform TJ Surgery on a catcher who blew out his arm after a drill throwing buckets of baseballs to second base in a short period of time.
“Baseball should study the showcases and the travel teams,” says Wilk. The ASMI doctors and rehabilitation experts are also concerned about some of the pitching gurus and schools that crop up; one suggests constant long toss up to 300 feet, which say necessitates an unnatural motion that puts tremendous straight on ligaments and tendons.
By Collette’s calculations, more than $282M right now is being paid to pitchers who cannot pitch, not because they so choose, but because they’re hurt. If indeed the injury cycle begins between 14 and 22, it’s because kids are abused trying to fastlane their careers because they love the game.
When, as happened in 2013, nearly a third of the money paid to pitchers was paid to disabled pitchers, it’s a good idea for the people who run a very good, profitable industry to study why so much—young men’s careers, as well as money—is wasted on ligaments and tendons and rotator cuffs that can no longer bend, but break.
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