Baseball Pitching and Injuries

What to do about it?

Lee Bressler writes,

I recently read an eye-opening interview with Max Scherzer in Sports Illustrated—if you haven’t, do yourself a favor and check it out. Scherzer, a three-time Cy Young winner and a throwback to an era when pitchers were as relentless as they were dominant, makes a radical case for overhauling the current system.

The game of baseball today is dominated by pitchers who throw extremely hard for a few innings and then get removed. It is dominated by batters who try to raise the “launch angle” when they hit the ball, hoping for a homerun whenever they make contact. These tactics have two adverse results. One is to reduce baseball to The Three Outcomes—strikeout, walk, or homerun. The other is to make pitching a dangerous activity, sort of like pro football, in that the man must risk damaging his body in order to play.

Sports Illustrated describes Max Scherzer’s proposal to reduce pitching injuries.¹

Penalize teams for taking their starter out early. It’s a concept the Toronto Blue Jays pitcher calls “the qualified starter,” and he has upgraded his original suggested requirements. What’s a qualified starter?

“If you go six innings, throw 100 pitches or give up four runs,” Scherzer says. “You achieve any one of these three, you become qualified.”

Instead of counting on being taken out of the game after they face 18 batters, a starting pitcher would have to stay in the game until the start becomes “qualified.” Failure to do so would result in the team being penalized (Scherzer lists various possible penalties).

Scherzer, at age 40, is a veteran pitcher himself. When he was in his prime, he never wanted to leave the game without satisfying the criteria he lists. Scherzer is proposing to make all of today’s hurlers go back to pitching like Scherzer.

If pitchers are injuring themselves by asking their arms to use more torque than the human body was meant to handle, then Scherzer’s proposed rule change seems counterintuitive. How would making a pitcher stay in the game longer make pitching safer?

The logic is that in order to stay in the game longer, the pitcher would have to go easier on his arm. This would achieve the desired result.

It reminds me of the argument that if we got rid of deposit insurance, bank customers would make sure that their banks operate more safely. Or the classic economist’s joke that you could induce safe driving if instead of installing air bags you could put a big, sharp spike on the steering wheel, aimed at the driver’s chest.

Fix the Ball

Long-time readers know that I believe that baseball has too many home runs. And I blame the ball for much of the game’s woes.

My thought is to make the ball slightly larger and less resilient. This would make the ball easier to hit but more difficult to hit far.

I grew up in an era dominated by pitching. Of that era, Bressler writes,

Even into the ’70s, aces such as Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver regularly logged 250 innings and 20-plus complete games a season.

Gibson, Koufax, Marichal, and others piled up complete games. On July 2, 1963, Marichal and the aging Warren Spahn staged a pitchers’ duel that ended in the 16th inning with Willie Mays hitting a home run for the only run of the game. Marichal and Spahn stayed on the mound the entire game.

In 1972, knuckleballer Wilbur Wood started 49 games and compiled 376 innings. The following season, in July he started both ends of a doubleheader. The knuckleball, a trick pitch that is easy on a pitcher’s arm, is no longer used by any major league pitcher.

The inability to throw a knuckleball is one symptom of what I believe is the source of the problem with baseball today: the baseball itself has changed. When I was a kid, if you dropped a baseball on pavement, it might bounce a couple of inches. Today’s baseball you can almost dribble like a basketball. It is way too resilient.

Redesign the baseball to improve the game

How can we get pitchers to throw less hard? Bressler suggests shrinking the size of a team’s pitching roster, so that the team knows that each individual pitcher must pitch more innings. He thinks that this would induce managers to take care of their pitchers’ arms.

Instead, I want to see a slightly larger, less resilient baseball. A less resilient ball will tend to stay in the park. A pitcher will not need to “miss bats” in order to avoid homeruns. And with a larger ball, the pitcher will not be able to use speed and spin to miss so many bats even if he wanted to.

With a slightly larger, less resilient ball, pitchers will rely more on finesse and on their team defense. Hitters will rely on putting the ball in play, rather than going for launch angle and the Three Outcomes. With more balls in play, baserunning and fielding will matter again, and baseball will be more interesting to watch.

My hope is that with a proper ball, straining one’s arm to the breaking point won’t be a source of advantage. Pitchers will choose less dangerous ways to exercise their craft.

substacks referenced above:

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The Death of Starting Pitching

1. I have a soft spot in my heart for Scherzer. He is on my 2025 NFBC auction fantasy team.