I read: The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports by Jeff Passan and came to the conclusion that the economic incentives are not there for keeping pitchers healthy. Part of this is because teams can buy insurance for their arms -- and the insurance companies are behind when it comes to estimating risk. Part of this is because there is a whole industry built up around 'turning your child into a professional athlete'. The parents who push their sons the hardest either do not understand what they are doing to their son's arms, or think the tradeoff is worth it. Part of the problem is the ubiquity of 'Tommy John' surgery, and the belief that pitching arms are _better_ (i.e. can throw harder) after the surgery rather than they were before. And part of it is because so many people want to be professional pitchers you can just throw away the ones that end up too injured to pitch, because 'there are more where those came from'. People are experimenting now with new materials to replace the ulnar ligament. Are natural arms about to become obsolete?
We may also need a new chapter of child labour laws to cover children's sports.
I am no expert in anything you say here but it was my understanding that the Orioles pitchers of the 70s won by somehow forcing lots of grounders to a great fielding team. They certainly didn't strike hardly anyone out. Is that really not still an option?
You force grounders by keeping the ball down below the batter's knees when it passes through his swing zone. Now, I haven't watched professional baseball since the 1990s, but my impression by what I read today, the bottom of the strike zone is strictly enforced higher than that, so if you keep the ball down today you give up lots of walks.
I haven't followed baseball since the Yankees won the WS in 2009 so take this with a grain of salt, but: my theory is that the casual fan to whom Major League Baseball markets its game cares more about seeing monster home runs than they do anything else. This uncomfortable truth was reified for me during the Bash Brothers' heyday in Oakland in the '80s & '90s. (And this theory was only further reified for me during the Barry Bonds/Sammy Sosa home run record chase a decade later.) The average fan would much rather see monster home runs than deft fielding or precision pitching. And the league wants to market to that average fan. Insofar as the league doesn't want to be seen as encouraging steroid use, it had to do something else to ensure that those average fans got their home runs. And so, my theory goes, they've juiced the balls.
No baseball expert here but I wonder about number of games played.. when I played little league(1960’s) we played 12-15 games a summer.. One of my friend’s sons played 50 games in the summer and will play 15 games this fall as a 6th grader .. I know they try to keep their innings pitched down but still...
RA Dickey pitched until he was 42 and won a Cy Young in 2012 without ever making the AS game in any other season after switching to a knuckle ball. Steven Wright switched to a knuckleball in 2011 after 5 years in the minors, made a major league roster in 2013 and was an all-star in 2016.
The Niekro brothers combined for 9,000 innings and pitched into their 40s, as well as a few other long lived knuckleballers.
Why aren't there more knuckle ball pitches? Especially if there are so many higher end pitchers getting injured, why are they not learning this style of pitch which obviously has less wear than your typical pitch and has turned otherwise unremarkable pitchers into all-stars?
I think it might be just as simple as “pitchers throw harder now.” Fastball velocity, spin rates, strikeouts-per-nine, and reliever usage have all come up a lot in recent years/decades.
Might be the ball or something, but it might just be a side effect of analytics. From the perspective of the front office, turns out that if you get your pitchers to throw harder, they’ll allow fewer runs. Pitcher durability doesn’t matter *per se*, just run prevention, so might as well get them to throw as hard as possible, even if it wears them out more quickly.
"Fastball velocity, spin rates, strikeouts-per-nine, and reliever usage have all come up a lot in recent years/decades."
This should lead to pitchers having an advantage. But scoring is high. That seems to be because a lot of fly balls become home runs. I suspect that is because of the resiliency of the ball.
I would look at, if it is technically possible, the velocity, both translational and angular, of a Steve Carlton curveball vs one thrown by any good pitcher of today. I suspect that both velocities are higher today. I also think that with pitch counts strictly enforced, the pitchers of today are simply going all out rather than trying to set a pace and effort to stretch out 9 innings.
I grew up playing baseball and I took the sport up again recreationally in my late 20s and played another 20 years every Spring thru Fall. I pitched and played 3rd base. Pitching is tough on the arm if you try to put lots of spin on the ball. When I took the sport up again in my late 20s, I was 100% fastballs and change-ups, so never suffered any real arm injuries, though my right shoulder sometimes aches if I overdo weightlifting today.
Didn't they make the ball heavier in tennis because grass court tournaments especially in the 90s were boring ace-fests? Perhaps I have imagined that.
This was interesting to read. I should disclose that I am a British reader, and my sport is cricket. I can very happily watch baseball though and even attended Seattle v Chicago Whitesox last time I was in the US last April (and caught a foul ball in the crowd which is remains a valued souvenir) .
But cricket has an injury epidemic too, to fast bowlers. The mechanics place more stress on the back and lower body than what it sounds like pitchers are going through, but there must be some reason why young and fit bowlers who have the rare and highly valued ability to pelt the ball at the batter at 90+ mph, leaving room for quite some skill in what exact direction it goes and how it behaves along the way, to the point where they are getting injured, and long-term, to a much much greater extent than their peers of yesteryear.
I am 41. I'm aware that none of these names will mean anything to anyone reading, but that means that I had the privilege of spending my teenage years watching some of the best fast bowlers who ever lived. Curtly Ambrose. Allan Donald. Wasim Akram. Waqar Younis. There were others too, go look them up on Youtube! But now England alone has seen the careers of two rapidly fast bowlers, Mark Wood and Jofra Archer, almost ruined by injury (though Wood will play in the World Cup which begins in India on Thursday). And they're not alone. The counter-example is James Anderson, an Englishman who is still bowling at the top level at 41 years old. Why did none of them get injured despite massive workload?
But the irony is they bowl so much less than they used to. The greats of the 1950s not only played for England in the summer, but had long seasons with their counties. Take Fred Trueman for instance, who bowled many, many more balls each summer than today's, but never got injured.
But something has happened either to the game or to bowlers' bodies which means they are much more likely to get crocked nowadays. I do not know of an analysis such as from the guy here who explains the elbow injuries afflicting pitchers, but cricket is a much poorer game if 90mph+ bowlers are missing from it.
It's an old adage; Follow the money. Do you know the odds of a high school kid playing in MLB? But that's the dream, the allure and where the big money is. By the time the kid is old enough, he has worked so hard his body is likely to fail - if not before, then at the MLB level. On the other side of the coin are the teams. Needing great athletes and having the budget to make it possible, they offer huge sums of money and pay for results, not longevity, because of the number of job applicants and they can also hedge their bets with insurance on the arms that throw. Sports injuries at the professional level are the result of the drive to make more money, on the part of the players and teams, and maybe the desire for a place in history. It's about money and ego, but mostly money.
Higher performance means higher fragility*. This is
>why high-performance pitchers last less long in MLB. Like so many top athletes attempting to maintain 100% sustainable performance but often adding some 5 or 10% short term unsustainable performance boost - unsustainable because of the increased risk of a small change causing disaster.
or of many free climbers or of folk jumping of skyscrapers with parachutes or ... extreme sports.
<
It's the same fragility from high performance banks & finance teams - trying to get 100% sustainable performance with uncertainty, and sometimes, frequently, getting 110% performance, unsustainable, by taking on too much risk, which means more failure.
*Wrote the pitching issue for the prior post including too much debt. One reason I'm addicted to Arnold's posts is the frequent cross-thinking in my own mind from many of the links.
As Ian has said about pitchers from the owners view: "might as well get them to throw as hard as possible, even if it wears them out more quickly."
1930 was notable offensive year so I checked the top pitchers that year. There were 5 20-game winners: Lefty Grove, George Earnshaw (fellow S’more alum), Ted Lyons, Wes Ferrell, and Ray Kremer. Lyons & Grove are the only Hall of Famers. Here are innings and career wins:
Earnshaw 1915 & 127
Ferrell 2623 & 193
Grove 3941 & 300
Lyons 4161 & 260
Kremer 1954 & 143
These guys weren’t injury prone the way today’s pitchers are, and yet they played in small ballparks with a lot of scoring like today.
I suspect Arnold is right about muscle and mechanics. And maybe there's a combo of more awareness/imaging plus a Wyatt Earp effect. How many potential Hall of Famers like Dwight Gooden (addiction aside) broke down with overuse? Maybe the past greats had styles and bodies that were more robust to heavy usage.
I read: The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports by Jeff Passan and came to the conclusion that the economic incentives are not there for keeping pitchers healthy. Part of this is because teams can buy insurance for their arms -- and the insurance companies are behind when it comes to estimating risk. Part of this is because there is a whole industry built up around 'turning your child into a professional athlete'. The parents who push their sons the hardest either do not understand what they are doing to their son's arms, or think the tradeoff is worth it. Part of the problem is the ubiquity of 'Tommy John' surgery, and the belief that pitching arms are _better_ (i.e. can throw harder) after the surgery rather than they were before. And part of it is because so many people want to be professional pitchers you can just throw away the ones that end up too injured to pitch, because 'there are more where those came from'. People are experimenting now with new materials to replace the ulnar ligament. Are natural arms about to become obsolete?
We may also need a new chapter of child labour laws to cover children's sports.
I am no expert in anything you say here but it was my understanding that the Orioles pitchers of the 70s won by somehow forcing lots of grounders to a great fielding team. They certainly didn't strike hardly anyone out. Is that really not still an option?
You force grounders by keeping the ball down below the batter's knees when it passes through his swing zone. Now, I haven't watched professional baseball since the 1990s, but my impression by what I read today, the bottom of the strike zone is strictly enforced higher than that, so if you keep the ball down today you give up lots of walks.
https://sabr.org/journal/article/the-growth-of-three-true-outcomes-from-usenet-joke-to-baseball-flashpoint/
I haven't followed baseball since the Yankees won the WS in 2009 so take this with a grain of salt, but: my theory is that the casual fan to whom Major League Baseball markets its game cares more about seeing monster home runs than they do anything else. This uncomfortable truth was reified for me during the Bash Brothers' heyday in Oakland in the '80s & '90s. (And this theory was only further reified for me during the Barry Bonds/Sammy Sosa home run record chase a decade later.) The average fan would much rather see monster home runs than deft fielding or precision pitching. And the league wants to market to that average fan. Insofar as the league doesn't want to be seen as encouraging steroid use, it had to do something else to ensure that those average fans got their home runs. And so, my theory goes, they've juiced the balls.
No baseball expert here but I wonder about number of games played.. when I played little league(1960’s) we played 12-15 games a summer.. One of my friend’s sons played 50 games in the summer and will play 15 games this fall as a 6th grader .. I know they try to keep their innings pitched down but still...
RA Dickey pitched until he was 42 and won a Cy Young in 2012 without ever making the AS game in any other season after switching to a knuckle ball. Steven Wright switched to a knuckleball in 2011 after 5 years in the minors, made a major league roster in 2013 and was an all-star in 2016.
The Niekro brothers combined for 9,000 innings and pitched into their 40s, as well as a few other long lived knuckleballers.
Why aren't there more knuckle ball pitches? Especially if there are so many higher end pitchers getting injured, why are they not learning this style of pitch which obviously has less wear than your typical pitch and has turned otherwise unremarkable pitchers into all-stars?
I think it might be just as simple as “pitchers throw harder now.” Fastball velocity, spin rates, strikeouts-per-nine, and reliever usage have all come up a lot in recent years/decades.
Might be the ball or something, but it might just be a side effect of analytics. From the perspective of the front office, turns out that if you get your pitchers to throw harder, they’ll allow fewer runs. Pitcher durability doesn’t matter *per se*, just run prevention, so might as well get them to throw as hard as possible, even if it wears them out more quickly.
"Fastball velocity, spin rates, strikeouts-per-nine, and reliever usage have all come up a lot in recent years/decades."
This should lead to pitchers having an advantage. But scoring is high. That seems to be because a lot of fly balls become home runs. I suspect that is because of the resiliency of the ball.
I would look at, if it is technically possible, the velocity, both translational and angular, of a Steve Carlton curveball vs one thrown by any good pitcher of today. I suspect that both velocities are higher today. I also think that with pitch counts strictly enforced, the pitchers of today are simply going all out rather than trying to set a pace and effort to stretch out 9 innings.
I grew up playing baseball and I took the sport up again recreationally in my late 20s and played another 20 years every Spring thru Fall. I pitched and played 3rd base. Pitching is tough on the arm if you try to put lots of spin on the ball. When I took the sport up again in my late 20s, I was 100% fastballs and change-ups, so never suffered any real arm injuries, though my right shoulder sometimes aches if I overdo weightlifting today.
More on the Three True Outcomes: https://www.theringer.com/2017/8/7/16108098/the-end-of-baseball-as-we-know-it
It’s a topic that’s been analyzed to death (like most things in baseball)
Didn't they make the ball heavier in tennis because grass court tournaments especially in the 90s were boring ace-fests? Perhaps I have imagined that.
This was interesting to read. I should disclose that I am a British reader, and my sport is cricket. I can very happily watch baseball though and even attended Seattle v Chicago Whitesox last time I was in the US last April (and caught a foul ball in the crowd which is remains a valued souvenir) .
But cricket has an injury epidemic too, to fast bowlers. The mechanics place more stress on the back and lower body than what it sounds like pitchers are going through, but there must be some reason why young and fit bowlers who have the rare and highly valued ability to pelt the ball at the batter at 90+ mph, leaving room for quite some skill in what exact direction it goes and how it behaves along the way, to the point where they are getting injured, and long-term, to a much much greater extent than their peers of yesteryear.
I am 41. I'm aware that none of these names will mean anything to anyone reading, but that means that I had the privilege of spending my teenage years watching some of the best fast bowlers who ever lived. Curtly Ambrose. Allan Donald. Wasim Akram. Waqar Younis. There were others too, go look them up on Youtube! But now England alone has seen the careers of two rapidly fast bowlers, Mark Wood and Jofra Archer, almost ruined by injury (though Wood will play in the World Cup which begins in India on Thursday). And they're not alone. The counter-example is James Anderson, an Englishman who is still bowling at the top level at 41 years old. Why did none of them get injured despite massive workload?
But the irony is they bowl so much less than they used to. The greats of the 1950s not only played for England in the summer, but had long seasons with their counties. Take Fred Trueman for instance, who bowled many, many more balls each summer than today's, but never got injured.
But something has happened either to the game or to bowlers' bodies which means they are much more likely to get crocked nowadays. I do not know of an analysis such as from the guy here who explains the elbow injuries afflicting pitchers, but cricket is a much poorer game if 90mph+ bowlers are missing from it.
After 1968 didn’t they also lower the mound from 15 to 10 inches. That will punish the arm
It's an old adage; Follow the money. Do you know the odds of a high school kid playing in MLB? But that's the dream, the allure and where the big money is. By the time the kid is old enough, he has worked so hard his body is likely to fail - if not before, then at the MLB level. On the other side of the coin are the teams. Needing great athletes and having the budget to make it possible, they offer huge sums of money and pay for results, not longevity, because of the number of job applicants and they can also hedge their bets with insurance on the arms that throw. Sports injuries at the professional level are the result of the drive to make more money, on the part of the players and teams, and maybe the desire for a place in history. It's about money and ego, but mostly money.
Higher performance means higher fragility*. This is
>why high-performance pitchers last less long in MLB. Like so many top athletes attempting to maintain 100% sustainable performance but often adding some 5 or 10% short term unsustainable performance boost - unsustainable because of the increased risk of a small change causing disaster.
See the free-diving death of Natalia Molchanova, https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-disappearance-of-the-worlds-greatest-free-diver
or of many free climbers or of folk jumping of skyscrapers with parachutes or ... extreme sports.
<
It's the same fragility from high performance banks & finance teams - trying to get 100% sustainable performance with uncertainty, and sometimes, frequently, getting 110% performance, unsustainable, by taking on too much risk, which means more failure.
*Wrote the pitching issue for the prior post including too much debt. One reason I'm addicted to Arnold's posts is the frequent cross-thinking in my own mind from many of the links.
As Ian has said about pitchers from the owners view: "might as well get them to throw as hard as possible, even if it wears them out more quickly."
1930 was notable offensive year so I checked the top pitchers that year. There were 5 20-game winners: Lefty Grove, George Earnshaw (fellow S’more alum), Ted Lyons, Wes Ferrell, and Ray Kremer. Lyons & Grove are the only Hall of Famers. Here are innings and career wins:
Earnshaw 1915 & 127
Ferrell 2623 & 193
Grove 3941 & 300
Lyons 4161 & 260
Kremer 1954 & 143
These guys weren’t injury prone the way today’s pitchers are, and yet they played in small ballparks with a lot of scoring like today.
I suspect Arnold is right about muscle and mechanics. And maybe there's a combo of more awareness/imaging plus a Wyatt Earp effect. How many potential Hall of Famers like Dwight Gooden (addiction aside) broke down with overuse? Maybe the past greats had styles and bodies that were more robust to heavy usage.
Why did they make the ball more lively?