Your question is one I have been thinking about for quite some time (I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s). My theory is that these athletes are no longer playing multiple sports. Different sports use different muscle groups in different ways. I believe athletes who became pitchers in the 1960s were stronger for playing more kinds of sports. Today, baseball players are playing baseball year round with few exceptions. This decision to specialize in baseball has had adverse consequences on their ability to throw a baseball more than a prescribed amount of pitches per game.
Since you mentioned Sandy Koufax, most people don’t know that his primary sport was basketball. He attended Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, New York, where he did not even play varsity baseball until his senior year.
Koufax finished his final high school season as the second-highest scorer in his division, averaging 16.5 points per game. This performance earned him a spot on the sportswriter-selected All-City team.
His basketball prowess earned him a college roster spot, and he enrolled at the University of Cincinnati on a basketball scholarship.
Playing for the freshman basketball team under coach Ed Jucker, Koufax was a highly productive forward, averaging 9.7 points per game.
In the spring of 1954, Koufax overheard Coach Jucker (who doubled as the university's baseball coach) planning a spring break baseball road trip to New Orleans. Wanting to join the trip, Koufax walked into Jucker's office, stated "I'm a pitcher," and tried out for the baseball team. He went 3–1 with 51 strikeouts in 32 innings that spring, catching the attention of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who signed him to a professional contract later that year.
Christy Mathewson explained in his book on pitching during the Dead Ball era that you shouldn't throw near full velocity until a runner gets to second base. How is a hitter with nobody on base going to hurt you? Hit a home run? Yeah, like that happens often.
Babe Ruth changed that, so pitchers stopped throwing 400 innings per season. You had to pitch your best to Ruth every time he came up. Soon every team had 2 or 3 guys who could homer regularly.
The 300 inning season was fairly rare by the 1950s, although the success of Koufax and Drysdale seems to have made it fashionable again in the later 1960s and early 1970s. But they both burned out young.
The last 300 season inning was Steve Carlton in 1980. Then 250 inning seasons became the new 300 inning season as teams universally switched from 4 man to 5 man starting rotations and developed reliable relievers to handle the 8th inning and then the closer to pitch the ninth.
Baseball players seldom lifted weights until the very late 20th Century. Nolan Ryan started lifting in 1973 but despite his huge success, couldn't get a teammate to lift with him until Brian Downing in 1979.
But now, 20 homers per season is pretty standard for catchers, middle infielders, and centerfielders, whereas 8 would be a decent number for half the guys in your line-up a half century ago.
So, pitchers have to throw hard to maybe 8 out of 9 hitters.
In recent years, new techniques have been developed to add 2 or 3 mph to fastballs. But they seem to take their toll physically. Plus, teams have gotten better and finding and using guys who can throw very hard for one inning twice a week, but no more than that.
How is Bucky Dent going to hurt you? Ironically, three of the most famous and incredible home runs were hit by Dent (1978), Mazeroski (1960) and Ozzie Smith (1985). Dent & Smith had a combined 68 regular season home runs.
Baseball people realizing that a 200 pound linebacker could play shortstop & second base changed everything. This and realizing that batters swinging to hit the ball hard was a productive strategy.
It also hasn't helped pitchers that ballpark fences were moved in.
Peak baseball diversity was the 1980s when a team would have a blend of speed, power, contact hitters and defensive specialist. The Royals & Cardinals successfully tailored their teams for AstroTurf. The Astros did likewise. It was rare for teams to have more than two home run hitters in the lineup. Pitchers did not need to worry about most batters making contact, and in fact hoped hitters would hit a flyball.
1980s baseball carried into the early 1990s. But after the 1994 strike and the acceptance of PEDs, the bias for the weak hitting middle infielder was discarded.
I think the real issue has to do with youth baseball, much more than professional baseball. In the US, the majority of Tommy John surgeries are now done on 16 and 17 year olds. They have already damaged their UCL - that's the ligament in the elbow that the surgery repairs. The cause of this is often trying to throw harder and trying to cultivate different pitches at a younger age. Particularly a curve ball, which required snapping the arm in a way that puts tremendous stress on the elbow ligaments. I think it's possible that changes to the baseball itself may have some impact, but I think that is far less significant than the way boys arms develop as kids. I don't think the current equilibrium is sustainable - but I think we are still in the early innings of learning better techniques for training youth baseball players in a way that is healthy. It's possible we will see a push to use a lighter weight or smaller baseball at an earlier age. It's odd that kids use a smaller and lighter ball for football and basketball, but an 8 year old and Paul Skenes use the same size baseball.
Yes, if it were all about changes in the major leagues, we wouldn't see youth injuries. (Other than the indirect effect of showing youths that they need to have great stuff to pitch in the majors)
Velocity is the most important metric for a high school pitcher to stand out. Consequently, youth baseball players are fixated on throwing hard and getting a high peak velocity
Likewise, power hitting - exit velocity - is how high school hitters stand out. All attention is on max effort performance.
I'm not sure how you modify the game to lessen the importance of speed in pitching & hitting.
All that explains why pitchers give up more runs, but only very indirectly explains increased injuries even while throwing fewer innings. It seems more likely that throwing breaking balls at 90+ is just really hard on the joints.
But why try to make every pitch a "bat-misser?" Because if they don't, the ball will leave the park. They would give up even more runs if they put a little less torque on their arms.
It's not the same game. Talent pool is deeper across the board. Conditioning and training is better for hitters and pitchers. Lineup construction is optimized. Swingpaths are optimized. Mechanics are optimized. We know pitch shape, arm extension and spin rates. Average mph for starting fastball has increased to close to 96 mph. It's more strenuous bc if it wasn't, it couldn't compete.
Golf is somewhat comparable, but nothing is quite so measurable across so many different dimensions as baseball. It's like asking a 1960s military to compete against a 2026 military. They wouldn't stand a chance. If the 90s Bulls played a game today, they'd get wrecked…at least until they figured out that Phil Jackson is a moron, and it was good to shoot threes, and then they'd figure out how to get better. If Sandy Koufax or Joe DiMaggio came to spring training today, they'd be so overwhelmed they'd just quit. If Aaron Judge went back to the 60s, he'd hit 100 hrs. They wouldn't be able to get him out. 89 mph fastballs? Good luck with that.
To your basketball analogy, we could hand Nicklaus a modern driver and ball, but we could not give him the rotational power of a Rory McIlroy or the ground force mechanics of a Bryson DeChambeau. That gap is real and not closeable without significant athletic and strength training. Combine that with the fact that the modern courses are significantly more complex (longer, narrower, faster, rougher) vs. the 1960s variant means that course management and ball striking are at a much greater premium.
Lastly, the competition in the field (it's an international sport started at a very young age) has increased immensely. This factor cannot be emphasized enough.
Bottom line: the average professional golfer of the 60s with modern equipment would not qualify to play, and if they somehow did, they would not make the Friday cutline.
That’s fun! So, let’s flip the script then: a modern elite player using persimmon drivers and blade irons with wound balata balls playing on a course of the Nicklaus era.
So, they lose 30-40 yards off the tees, but consider what the modern day elite players can do to overcome that constraint:
1) Their swing fundamentals are so grooved that they’d adapt to the smaller sweet spot faster than average
2) They understand ball flight and shot shaping at a mechanical level 1960s players learned purely by feel
3)They’d actually have an advantage in persimmon because their understanding of strike quality and center contact is so precise — launch monitor training essentially teaches you to find the middle of the face obsessively
4)The wound balata ball actually spins more, which rewards the elite shot shaping that modern players already possess
Combine that with the fact that the 1970s courses were so much easier to navigate. For example, a 1970s championship setup compared to today is:
*500+ yards shorter
*Slower greens by 4-5 stimpmeter points
*More generous rough
*Fairway bunkers positioned for 1970s distances, meaning modern players carry them entirely
*Greens holding approach shots more readily
Scheffler or Rory on a 1970s Augusta setup is essentially playing a course that was never designed to test someone of their caliber even with the equipment penalty factored in.
I do think that from a skills/athleticism standpoint, the best of the 70-90s basketball players could compete... they'd have to adjust to the different tactics of modern basketball, but they'd figure that out. Some of the bruiser types would probably be obsolete, but other guys (like Patrick Ewing, who was a great shooter) would be even more valuable. In baseball, the technology has advanced so much that the previous generation's stars wouldn't even make the team. Flamethrowing closers in the 90s grade out with mediocre fastballs by today's standards for *starting pitchers* (forget closers).
I just read your remark ... You claim that the talent pool is now deeper. I've often wondered about this. In my youth/adolescence, baseball was the default summer sport -- If you randomly passed by a park, you'd often see young boys playing pick-up baseball. But who plays pick-up these days? I never see kids playing. Where I live (New Brunswick) the only games you'll see at the local park are played by middle-aged men and women engaged in slow-pitch soft-softball. In fact, soccer now appears to be the default summer-sport -- and even then it's all organized by adults, and never pick-up.
So how is the talent pool deeper today? Is my experience simply not representative? Or is the pool deeper because the game has become far more international -- Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Korea, Japan, etc.? I’m not trying to take a contrary position here — I genuinely don’t know the answer.
Got a question about coaching. I came up with this theory about why there are no more .400 hitters. (I don't follow baseball much at all and have no statistics to back up any of this. It is pure speculation, a wild-assed guess with no scientific pretensions whatsoever.)
Back when Ty Cobb and Ted Williams and even Willie Mays were kids, there was no Little League (it began in 1939) and no organized kid coaching. A kid was a natural or he wasn't. Nowadays kids get so much coaching that the naturals get ground down and the mediocre get improvements. The average may well be the same, but the highs are gone and so are the .400 hitters.
Is this a completely crackpot idea? I came up with it a zillion years ago for no particular reason.
I think it's crackpot, lol. Outliers have been pulled up. The reason guys don't hit .400 is bc hitting for power is much more valuable than hitting for average, and pitching is much, much better
The increase in pitcher's injuries is just one example of something common to all professional sports. Serious participants push their bodies farther and farther past normal limits for longer periods of time. It is inevitable that bodies will often break.
But no one can afford to stop because then they lose their competitive edge and wash out.
It's also doping. And if the players really wanted to put a stop to it, the players' unions would drop their opposition to a regime of testing every game, which is the only way you're going to have the anti-doping rules consistently obeyed. (This mainly applies to both MLB and the NFL.)
The players don't want that because they're already seriously abusing their bodies with so much exercise (and yes, there is such a thing as too much) that many of them suffer heart attacks and strokes before they reach age 50. And if they're willing to do that, the added damage they suffer from doping disappears in the noise. If they're not willing to do that, then any enforcement of doping rules becomes unfair, selective enforcement.
But the '60s era game, overall, was not necessarily easier. The games lasted longer, and nobody complained about that until later. With only two home-run hitters in a lineup you could regularly pitch a complete game taking 3.5 or 4 hours, without many injuries. But now the fans, league management, and even the TV networks have lost the patience to sit through long, leisurely games. I liked it the old way better.
The essay is well-written and historically engaging, but measured against the full range of what actually drives modern pitching injuries, it is notably incomplete and focuses on the wrong causes.
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What the Essay Gets Right
The observation that batting lineups are more dangerous top to bottom today is accurate and well-supported by the 1964 Cardinals example. The point about the designated hitter eliminating the opposing pitcher as an easy out is legitimate and often overlooked. The historical detail throughout is genuinely enjoyable.
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Major Factors the Essay Misses
**Year-Round Throwing**
Perhaps the most important missing piece. In the 1960s, many players worked other jobs in the off-season and their arms genuinely rested for months at a time. Today, young pitchers are in organized throwing programs essentially year-round, often beginning serious training in childhood. The cumulative wear on the arm begins very early and never fully stops. This is almost certainly more damaging than anything happening inside the ballpark.
**Throwing Harder**
Average pitch velocity has climbed steadily for decades. Throwing a baseball harder places significantly greater stress on the elbow and shoulder. The essay discusses what pitchers face from hitters but never addresses what pitchers are doing to themselves simply by throwing harder than their predecessors did.
**Economic Pressure to Hide Injury**
A pitcher earning tens of millions of dollars faces enormous pressure — from himself, his team, and his agent — to keep throwing through early warning signs of injury. In the 1960s, the financial stakes were incomparably lower. A sore arm today is a financial crisis in a way it simply was not sixty years ago.
**Young Players Specializing Too Early**
In earlier generations, many athletes played multiple sports, which gave their arms natural rest and worked different muscle groups across seasons. Today's elite pitching prospect has often thrown almost exclusively since childhood. Tommy John surgery — a procedure to repair a torn ligament in the elbow — is now commonly performed on high school and even middle school aged players, something essentially unheard of in previous generations. The damage is accumulating long before anyone reaches the major leagues.
**More Stressful Pitch Types**
Pitchers today throw a wider variety of breaking pitches than their predecessors, and several of the most popular modern pitch types place greater stress on the elbow than the simpler mix of fastballs and curveballs common in the 1960s. This is a technical point but a well-documented one in sports medicine research.
**Better Medical Detection**
Some portion of what looks like an injury epidemic may simply reflect that doctors today can identify and name injuries that previously went undetected. A pitcher in 1965 who "lost something off his fastball" and quietly retired may have had the same torn elbow ligament that today gets diagnosed, surgically repaired, and entered into the statistics. This does not eliminate the problem but complicates the comparison.
**The Relief Pitcher Problem**
Modern teams use far more relief pitchers than teams did in the 1960s, partly as a strategy to protect arms. The unintended consequence is that relief pitchers, knowing they only need to throw one or two innings, throw at maximum effort every single outing with no reason to pace themselves. This may actually be increasing arm stress rather than reducing it.
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The Essay's Fundamental Problem
The author looks almost entirely at conditions inside the game — ballpark dimensions, the designated hitter, the quality of opposing hitters — to explain why pitchers get hurt more today. These are real factors but relatively minor ones. The deeper causes are structural: how young athletes are trained, what financial pressures the modern game creates, and how American youth sports culture has changed over sixty years. The essay asks why the job is harder, when the more important question is why arms are breaking down before pitchers even arrive at the job.
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Bottom Line
The essay is historically literate and a pleasure to read, but it identifies secondary causes while missing the primary ones almost entirely.
My memory is that the Orioles won in the 70s with good pitchers who struck out almost nobody. Instead, they pitched to create ground balls. Where does that fit in?
This is sort of background and beyond the pitching question. They also use a ball only an average of 2 to 6 pitches. It is always brand new. The dead ball era according to ChatGPT was because they would use the ball until destruction. So, it didn't matter how much tobacco juice was on it or how misshapen it was. According to ChatGPT in a high turnover game today they will use as many as 160 balls with a typical game using closer to 100. It claims the '60s games would use only 30 to 60 balls. There is also much shorter usage of a bat, and it is destroyed quicker and optimized much more than either the '60s or the dead ball era. There has also been changes in materials moving from exclusively ash to maple bats and apparently now birch, but with maple still dominant. They have different density and life cycles. Bonds used maple bats. I had a maple bat, and you could feel the difference.
Baseballs were radically improved with a rubber core in 1911, so hitting statistics went way up. But pitchers brought back the Dead Ball Era by abusing the new baseballs with tobacco juice and gouges.
Batter Ray Chapman was killed by a dirty baseball on August 17, 1920. It was widely assumed that he hadn't seen it and thus didn't get out of its way. Soon, umpires were putting more new clean balls into play. The spitball was outlawed the next season, except for a number of older pitchers who were allowed to continue to use it for the rest of their careers.
So, the quality of baseballs in play was much better by 1921 or 1922. (By the way, Babe Ruth's giant leaps in home runs, to 29 in 1919 and 54 in 1920, were largely accomplished in the Dead Ball Era.)
The ball was probably juiced again around 1925 and then again in 1930. It may have been de-juiced after 1930. They've been played around with some since then. E.g., 1987 seemed to have lively balls.
Pitchers continued to look for flaws in the sewing of the ball to make them break weirdly. Probably modern baseballs are less susceptible to that.
I always wonder whether the three true outcomes business is over-emphasized due to the fact that it's easier to quantify and reduce to a single value like bWAR or something.
How "Feminization" Explains What Went Wrong with Baseball
Economist and blogger Arnold Kling has been writing about what he calls "feminization" — not a simple claim about women, but about a set of institutional behaviors that tend to cluster with female personality traits as described by psychologist Joyce Benenson. Feminized institutions are conflict-avoidant, safety-seeking, deferential to authority, and protective of orthodoxy. They resist challenges to established power and prioritize consensus over experimentation. Kling argues this institutional personality has spread across academia, corporate life, and government, generally making those institutions worse.
Baseball offers an unexpected window into the same dynamic.
Baseball's rules were not invented by a committee. They emerged organically from millions of playground games, refined through a decentralized, iterative process with immediate feedback. Children playing pickup baseball unconsciously optimized the rules for one thing: the pleasure of the players. That emergent process produced something genuinely well-balanced — competitive, self-governing, and fun.
As baseball professionalized, the audience grew and rules were adjusted for spectator enjoyment. As commercial interests grew larger still, the rules bent further toward profit. Today, the commercial structure — team owners, the Players Association, the NCAA, television networks — is vastly more powerful than any organic player interest. The rules now serve capital, not the game.
What does this have to do with feminization? The connection isn't that women ruined baseball. It's that the *institutional personality* Kling calls feminized — conflict-avoidant, orthodoxy-preserving, deferential to the powerful — is exactly what emerges when a commercial interest captures a rule system. Nobody seriously challenges the owners. Nobody challenges the Players Association. Nobody in the NCAA ecosystem challenges the subsidy structure that benefits universities and real estate interests around stadiums. The incentives all run toward accommodation of power and away from the kind of disruptive, heterodox thinking that genuine reform would require.
Meanwhile, government subsidies — public stadiums, youth recreation infrastructure, tax breaks for collegiate programs — insulate the commercial structure from competitive pressure that might otherwise force change. Losses get socialized; gains get privatized. The feedback loop that made playground baseball great has been completely severed.
The result, visible to any serious fan, is a game optimized for the wrong things — exit velocity statistics, broadcast revenue, franchise valuations — while the actual experience of players and fans deteriorates. Pitching injuries have reached epidemic levels because the ball, the ballparks, and the rules have been shaped by commercial logic rather than the health of the game. Obvious structural fixes are available but go unpursued, not because they're technically difficult, but because the institutions governing baseball have the conflict-avoidant, change-resistant personality of organizations that have been captured by power.
The playground, it turns out, was the more masculine environment in Kling's sense — competitive, self-regulating, and ruthlessly experimental. Professional baseball became feminized precisely as it became institutionalized. The organic feedback loop was replaced by bureaucracy, and bureaucracy serves those who fund it.
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The deeper insight here is that feminization, in Kling's framework, isn't primarily about gender. It's about what happens to any institution when the incentive to avoid conflict and defer to power overwhelms the incentive to get things right.
Good question. And obvious to who? I'm being a bit lazy here in my use of AI. Sorry.
From Kling's post:
Make the ball larger or increase its drag
The ball would travel less far for a given quality of contact, meaning fewer home runs on well-struck balls. More importantly for your argument, pitchers could afford to let batters make contact without catastrophic results. The obsession with strikeouts — which drives extreme pitch velocity and spin, and therefore arm stress — would diminish. Pitchers could pitch to contact more, throwing more innings at lower intensity. This was essentially the 1960s model.
Move fences back
Similar effect — reduces home run threat, allows pitchers to be less maximal on every pitch. Also potentially restores the value of speed and gap hitting, making the game more varied and interesting. The "launch angle revolution" — where hitters optimize for lofting the ball — becomes less rational when the fences are deeper. More balls in play, more athleticism rewarded.
Eliminate the designated hitter
Restores a genuine soft spot in the lineup. Pitchers facing the opposing pitcher can afford to give up contact. It also reintroduces strategic complexity — when do you pinch hit for your pitcher, sacrificing defense for offense? Many fans consider this the most intellectually interesting decision in baseball. The DH was introduced in 1973 specifically to increase offense and attendance, a pure commercial decision.
Move the pitching rubber back
This one is the most counterintuitive and deserves careful thought. The conventional wisdom would say it helps batters — more time to read the pitch, slightly slower effective velocity. But the more important effect might be on pitcher mechanics. Currently pitchers compensate for the fixed rubber distance by maximizing velocity and spin through increasingly extreme arm angles and torque — exactly what causes injuries like UCL tears. A slightly longer distance might paradoxically allow pitchers to throw more naturally, with less mechanical extremity, at velocities that are still effective given the extra movement time. The injury reduction could be significant.
Taken together these four changes point in a coherent direction — toward a game where contact and athleticism matter more than raw power, where pitchers can sustain longer careers, and where strategic variety replaces the current home-run-or-strikeout monoculture that many fans find tedious. The game becomes less like a slugging contest and more like the chess match it was historically celebrated as being.
The commercial resistance to all four is also coherent — home runs are the most televised, most highlight-friendly, most casually accessible moment in baseball. Everything that reduces home runs threatens the broadcast product, even if it makes the game better by almost every other measure.
From my framework:
- Cut public subsidies to professional, collegiate, and local baseball leagues, forcing the commercial structure to bear its own costs and breaking the pipeline of institutionalized orthodoxy at every level
- Create genuine competitive pressure on the rules themselves, perhaps through rival leagues or international formats with different rules
How did I get so old that while I knew the entire 1960 Cardinals' roster and all the starting players in the National League to having no more idea who these two best current pitchers are ("Tarik Skubal and Garett Crochet") than I do who is at the top of today's Hit Parade (assuming there is such a thing anymore)?
I don't think we want to go back to 1968, "the year of the pitcher." Gibson had a 1.12 ERA and the AL had only one .300 hitter. Carl Yastrzemski at .301. I would like to see more "small ball." I wonder if MLB could limit the number of times a pitcher could throw 100+ mph pitches?
Your question is one I have been thinking about for quite some time (I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s). My theory is that these athletes are no longer playing multiple sports. Different sports use different muscle groups in different ways. I believe athletes who became pitchers in the 1960s were stronger for playing more kinds of sports. Today, baseball players are playing baseball year round with few exceptions. This decision to specialize in baseball has had adverse consequences on their ability to throw a baseball more than a prescribed amount of pitches per game.
Since you mentioned Sandy Koufax, most people don’t know that his primary sport was basketball. He attended Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, New York, where he did not even play varsity baseball until his senior year.
Koufax finished his final high school season as the second-highest scorer in his division, averaging 16.5 points per game. This performance earned him a spot on the sportswriter-selected All-City team.
His basketball prowess earned him a college roster spot, and he enrolled at the University of Cincinnati on a basketball scholarship.
Playing for the freshman basketball team under coach Ed Jucker, Koufax was a highly productive forward, averaging 9.7 points per game.
In the spring of 1954, Koufax overheard Coach Jucker (who doubled as the university's baseball coach) planning a spring break baseball road trip to New Orleans. Wanting to join the trip, Koufax walked into Jucker's office, stated "I'm a pitcher," and tried out for the baseball team. He went 3–1 with 51 strikeouts in 32 innings that spring, catching the attention of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who signed him to a professional contract later that year.
Christy Mathewson explained in his book on pitching during the Dead Ball era that you shouldn't throw near full velocity until a runner gets to second base. How is a hitter with nobody on base going to hurt you? Hit a home run? Yeah, like that happens often.
Babe Ruth changed that, so pitchers stopped throwing 400 innings per season. You had to pitch your best to Ruth every time he came up. Soon every team had 2 or 3 guys who could homer regularly.
The 300 inning season was fairly rare by the 1950s, although the success of Koufax and Drysdale seems to have made it fashionable again in the later 1960s and early 1970s. But they both burned out young.
The last 300 season inning was Steve Carlton in 1980. Then 250 inning seasons became the new 300 inning season as teams universally switched from 4 man to 5 man starting rotations and developed reliable relievers to handle the 8th inning and then the closer to pitch the ninth.
Baseball players seldom lifted weights until the very late 20th Century. Nolan Ryan started lifting in 1973 but despite his huge success, couldn't get a teammate to lift with him until Brian Downing in 1979.
But now, 20 homers per season is pretty standard for catchers, middle infielders, and centerfielders, whereas 8 would be a decent number for half the guys in your line-up a half century ago.
So, pitchers have to throw hard to maybe 8 out of 9 hitters.
In recent years, new techniques have been developed to add 2 or 3 mph to fastballs. But they seem to take their toll physically. Plus, teams have gotten better and finding and using guys who can throw very hard for one inning twice a week, but no more than that.
How is Bucky Dent going to hurt you? Ironically, three of the most famous and incredible home runs were hit by Dent (1978), Mazeroski (1960) and Ozzie Smith (1985). Dent & Smith had a combined 68 regular season home runs.
Baseball people realizing that a 200 pound linebacker could play shortstop & second base changed everything. This and realizing that batters swinging to hit the ball hard was a productive strategy.
It also hasn't helped pitchers that ballpark fences were moved in.
Peak baseball diversity was the 1980s when a team would have a blend of speed, power, contact hitters and defensive specialist. The Royals & Cardinals successfully tailored their teams for AstroTurf. The Astros did likewise. It was rare for teams to have more than two home run hitters in the lineup. Pitchers did not need to worry about most batters making contact, and in fact hoped hitters would hit a flyball.
1980s baseball carried into the early 1990s. But after the 1994 strike and the acceptance of PEDs, the bias for the weak hitting middle infielder was discarded.
I think the real issue has to do with youth baseball, much more than professional baseball. In the US, the majority of Tommy John surgeries are now done on 16 and 17 year olds. They have already damaged their UCL - that's the ligament in the elbow that the surgery repairs. The cause of this is often trying to throw harder and trying to cultivate different pitches at a younger age. Particularly a curve ball, which required snapping the arm in a way that puts tremendous stress on the elbow ligaments. I think it's possible that changes to the baseball itself may have some impact, but I think that is far less significant than the way boys arms develop as kids. I don't think the current equilibrium is sustainable - but I think we are still in the early innings of learning better techniques for training youth baseball players in a way that is healthy. It's possible we will see a push to use a lighter weight or smaller baseball at an earlier age. It's odd that kids use a smaller and lighter ball for football and basketball, but an 8 year old and Paul Skenes use the same size baseball.
Yes, if it were all about changes in the major leagues, we wouldn't see youth injuries. (Other than the indirect effect of showing youths that they need to have great stuff to pitch in the majors)
Velocity is the most important metric for a high school pitcher to stand out. Consequently, youth baseball players are fixated on throwing hard and getting a high peak velocity
Likewise, power hitting - exit velocity - is how high school hitters stand out. All attention is on max effort performance.
I'm not sure how you modify the game to lessen the importance of speed in pitching & hitting.
All that explains why pitchers give up more runs, but only very indirectly explains increased injuries even while throwing fewer innings. It seems more likely that throwing breaking balls at 90+ is just really hard on the joints.
But why try to make every pitch a "bat-misser?" Because if they don't, the ball will leave the park. They would give up even more runs if they put a little less torque on their arms.
It's not the same game. Talent pool is deeper across the board. Conditioning and training is better for hitters and pitchers. Lineup construction is optimized. Swingpaths are optimized. Mechanics are optimized. We know pitch shape, arm extension and spin rates. Average mph for starting fastball has increased to close to 96 mph. It's more strenuous bc if it wasn't, it couldn't compete.
This 100%! Same goes for all competitive sports, including golf (if you can believe it).
Golf is somewhat comparable, but nothing is quite so measurable across so many different dimensions as baseball. It's like asking a 1960s military to compete against a 2026 military. They wouldn't stand a chance. If the 90s Bulls played a game today, they'd get wrecked…at least until they figured out that Phil Jackson is a moron, and it was good to shoot threes, and then they'd figure out how to get better. If Sandy Koufax or Joe DiMaggio came to spring training today, they'd be so overwhelmed they'd just quit. If Aaron Judge went back to the 60s, he'd hit 100 hrs. They wouldn't be able to get him out. 89 mph fastballs? Good luck with that.
To your basketball analogy, we could hand Nicklaus a modern driver and ball, but we could not give him the rotational power of a Rory McIlroy or the ground force mechanics of a Bryson DeChambeau. That gap is real and not closeable without significant athletic and strength training. Combine that with the fact that the modern courses are significantly more complex (longer, narrower, faster, rougher) vs. the 1960s variant means that course management and ball striking are at a much greater premium.
Lastly, the competition in the field (it's an international sport started at a very young age) has increased immensely. This factor cannot be emphasized enough.
Bottom line: the average professional golfer of the 60s with modern equipment would not qualify to play, and if they somehow did, they would not make the Friday cutline.
How would today's golfers do with Jack Nicklaus's 1972 clubs?
People hold amateur tournaments with Bobby Jones-style 1920s wooden-shafted clubs. They say they are a lot of fun, but they seldom post their scores.
That’s fun! So, let’s flip the script then: a modern elite player using persimmon drivers and blade irons with wound balata balls playing on a course of the Nicklaus era.
So, they lose 30-40 yards off the tees, but consider what the modern day elite players can do to overcome that constraint:
1) Their swing fundamentals are so grooved that they’d adapt to the smaller sweet spot faster than average
2) They understand ball flight and shot shaping at a mechanical level 1960s players learned purely by feel
3)They’d actually have an advantage in persimmon because their understanding of strike quality and center contact is so precise — launch monitor training essentially teaches you to find the middle of the face obsessively
4)The wound balata ball actually spins more, which rewards the elite shot shaping that modern players already possess
Combine that with the fact that the 1970s courses were so much easier to navigate. For example, a 1970s championship setup compared to today is:
*500+ yards shorter
*Slower greens by 4-5 stimpmeter points
*More generous rough
*Fairway bunkers positioned for 1970s distances, meaning modern players carry them entirely
*Greens holding approach shots more readily
Scheffler or Rory on a 1970s Augusta setup is essentially playing a course that was never designed to test someone of their caliber even with the equipment penalty factored in.
I do think that from a skills/athleticism standpoint, the best of the 70-90s basketball players could compete... they'd have to adjust to the different tactics of modern basketball, but they'd figure that out. Some of the bruiser types would probably be obsolete, but other guys (like Patrick Ewing, who was a great shooter) would be even more valuable. In baseball, the technology has advanced so much that the previous generation's stars wouldn't even make the team. Flamethrowing closers in the 90s grade out with mediocre fastballs by today's standards for *starting pitchers* (forget closers).
I just read your remark ... You claim that the talent pool is now deeper. I've often wondered about this. In my youth/adolescence, baseball was the default summer sport -- If you randomly passed by a park, you'd often see young boys playing pick-up baseball. But who plays pick-up these days? I never see kids playing. Where I live (New Brunswick) the only games you'll see at the local park are played by middle-aged men and women engaged in slow-pitch soft-softball. In fact, soccer now appears to be the default summer-sport -- and even then it's all organized by adults, and never pick-up.
So how is the talent pool deeper today? Is my experience simply not representative? Or is the pool deeper because the game has become far more international -- Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Korea, Japan, etc.? I’m not trying to take a contrary position here — I genuinely don’t know the answer.
Yes, global game, and ruthless sorting, even at the earlier levels. Best players aren't playing pickup. They're doing uber-competitive travel leagues
Got a question about coaching. I came up with this theory about why there are no more .400 hitters. (I don't follow baseball much at all and have no statistics to back up any of this. It is pure speculation, a wild-assed guess with no scientific pretensions whatsoever.)
Back when Ty Cobb and Ted Williams and even Willie Mays were kids, there was no Little League (it began in 1939) and no organized kid coaching. A kid was a natural or he wasn't. Nowadays kids get so much coaching that the naturals get ground down and the mediocre get improvements. The average may well be the same, but the highs are gone and so are the .400 hitters.
Is this a completely crackpot idea? I came up with it a zillion years ago for no particular reason.
I think it's crackpot, lol. Outliers have been pulled up. The reason guys don't hit .400 is bc hitting for power is much more valuable than hitting for average, and pitching is much, much better
There are high school kids throwing 100mph now!
The increase in pitcher's injuries is just one example of something common to all professional sports. Serious participants push their bodies farther and farther past normal limits for longer periods of time. It is inevitable that bodies will often break.
But no one can afford to stop because then they lose their competitive edge and wash out.
it's a Red Queen's Race.
It's also doping. And if the players really wanted to put a stop to it, the players' unions would drop their opposition to a regime of testing every game, which is the only way you're going to have the anti-doping rules consistently obeyed. (This mainly applies to both MLB and the NFL.)
The players don't want that because they're already seriously abusing their bodies with so much exercise (and yes, there is such a thing as too much) that many of them suffer heart attacks and strokes before they reach age 50. And if they're willing to do that, the added damage they suffer from doping disappears in the noise. If they're not willing to do that, then any enforcement of doping rules becomes unfair, selective enforcement.
But the '60s era game, overall, was not necessarily easier. The games lasted longer, and nobody complained about that until later. With only two home-run hitters in a lineup you could regularly pitch a complete game taking 3.5 or 4 hours, without many injuries. But now the fans, league management, and even the TV networks have lost the patience to sit through long, leisurely games. I liked it the old way better.
Essay Grade: C+
The essay is well-written and historically engaging, but measured against the full range of what actually drives modern pitching injuries, it is notably incomplete and focuses on the wrong causes.
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What the Essay Gets Right
The observation that batting lineups are more dangerous top to bottom today is accurate and well-supported by the 1964 Cardinals example. The point about the designated hitter eliminating the opposing pitcher as an easy out is legitimate and often overlooked. The historical detail throughout is genuinely enjoyable.
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Major Factors the Essay Misses
**Year-Round Throwing**
Perhaps the most important missing piece. In the 1960s, many players worked other jobs in the off-season and their arms genuinely rested for months at a time. Today, young pitchers are in organized throwing programs essentially year-round, often beginning serious training in childhood. The cumulative wear on the arm begins very early and never fully stops. This is almost certainly more damaging than anything happening inside the ballpark.
**Throwing Harder**
Average pitch velocity has climbed steadily for decades. Throwing a baseball harder places significantly greater stress on the elbow and shoulder. The essay discusses what pitchers face from hitters but never addresses what pitchers are doing to themselves simply by throwing harder than their predecessors did.
**Economic Pressure to Hide Injury**
A pitcher earning tens of millions of dollars faces enormous pressure — from himself, his team, and his agent — to keep throwing through early warning signs of injury. In the 1960s, the financial stakes were incomparably lower. A sore arm today is a financial crisis in a way it simply was not sixty years ago.
**Young Players Specializing Too Early**
In earlier generations, many athletes played multiple sports, which gave their arms natural rest and worked different muscle groups across seasons. Today's elite pitching prospect has often thrown almost exclusively since childhood. Tommy John surgery — a procedure to repair a torn ligament in the elbow — is now commonly performed on high school and even middle school aged players, something essentially unheard of in previous generations. The damage is accumulating long before anyone reaches the major leagues.
**More Stressful Pitch Types**
Pitchers today throw a wider variety of breaking pitches than their predecessors, and several of the most popular modern pitch types place greater stress on the elbow than the simpler mix of fastballs and curveballs common in the 1960s. This is a technical point but a well-documented one in sports medicine research.
**Better Medical Detection**
Some portion of what looks like an injury epidemic may simply reflect that doctors today can identify and name injuries that previously went undetected. A pitcher in 1965 who "lost something off his fastball" and quietly retired may have had the same torn elbow ligament that today gets diagnosed, surgically repaired, and entered into the statistics. This does not eliminate the problem but complicates the comparison.
**The Relief Pitcher Problem**
Modern teams use far more relief pitchers than teams did in the 1960s, partly as a strategy to protect arms. The unintended consequence is that relief pitchers, knowing they only need to throw one or two innings, throw at maximum effort every single outing with no reason to pace themselves. This may actually be increasing arm stress rather than reducing it.
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The Essay's Fundamental Problem
The author looks almost entirely at conditions inside the game — ballpark dimensions, the designated hitter, the quality of opposing hitters — to explain why pitchers get hurt more today. These are real factors but relatively minor ones. The deeper causes are structural: how young athletes are trained, what financial pressures the modern game creates, and how American youth sports culture has changed over sixty years. The essay asks why the job is harder, when the more important question is why arms are breaking down before pitchers even arrive at the job.
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Bottom Line
The essay is historically literate and a pleasure to read, but it identifies secondary causes while missing the primary ones almost entirely.
**Grade: C+**
My memory is that the Orioles won in the 70s with good pitchers who struck out almost nobody. Instead, they pitched to create ground balls. Where does that fit in?
Like the 60s except with the DH
"The Ball Carries Farther"
This is sort of background and beyond the pitching question. They also use a ball only an average of 2 to 6 pitches. It is always brand new. The dead ball era according to ChatGPT was because they would use the ball until destruction. So, it didn't matter how much tobacco juice was on it or how misshapen it was. According to ChatGPT in a high turnover game today they will use as many as 160 balls with a typical game using closer to 100. It claims the '60s games would use only 30 to 60 balls. There is also much shorter usage of a bat, and it is destroyed quicker and optimized much more than either the '60s or the dead ball era. There has also been changes in materials moving from exclusively ash to maple bats and apparently now birch, but with maple still dominant. They have different density and life cycles. Bonds used maple bats. I had a maple bat, and you could feel the difference.
Baseballs were radically improved with a rubber core in 1911, so hitting statistics went way up. But pitchers brought back the Dead Ball Era by abusing the new baseballs with tobacco juice and gouges.
Batter Ray Chapman was killed by a dirty baseball on August 17, 1920. It was widely assumed that he hadn't seen it and thus didn't get out of its way. Soon, umpires were putting more new clean balls into play. The spitball was outlawed the next season, except for a number of older pitchers who were allowed to continue to use it for the rest of their careers.
So, the quality of baseballs in play was much better by 1921 or 1922. (By the way, Babe Ruth's giant leaps in home runs, to 29 in 1919 and 54 in 1920, were largely accomplished in the Dead Ball Era.)
The ball was probably juiced again around 1925 and then again in 1930. It may have been de-juiced after 1930. They've been played around with some since then. E.g., 1987 seemed to have lively balls.
Pitchers continued to look for flaws in the sewing of the ball to make them break weirdly. Probably modern baseballs are less susceptible to that.
A simpler adjustment might be to widen the home plate.
What a fun article. Thanks for this!
I always wonder whether the three true outcomes business is over-emphasized due to the fact that it's easier to quantify and reduce to a single value like bWAR or something.
How "Feminization" Explains What Went Wrong with Baseball
Economist and blogger Arnold Kling has been writing about what he calls "feminization" — not a simple claim about women, but about a set of institutional behaviors that tend to cluster with female personality traits as described by psychologist Joyce Benenson. Feminized institutions are conflict-avoidant, safety-seeking, deferential to authority, and protective of orthodoxy. They resist challenges to established power and prioritize consensus over experimentation. Kling argues this institutional personality has spread across academia, corporate life, and government, generally making those institutions worse.
Baseball offers an unexpected window into the same dynamic.
Baseball's rules were not invented by a committee. They emerged organically from millions of playground games, refined through a decentralized, iterative process with immediate feedback. Children playing pickup baseball unconsciously optimized the rules for one thing: the pleasure of the players. That emergent process produced something genuinely well-balanced — competitive, self-governing, and fun.
As baseball professionalized, the audience grew and rules were adjusted for spectator enjoyment. As commercial interests grew larger still, the rules bent further toward profit. Today, the commercial structure — team owners, the Players Association, the NCAA, television networks — is vastly more powerful than any organic player interest. The rules now serve capital, not the game.
What does this have to do with feminization? The connection isn't that women ruined baseball. It's that the *institutional personality* Kling calls feminized — conflict-avoidant, orthodoxy-preserving, deferential to the powerful — is exactly what emerges when a commercial interest captures a rule system. Nobody seriously challenges the owners. Nobody challenges the Players Association. Nobody in the NCAA ecosystem challenges the subsidy structure that benefits universities and real estate interests around stadiums. The incentives all run toward accommodation of power and away from the kind of disruptive, heterodox thinking that genuine reform would require.
Meanwhile, government subsidies — public stadiums, youth recreation infrastructure, tax breaks for collegiate programs — insulate the commercial structure from competitive pressure that might otherwise force change. Losses get socialized; gains get privatized. The feedback loop that made playground baseball great has been completely severed.
The result, visible to any serious fan, is a game optimized for the wrong things — exit velocity statistics, broadcast revenue, franchise valuations — while the actual experience of players and fans deteriorates. Pitching injuries have reached epidemic levels because the ball, the ballparks, and the rules have been shaped by commercial logic rather than the health of the game. Obvious structural fixes are available but go unpursued, not because they're technically difficult, but because the institutions governing baseball have the conflict-avoidant, change-resistant personality of organizations that have been captured by power.
The playground, it turns out, was the more masculine environment in Kling's sense — competitive, self-regulating, and ruthlessly experimental. Professional baseball became feminized precisely as it became institutionalized. The organic feedback loop was replaced by bureaucracy, and bureaucracy serves those who fund it.
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The deeper insight here is that feminization, in Kling's framework, isn't primarily about gender. It's about what happens to any institution when the incentive to avoid conflict and defer to power overwhelms the incentive to get things right.
What are these "obvious structural fixes"?
Good question. And obvious to who? I'm being a bit lazy here in my use of AI. Sorry.
From Kling's post:
Make the ball larger or increase its drag
The ball would travel less far for a given quality of contact, meaning fewer home runs on well-struck balls. More importantly for your argument, pitchers could afford to let batters make contact without catastrophic results. The obsession with strikeouts — which drives extreme pitch velocity and spin, and therefore arm stress — would diminish. Pitchers could pitch to contact more, throwing more innings at lower intensity. This was essentially the 1960s model.
Move fences back
Similar effect — reduces home run threat, allows pitchers to be less maximal on every pitch. Also potentially restores the value of speed and gap hitting, making the game more varied and interesting. The "launch angle revolution" — where hitters optimize for lofting the ball — becomes less rational when the fences are deeper. More balls in play, more athleticism rewarded.
Eliminate the designated hitter
Restores a genuine soft spot in the lineup. Pitchers facing the opposing pitcher can afford to give up contact. It also reintroduces strategic complexity — when do you pinch hit for your pitcher, sacrificing defense for offense? Many fans consider this the most intellectually interesting decision in baseball. The DH was introduced in 1973 specifically to increase offense and attendance, a pure commercial decision.
Move the pitching rubber back
This one is the most counterintuitive and deserves careful thought. The conventional wisdom would say it helps batters — more time to read the pitch, slightly slower effective velocity. But the more important effect might be on pitcher mechanics. Currently pitchers compensate for the fixed rubber distance by maximizing velocity and spin through increasingly extreme arm angles and torque — exactly what causes injuries like UCL tears. A slightly longer distance might paradoxically allow pitchers to throw more naturally, with less mechanical extremity, at velocities that are still effective given the extra movement time. The injury reduction could be significant.
Taken together these four changes point in a coherent direction — toward a game where contact and athleticism matter more than raw power, where pitchers can sustain longer careers, and where strategic variety replaces the current home-run-or-strikeout monoculture that many fans find tedious. The game becomes less like a slugging contest and more like the chess match it was historically celebrated as being.
The commercial resistance to all four is also coherent — home runs are the most televised, most highlight-friendly, most casually accessible moment in baseball. Everything that reduces home runs threatens the broadcast product, even if it makes the game better by almost every other measure.
From my framework:
- Cut public subsidies to professional, collegiate, and local baseball leagues, forcing the commercial structure to bear its own costs and breaking the pipeline of institutionalized orthodoxy at every level
- Create genuine competitive pressure on the rules themselves, perhaps through rival leagues or international formats with different rules
How did I get so old that while I knew the entire 1960 Cardinals' roster and all the starting players in the National League to having no more idea who these two best current pitchers are ("Tarik Skubal and Garett Crochet") than I do who is at the top of today's Hit Parade (assuming there is such a thing anymore)?
Junk food diet. Same reason as epidemic of ACL injuries.
I don't think we want to go back to 1968, "the year of the pitcher." Gibson had a 1.12 ERA and the AL had only one .300 hitter. Carl Yastrzemski at .301. I would like to see more "small ball." I wonder if MLB could limit the number of times a pitcher could throw 100+ mph pitches?