MLB's Push To Prevent Youth Pitching Injuries Is Pointless PR

This past Tuesday, Major League Baseball along with USA Baseball, the sport's governing body for amateurs, launched pitchsmart.com, a website to inform and warn young pitchers and their parents about injuries caused by overuse. The website's guidelines say, for example, that 12-13 year olds should "take at least 4 months off from throwing every year, with at least 2-3 of those months being continuous." However, such guidelines conveniently ignore how youth baseball works.

Across hundreds of youth and younger age level leagues in the United States, baseball is played so frequently year-round that it leaves most pitchers with a rest time of one week: the week between Christmas and New Year's. And the MLB knows this: 45 percent of youth pitchers, it says on the new website, pitched in a league without pitch counts. More than 43 percent pitched on consecutive days and more than 30 percent pitched in multiple leagues with overlapping seasons. Studies in the past by Birmingham's American Sports Medicine Institute have shown that anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of reconstructive Tommy John surgeries have been performed in recent years on pitchers in high school or even younger, a massive increase from 10 years ago.

The website is no doubt a sleek, well-intentioned first step by MLB to provide a "resource for safe pitching practices," but the guidelines don't reflect the reality of the schedules of youth leagues across the country; and will have no weight without accompanying institutional changes. No amount of medical data connecting the dots between overuse and injuries will convince kids and parents to slow down, either in effort or velocity, when they know what the scouts and people with the power to hand out scholarships are looking for.

"The biggest risk factor is still year-long baseball," Dr. James Andrews, who heads the 12-member committee that drafted these guidelines, told VICE Sports. "You can't dictate a short season."

The MLB can shrug its shoulders and say they don't really have authority to police these unregulated leagues, but as long as high velocity pitchers are valued, encouraged, and incentivized, telling kids to botch their big league dreams is pointless. If high velocity arms get drafted and are offered college scholarships, who's going to care about what MLB is saying for the sake of PR?

"That's the battle. Can we really control that [the incentives]?," Dr. Andrews says. "We may have a battle we can't win."

Even the doctors on MLB's own committee believe that the risk of injury rises with high velocity pitches. Dr. Andrews, in a video on the website, explains how kids who throw at high velocity are perilously close to tearing major ligaments. But where's the systemic change that'll ensure these recommendations are implemented or even taken seriously?

"That issue [high velocity] is more difficult to tackle," said Dr. Glenn Fleisig, who's also on the MLB committee for this website. "Higher velocity is very attractive to coaches, teams, players but the solution is not to tell people to throw at less velocity. One of the things we are saying is that you can make a practical and respectable compromise by varying the speeds of your pitches and fastball. Not every ball you pitch has to be at that velocity."

Sensible, but not the sort of advice that will register to a kid trying to reach the majors. So, what's the use of this new effort by MLB? Is it nothing more than offsetting liability?

"As people realize that there's a balance between throwing fast and staying healthy, this will be useful," Fleisig says. "Nobody wants to throw as fast as possible and get injured. You are of no use to any team if you're injured." That is, of course, true, but as long as high velocity arms remain valuable, teams and players alike will go on gambling against the science that these doctors have long warned us about.