Saturday was Spencer Strider’s day to receive dreaded news about damage to the ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow. But following his abbreviated second start on Friday at Truist Park, it wasn’t just the Braves ace.
The Guardians also announced Saturday that ace Shane Bieber will undergo Tommy John surgery. Sunday or Monday, it could be some new pitcher’s day to learn that his season has been wrecked by a UCL tear.
While hardly new, the injury has been sweeping through baseball, sidelining many of the best pitchers in the game. No fewer than five former Cy Young Award winners, along with superstar Shohei Ohtani, are somewhere in the process of recovering from UCL tears. Baseball teams and their fans are being deprived of the performances of many of the game’s stars.
“Nobody’s insulated from it, and everybody goes through it,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said Saturday.
Baseball has a problem on its hands. Possible culprits may be easy to identify, but they don’t come with solutions that are simple to implement.
“I hate it for everybody concerned,” Snitker said. “That’s the biggest thing we have in our game, is the pitching.”
Saturday, the players union released a statement condemning Major League Baseball for lowering the pitch clock from 20 to 18 seconds when runners are on base this past offseason, which the union opposed on health grounds when the change was made.
“Since then, our concerns about the health impacts of reduced recovery time have only intensified,” union executive director Tony Clark said in a statement, further saying that baseball’s unwillingness to consider the impact of the change on pitchers constituted “an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset – the players.”
It might be part of it, but the numbers were going up beforehand. According to data kept by writer/analyst Jon Roegele, there were 28 major-league pitchers who had Tommy John surgery in 2023 and 26 in 2022 (the year before the pitch clock was instituted and 32 in 2021. Compare that with 19 in 2013 and 13 in 2008. As of Saturday, there were nine thus far in 2024 (not counting Strider).
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Perhaps the biggest factor in the epidemic is the trend of pitchers throwing at maximum velocity throughout a start. Strider, who last season averaged 97.2 miles per hour on his four-seam fastball (Statcast), is among the prime examples. It ranked first among pitchers who threw at least 3,000 pitches last season.
Statcast has data going back to the 2017 season. Each of the first three pitchers who has led that category (highest average velocity on a four-seam fastball with at least 3,000 pitches) has ended up having Tommy John surgery. Strider would make it 4-for-4. (Saturday, Snitker would not confirm that Strider will need it, but no one will be surprised if he does.)
“That’s probably got a lot to do with it,” Snitker said.
On the other hand, the game has changed and placed a greater emphasis on breaking pitches, deliveries that can be more stressful to elbows over the long haul than fastballs (particularly when consistently not thrown with maximum effort). In 2003, the Braves led the majors by throwing fastballs 70.2% of the time. The No. 30 team was Oakland at 58.4%.
Last year, the leading fastball team was Washington at 54.4% (a drop of almost 16 percentage points) and the No. 30 team was Cincinnati at 43.2% (a decline of 15 percentage points) That’s a lot more breaking balls that pitchers are releasing than they used to.
An interesting explanation for the change – technology has put umpires under greater scrutiny to call the strike zone by the book. Umpires granting control artists like Braves greats Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine pitches on the outside edge of the strike zone have largely become a thing of the past, making the strike zone more of a vertical plane than horizontal. Thus, pitchers who don’t have the fastball velocity to challenge hitters in the strike zone have to instead rely on breaking balls to dive below or across the zone.
Technology has impacted the game in another way, ramping up the competition between hitter and pitcher. While hitters have more data, video and analytics at their disposal to better anticipate what they’ll face at the plate, pitchers have used technology to develop pitches with higher spin rates to increase movement on breaking pitches and fastballs. Pitchers working on their own in the offseason with private trainers to ramp up spin rates and velocity has become the norm.
“So you can’t control that,” Snitker said. “I don’t know. That’s something that needs to be looked at.”
It follows longer patterns of pitchers throwing nearly year-round and with prolonged intensity, an activity evident in high-school baseball and even younger, as pitchers (and their parents) commit themselves to playing only baseball at ages that seem unsafe.
Further, pitchers are bigger and stronger, leading to arms having the capacity to throw with torque that can be too great for their elbows to handle.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
It’s an issue that tweaking the pitch clock may help. But the more sweeping solutions are less clear. Baseball can’t make rules to compel a pitcher to stop developing his physical strength, work with a trainer to add spin rate to his curveball or ease off his fastball on the mound. As a pitcher who consistently maxes out on velocity and has been steadfast in his offseason program to develop his pitches and physical strength, Strider would seem a prime candidate to suffer the injury that he has.
Is someone going to tell him he’s doing it wrong? It won’t be Snitker, that’s for sure.
“Does ething right from being a great teammate, person,” Snitker said of Strider. “The dedication to what he does in everything. I hate it for him because he enjoys it so much.”
Snitker did have a leaning towards practices used by former Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone. Among them was having starting pitchers go through pitching workouts twice between starts rather than once, which has become the norm. The philosophy was that the sessions built up pitchers’ strength.
However, the likelihood of convincing a young pitcher to throw more between starts seems low.
It leaves baseball with a problem with a solution yet to be discovered. It may be that Tommy John surgery may end up being a cost of doing business. Should Strider need the surgery, it will be the second of his career, following his first procedure in 2019 while at Clemson. It’s not as though it prevented him from reaching the game’s apex. Last year, he set the Braves record for strikeouts in a season.
Surely more will follow the path to the operation room, their frayed elbow ligaments paying the price for the evolution of the game.
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