BASEBALL WILL DIE FROM COUNTLESS ISSUES, INCLUDING INJURED PITCHERS
One weekend means the end of two more prized hurlers in an industry that demands maximum velocity and spin, and when added to bad ratings and scandals and shoddy uniforms, what exactly is the future?
Allow me to write what you won’t hear on Fox Sports, ESPN or any media operation associated with Major League Baseball. The sport is at death’s door. For one reason, Caitlin Clark’s last two games strikingly outdrew the entire 2023 World Series. For another, Shohei Ohtani is still in a gambling daze. For a third, newish uniforms are showing too much sweat and look like softball duds with wee player names.
And the Athletics will play three seasons in West Sacramento, which third baseman J.D. Davis called “a downer for baseball,” even though he grew up 15 miles away. I’d normally call Bob Costas to comment but why not settle on Wayne Randazzo, play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Angels. He was angry the league office decided a week later that an error would end the streak of first baseman Nolan Schanuel, who’d reached base in 36 straight games, third-longest in MLB history.
But more pointedly, he said injuries to pitchers have become so daunting that the purpose of a game — throwing a ball to home plate — might be crippled forevermore.
“You have scandal after scandal. You have a fiasco in Oakland. You have these ridiculous-looking jerseys. You have the MLBPA challenging the league about the pitch clock today, because of constant pitcher injuries,” Randazzo said. “You have a young player who's trying to make a name for himself, who's come up and reached base safely in every single game that he has played. And the league allows this scoring change to go on.
“It is an absurdity.”
The countdown doesn’t involve October. We’re waiting for the collective bargaining agreement to end after the 2026 season, which can’t come soon enough. Atop all other issues, the industry has no clue how to protect pitchers who seek maximum velocity and spin from concurrently blowing out their elbows. Last weekend, the title hopes of the Atlanta Braves may have been crushed by the damaged ulnar collateral ligament of star pitcher Spencer Strider. This came the same day when Cleveland’s season was dampened when Shane Bieber, a Cy Young Award winner, said he’ll have surgery on his UCL. Also impacted were the New York Yankees, who already are without Gerrit Cole and his ailing right elbow, and other clubs in early April. Shoot, who isn’t impacted?
Teams used to hope they could survive 162 games without arms popping. Now, one game has become a miracle. “To protect these guys’ arms is paramount, and clearly we haven’t nailed it,” said Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who won’t have Ohtani on the mound until next year. When the season barely has started, how will fans remain interested when some of the biggest pitchers are sidelined — Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, Justin Verlander — while joined by young guns such as Sandy Alcantara and Shane McClanahan?
Convenient as it to recall Bob Gibson and Bert Blyleven and pitchers who winged for eight or nine innings, they weren’t dealing with tech devices. “We ask them for max velo, max shape, max everything, and virtually train year-round,” Detroit manager A.J. Hinch said. Max this: If we only start pitchers who fire fastballs until the fifth, before hoping they aren’t next on the injured list, baseball has no future. Who wants to pitch? Who wants to watch the demise of the art? Yes, an owner and general manager are paying enough money to want the highest velocity and spin. But what exactly is the point when the best are whittling away?
A massive number of pitchers — 132 — began the season off the grid after 263 UCL surgeries were performed last year. One Tommy John operation probably is enough to keep performing, but two could mean the beginning of the end. The union’s executive director, Tony Clark, swept right in and blamed a shorter pitch clock for the injuries. “Despite unanimous player opposition and significant concerns regarding health and safety, the commissioner's office reduced the length of the pitch clock last December, just one season removed from imposing the most significant rule change in decades,” Clark said. “Since then, our concern about the health impact of reduced recovery time has only intensified. The league's unwillingness to acknowledge or study the effects of profound changes is an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset — the players.”
Naturally, MLB responded with a Johns Hopkins University study: “This statement ignores the empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trend, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries. Nobody wants to see pitchers get hurt in this game, which is why MLB is currently undergoing a significant comprehensive research study into the causes of this long-term increase, interviewing prominent medical experts across baseball which to date has been consistent with an independent analysis by Johns Hopkins University that found no evidence to support that the introduction of the pitch clock has increased injuries. In fact, JHU found no evidence that pitchers who worked quickly in 2023 were more likely to sustain an injury than those who worked less quickly on average. JHU also found no evidence that pitchers who sped up their pace were more likely to sustain an injury than those who did not.”
The union or the owners? Aren’t we tiring of the same old debate?
So don’t expect the pitch clock — at 15 seconds with no runners on base, reduced to 18 from 20 with runners aboard — to suddenly retreat. The game does move faster, thank God, but years of throwing weighted balls on youth travel teams is destroying arms. This is not a typical muddle. This is the future of the game.
“I'm just frustrated it's a combative issue,” said Cole, who won’t be back until June at the earliest. “It's like, OK, we have divorced parents and the child's misbehaving and we can't get on the same page to get the child to behave, not that the players are misbehaving, but we have an issue here and we need to get on the same page to at least try and fix it.
“When I read the response from MLB — I didn’t think it was very thorough. To be able to say you implement something in one year and it has no effect is shortsighted. We are really going to understand the effects of what the pitch clock is maybe five years down the road, but to dismiss it out of hand, I didn’t think it was helpful for the situation. Two seconds. I don’t know what advertising money you’re getting for two seconds that makes it logical to move it up for two seconds.”
Two seconds multiplied by the number of pitches to a batter, in an inning, in a game, through a whole season — matters to the fans who attend games. But elbows matter to the people who make a game happen by throwing the ball. There are times when the world would be a better place without Major League Baseball.
This is one of them.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.