Glasnow a few years ago had a good breakdown of the impact on pitchers’ elbows with the sticky stuff crackdown:
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Did @Tron pronounce Haribo like Ha-ree-bo?
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It’s starting to cost the teams enough money that they’re probably gonna do something about it soon.
Until they do so as a league, the new moneyball might be teams finding ways to keep their pitchers healthier than everyone else’s.
Muuuuuch longer writeup:
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Yes he did. As far as I know it’s “Hair-ih-bow”
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Maybe start with letting them have an offseason and discouraging the professionalization of youth baseball.
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None of those things are market inefficiencies, aka “moneyball”, though
(Sorry, sorry, I’ve just immersed in the baseball stats nerd world since before that book came out and the way people misuse the term drives me insane)
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It has to be MLB that steps in. The meta is max velocity and strikeouts - I’m not sure how you put the genie back into the bottle. If you don’t throw with velocity, you die. But you also die if you throw with max velocity. I continue to be frustrated with MLB’s unwillingness to address this issue as it’s impacting the game more than anything else. Everyone (including our esteemed podcast hosts) gave MLB and Manfred flowers last year, but it was just window dressing.
From Joe Sheehan’s newsletter yesterday, emphasis mine:
It’s taken us a very long time to get here. In 1980, Steve Carlton won the NL Cy Young Award with the most recent – and surely last – 300-inning season. The two Rolaids Relief Award winners threw 136 2/3 and 102 1/3 innings, respectively. Over the next 40 years, teams would steadily reduce the number of innings all pitchers threw, having learned that pitchers would be more effective in shorter outings, with the difference being made up by carrying more pitchers on the roster and using more across a season. Injuries due to overuse, such as torn rotator cuffs, gave way to injuries due to max effort, such as torn UCLs.
Pitchers now try to maximize their velocity and spin from the majors down through the amateur ranks, because that’s how you get recruited, get scholarships, get drafted, get promoted, get MLB jobs, get eight-figure salaries and nine-figure contracts. Some blow out their elbows along the way, and even that’s not a deterrent. Jon Roegele reports that 37% of all pitchers have had Tommy John surgery. Pitchers and the teams that employ them just consider that part of the risk profile.
There is no clean or easy solution. Pitcher injury rate is related to the strikeout problem, but the solutions that could best address the strikeout problem – rostering fewer pitchers and moving the mound back – do nothing to change the incentive structure and could possibly put pitchers at more risk. Even if you could modify the game played at the MLB level, it would take decades for those changes to affect behaviors in scouting, in player development, in amateur ball. It took us 40 years to get here. It may take 40 to get back.
MLB needs leadership on this issue, and it does not have that now. There is no one in our game’s leadership ranks that can solve a complex problem. In the wake of Bieber’s injury and concerns about Strider’s future this weekend, we got snippy press releases about the pitch clock. It’s plausible that the pitch clock is having an impact on pitcher injury rates, and heaven knows I’m no fan of it anyway, but the clock arrived in MLB a year ago yet pitchers have been blowing out their elbows for a lot longer than that.
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lol baseball. Let’s play 162 games then have 1 game playoffs. Like the nfl having 6 minute playoff games, GTFO
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I’m pretty skeptical that the owners will step in, if anything, it will have to become an issue that the player’s union takes up and then suddenly it’s a “concession” that the owners can make in return for something else.
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Contracts are guaranteed. I’m sure there’s more and more contracts that are being insured, but owners don’t want damaged assets.
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Not sure I was following the latest chop correctly, but we may need a mea culpa already. Tc and the big man seemed happy that the medieval times people were unionizing while referencing a story about how the company successful busted the unionizing efforts.
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Yeah this is it. I don’t think you can. Lowering the mound means more effort to maintain current results. Raising the mount could theoretically mean less effort for current results, but we all know it would just mean pitchers throwing just as hard and runs going down. Raising the seams on the ball means pitches would move more, so pitchers would need to have more control over their spin rates, and I still think that’s probably the best solution. At a minimum, I think it has to start with allowing some kind of sticky stuff to be used again. Just figure out a way to make it universal and regulated like you do everything else. But honestly, I don’t know that we will ever really be able to go back to guys throwing 250 innings a year on a regular basis, and maybe not even 200 for most of them. Maybe you limit teams to 10 pitchers in order to force them to be able to work more innings, but then you run the risk of overwork from roster size issues, and an artificial offensive explosion. I don’t know, I’ve yet to see any one or two things that MLB could do that convinces me it would help for more than a year or two
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Baseball could just take a page out of golf’s book and back up home plate
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There’s been talk of moving the mound back 6-12 inches for a few years, but that was to boost offense. Probably makes it even harder on pitchers.
The real solution would be to put harder limits on 40 man roster moves and now many times in a season a guy can be called up/sent down, but I’m not sure either of the owners or mlbpa would go for that one
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I also love that this solution was couched as too simplistic. I suspect the engineering on this would be anything but simple.
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That pronunciation was a shocker. Mea culpa incoming.
He never even got to find the real killer…
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Dang this is gonna be a tough Masters for TC
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