BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER...AND MORE FRAGILE

 

               It’s universally accepted that today’s American professional baseball players are bigger, stronger and faster than those of any previous era. Richer, too. Much richer.

               But it’s now becoming clear that another adjective should be added to those above. It’s “more fragile.” That is to say they are getting injured at a greater rate than any time in the measurable past, and the situation is getting worse.

               Due to Covid last season was a short one of 60 games, and played after an unprecedented two months’ pause, so comparisons with that season would be misleading. But in the season that began with spring training in late February, and through the first two months of the regular season, the number of injuries that resulted in Injury List stints increased to about 350, 31% over the same 2019 period.

 Pitchers accounted for most of that figure, but the sort of “soft-tissue” injuries (hamstring, groin, oblique or calf-muscle strains or tears) position players usually suffer also rose, more than doubling the 2019 level.  With the presence of names like Justin Verlander, Chris Sale, Corey Kluber, Mike Trout, George Springer and Corey Seager, you could put together a pretty fair All-Star team from the current IL. At just about every point of the season at least a half-dozen of the 30 MLB teams have had a dozen or more players in sick bay at any one time, or about one-third of their 40-man rosters.

Some in baseball attribute the rise to a bounce from the herky-jerky 2020 season, but the trend continues what’s been happening in the Major Leagues for quite a while. Definitions and reporting accuracy have changed over time, but MDEdge, a medical website, has charted a steady annual rise in baseball injuries dating back to 1974. One of its papers counted 8,357 IL designations between 1998 and 2015, or close to 500 a year.

Ironically, much of the increase stems from advances in medical treatment. Exhibit A is the so-called Tommy John surgery, in which a ligament from another bodily part (or from a cadaver) replaces a torn ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) that binds the body’s elbow bones. It’s named not for the physician who perfected it (Dr. Frank Jobe) but for an early recipient. The left-handed John got the surgery in 1974, 11 years into his career, sat out that year and the next, and returned to add 164 wins to what would be a 288-win, 26-year stand (1963-89).  His success became living testimony for the procedure.

Before the surgery came along, pitchers with severe “sore arms” were flushed from the game, never to return. Sandy Koufax (1955-66) was a prime example. Now, with the operation at about a 90% success rate, they’re back after about a season and a half. It’s estimated that about one-third off all current MLB pitchers have had it, some more than once.

UCL injuries stem partly from the greater elbow strain required to achieve today’s hyper-fast deliveries (the average fastball last year measured 94 mph against 92.7 in 2015) and from cumulative overuse. The latter phenomenon begins in childhood, where talented youngsters are identified early and encouraged by ambitious parents and coaches to concentrate on a single sport and position.

 Back in the day kids played the sport in season, utilizing (and resting) a variety of muscles. Today, between Little League, age-group , school  and “traveling” teams, baseball prospects can play as many as 70 organized games a year before turning 18, plus long and intense practice sessions. Tommy John himself (he’s 78) is a bit of a nut, having spoken out against the covid vaccine from the hospital bed from which he was recovering from the illness, but he made plenty of sense when he declared against too-early sports specialization.

The position-player equivalents to pitchers’ elbow ligaments are the oblique muscles, which stretch across the abdominal cavity and control trunk flexion and rotation.  Maybe it’s me but I don’t recall hearing much about them until a few years ago. Now they are a major injury category, their rise corresponding to the “swing for the fences” mentality of today’s batsmen. Oblique strains don’t match other soft-tissue injuries in frequency but they typically take longer to heal, with IL times often stretching into months. There were 22 of them in the Majors through May, up from 12 in 2019.

The most common muscle injuries in baseball are hamstring, groin and calf sprains. These have always been part of baseball, a consequence of the game’s stop-and-start nature that has players running full tilt after sometimes-long periods of idleness.   Supposedly, these are controllable through exercise, but they continue to rise despite advances in exercise technique.

Part of this problem, I think, is that smart as their trainers might be they don’t teach ballplayers to exercise properly. For instance, a player in the on-deck circle will swing a weighted bat to prepare his arms and shoulders to hit but won’t stretch his legs to prepare to run as soon as he makes contact. Similarly, infielders and outfielders play catch before the start of each inning when, really, they are most vulnerable from the waist down after bench-sitting. Players today look a lot better in their underwear than those of 20 years ago, but they’d benefit from more attention to flexibility and less to muscle.

By me, though, the major cause of the injury surge is the fact that the wealthy ballplayer of today is a jock 24/7 and 365/365, and probably is working out somewhere when he isn’t playing. There’s such a thing as being in too-good shape, especially among adherents to the “no pain, no gain” school of exercise.

Like in other highly lucrative sports, competition for positions and roster spots in baseball is extreme, and players looking to rise, or who feel others nipping at their heels, believe that one more rep at whatever they’re doing will give them an edge. It’s hard to prove, but I think that too often that's what lands them on the IL.  In brief, they need to be protected against themselves.

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

THE FIX IS OUT

 

               The National Basketball Association playoffs are under way and the New York Knicks are in them. That means rumors are aswirl that they are fixed for them to win. There always are.

What’s that you say? The Knicks didn’t make the playoffs in the previous seven seasons and haven’t won a league championship since 1973, a 48-year span that is assuming Cubsian dimensions?  Nate McMillan, coach of the Knicks’ first-round opponent Atlanta Hawks, wasn’t about to let such things get in his way when before the series began he said “there’s going to be a lot of [referees’] calls that probably won’t go our way.”

The whispers no doubt will continue despite the fact the Hawks are off to a three-games-to-one lead in the best-of-seven series.  I’m not given to making predictions but I feel safe saying the Knicks, which had the NBA’s eleventh-best won-lost record (41-31) during the regular season, won’t go all the way this year.

  Indeed, facts rarely stand in the way when the subject of “fixed” games arises in sports, as it does with the least prompting. That may be particularly true these days, when all sorts of conspiracy theories abound. New York teams usually are at the center of them because the city is the nation’s largest, with the most television sets, and it stands to reason that the success of its teams means higher TV ratings, more ad revenues for the airing networks and, ultimately, larger rights fees for the leagues involved. There’s no simpler equation.

And there’s no simpler statement of fact that when it comes to the integrity of our sports’ outcomes the major American professional leagues are second to none. We don’t know everything that’s happened behind the scenes in the many thousands of games those entities have staged, but it requires a deep study of history to find solid examples to the contrary.

 To find one in baseball you have to go back more than a century to the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox confessed to “throwing” the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Pete Rose bet on games as a player and manager but never was accused of trying to fix one. The National Football League’s skirts have been clean since a couple of New York Giants entertained bribe offers to lose to the Chicago Bears in the 1946 title game (one of them, quarterback Frank Filchock, played anyway and threw a touchdown pass in the 24-14 Bears’ win), and the National Hockey League’s slate is marred of late by only the 2006 revelation that several players and coaches (including the great Wayne Gretzky) were involved in a betting ring but one that put its money on football games, not hockey.

Big-league athletes today are considered conspiracy-proof because they make too much money to risk their careers and freedoms to further one. Thus, it was no surprise that the splashiest U.S. sports-betting scandal of recent years concerned an NBA referee. In 2007 Tim Donaghy, a 13-year veteran in the league, was convicted of shaving points and otherwise aiding gambler-confederates during the last two seasons of his tenure. He served a 15-month prison term. A conspiracy theorist himself, Donaghy accused league officials of asking refs to steer games in certain ways, but produced no evidence to support that claim.

Horse racing is the sport most-often linked to fixes in the public mind, but most race-altering schemes involve furtive drug use rather than the jockey-conspiracies of popular imagination. Further, animals being animals, even those aren’t sure to succeed. Sam “The Genius” Lewin, the racing lifer and legendary bettor with whom I wrote a 1968 (gasp!) how-to-book, liked to tell about being a technical adviser for a racing movie in which a scripted race had to be run a half-dozen times before the right horse won.

College athletes don’t get paid by check, and then usually not much, so it should be no surprise that most American “fix” episodes concern them. The New York-based 1947-50 point-shaving scandals encompassing some 30 college-basketball players is the granddaddy of the genre, and more-recent schemes have involved basketball or football players at Northwestern U., Tulane, Boston U. and the U. of Toledo, among other schools. Northwestern footballer Dennis Lundy admitted to intentionally fumbling in a 1994 game against Iowa, and NU basketballers Kenneth Lee and Dewey Williams said they shaved points in several 1995 games. Interestingly, all three got off with one-month jail terms and probation. Other recent college-game fixers were treated similarly, indicating that the courts don’t find such behavior especially heinous.

To find evidence of multiple fixes one must look abroad to soccer and international tennis, which Betfair, the English bookmaking firm, rank with horse racing as the world’s three most-bet-upon sports. Most soccer betting schemes have involved low-level leagues, but the big boys also can play; the Italian world-power Juventus team had its 2005 and 2006 Serie A titles stripped away in a gambling scandal the involved its top management.

Tennis hardly is noticed in the U.S. outside the four “Grand Slam” tournaments, but among European and Asian plungers it’s a much-bigger deal, with minor-league tournaments galore and thousands of players scratching to earn a living. With only one player on each side of the net in singles it’s a fixer’s ideal, and on-line bets can be made on individual points, games and sets as well as matches, if you can believe it.

Tennis blogger Ben Rothenburg has written that there’s an informal pay scale for finaglers in the minor leagues, starting at $300 to $500 for service breaks, $1,000 to $2,000 for sets and $2,000 to $3,000 for matches. The International Tennis Federation, the sport’s governing body, took note of the bad press match dumping was generating by setting up a Tennis Integrity Unit to police that end of the sport. In 2019, its first full year of operation, the group cited 26 players for violations and issued lifetime bans against the Egyptian brothers Youssef and Karim Hassan.

 Moral of the story: you bet on tennis at your peril. But, then, who bets on tennis?