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.
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