We’ve shown that while pitchers (502 injured list stints in 2023) get hurt more often than hitters (355 times on the IL), they also get hurt worse. Hitters spent 13,142 days on the injured list last year. Pitchers lost 32,107 days. Pitchers got hurt 41% more often but spent 144% more days rehabbing. Put another way, pitchers accounted for 59% of injured list stints but 71% of days spent on the IL.
That’s consistent with John Wholestaff’s Valentine’s Day article on pitcher injuries. (Yes, he’s a real pitcher. Yes, that’s a pseudonym, obviously. No, we don’t know who he is, don’t ask.) His point was that pitchers get hurt a lot primarily because, in his words, “The act of pitching is insanely stressful on the body, and anyone who performs it for any significant amount of time is bound to get hurt in some way.” That’s a ringing endorsement for the vocation, huh?
He goes on to dispel the simple explanations some people cite for the uptick in pitcher injuries: Pitchers not using their legs enough, throwing too hard, etc. You should read the article if you haven’t already. The link’s in the prior paragraph. He lays out a persuasive case.
The most controversial assertion in the article, though, is this one:
Now, if I were in charge of making decisions at Major League Baseball, and I were aware of the fact that pitching is very stressful and that muscles don’t work quite so well when they don’t have enough time to recover, I would most certainly put a pitch clock in place. That is, of course, if I were being bribed heavily by Big Orthopedic Surgery. It isn’t yet clear how much this particular piece of the puzzle is contributing to the higher injury rate this year, but it is certainly contributing.
We can’t really test this. We can’t replay the 2023 season with no pitch clock and see if the injury counts are different, or if the injuries are less severe. We can only look at what happened in 2023 and compare it to prior years (while admitting that one season isn’t enough of a sample). If injuries are up—or down—we can’t definitively point to the pitch clock. Correlation isn’t causation, as they say.
Comments are closed.