The Wreckage Along the Way

Trouble in the arms race

Last week, MLB issued a 62-page study, a year in the making, on pitcher injuries and the trends that appear to be pushing injury rates ever upwards. While the entire report was not released publicly (rather it was sent to the 30 front offices), it was made available to media outlets, so most of the fundamental ideas, graphics, and bottom line suggestions were allowed to filter their way out into the general baseball consciousness and conversation — there are excellent pieces over at ESPN by Jesse Rogers and Jeff Passan if you want to get a solid overview of the report itself.

While certainly nothing groundbreaking was included — and MLB itself characterized this report as simply a first step in a process that needs much more thought and study — the report provided a good distillation of the current state of pitching at all levels of the baseball spectrum. Since some, though hardly all, of this study included aspects of player development and amateur scouting, it does seem like a topic that we should take up here.

So, today, before we head into a Christmas break for the remainder of the year, I want to spend a bit of time talking about the rise in pitcher stuff, pitcher injuries, and the complex web of influences and incentives that make it hard for any one party to do anything about it. We’re talking arms today at There R Giants, those powerful, fragile, amazing instruments that set the game of baseball in motion — and which have been tilting it out of balance for most of the last decade.

Mostly, today, I want to talk about the issue with preparing prospects in the minor leagues for major league workloads. But, before we get to that, it does seem worthwhile to set up some of the basics that MLB covered in its report. For instance, some of you may be wondering if there is actually any problem here at all to be solved? Haven’t pitchers always gotten injured? And haven’t there always been early season injuries specifically?

The answer to both is Yes, but data does show a clear and significant rise in recent years — especially in the cases of early-year injuries. These two figures from MLB’s study, both included in Jesse Rogers’ ESPN story, show the spike in spring training injuries that has taken place this decade:

What exactly is causing this spike is harder to say. MLB suggested in their report that pitchers are over-working in the winter — working to increase velo and spin, or to invent new pitches that will solve the performance problems of the previous year, trying to show up in mid-season form on day one of spring — and then under-working in spring. As winter time becomes the season of innovation and improvement, rather than a time of maintenance, more of the work being done in the off-season comes with an intensity level that comes closer to in-season competitions. And the fact that pitchers get in less game time innings during spring potentially exacerbates the issue. There are, no doubt, other circumstances at play in these early-season spikes — I think at least some of the March march to surgical procedures comes from pitchers who show up in spring and find that a winter’s rest hasn’t cured the pains they were trying to pitch through at the end of the previous season. But there is no doubting that winter works differently for pitchers in the current environment than it used to. When Alex Cobb and Sean Manaea show up in February throwing fastballs with career-high velocity from Day One, it’s not the result of a nice slow ramp up through the holiday season.

Regardless of cause, it’s understandable that these types of injuries are a major focus for MLB. Teams show up in March with a roster they have worked hard (and sometimes spent heavily on) to shape into a competitive group, and before they even take their position in the starting blocks, they find that major parts of the picture have been removed, very often for the year. Especially when it comes to the recipients of those shiny new FA deals, that can be a bitter pill to swallow.

But while it may be difficult to pin down a cause for the timing of injuries, this study puts MLB firmly on record as saying the most significant cause of injuries in general is the relentless pursuit of velocity and spin rates. Study after study have consistently pointed to these two elements as doing the most to increase stress levels on the arm. And when applied together — to the point where we’re now seeing breaking balls with extraordinary spin on them being thrown harder than the greatest fastballs of previous eras — the stress levels stretch the human body beyond its capacity. And that is what we’re seeing today. Chasing stuff and chasing whiffs is leading to an attrition rate for arms that makes previous generations’ injury rates pale by comparison.

This is, perhaps, not a ground-breaking conclusion. Throwing 100 puts more stress on the arm than throwing 90, and throwing sliders in the mid-90s, with spin rates that can top 3,000 rpm, puts far more stress than throwing the same pitch in the mid- or lower 80s with 1,000 fewer rpms. Still, while this seems pretty intuitive, the study did look at other potential causes and mostly was able to dismiss them. There are studies included that place doubt on the idea that the pitch clock is a significant factor, and, as Driveline founder Kyle Boddy (one of many people interviewed by MLB) has been at pains to show (through mountains of data), the training that they and other labs use to help build velocity (much of which involves working with heavier balls) does not itself create more stress, even though the result of that training absolutely does.

Unfortunately, this is not a case where finding the issue really leads to a solution. While MLB, and most observers, can see that chasing ever-bigger stuff is causing the bulk of the damage, it’s much harder to say what to do with that information for two key reasons — 1) baked in incentive structures for both teams and players, and 2) MLB is at the tail-end of a problem that is starting at the very earliest levels of the game.

As The Athletic spelled out brilliantly in their series this year on the industry’s obsession with missing bats, data is at the genesis of this story. As teams began leaning into big data to inform their on-field decision making, it became increasingly clear that the single most important change a team could make in trying to improve itself was to miss more bats. The logical chain link of that simple concept has led to just about everything we know about today’s game. Getting max effort from a starting pitcher for less time, and then replacing them with a parade of anonymous max-effort relievers (who can be optimized into powerful one-inning weapons and who can easily be replaced with other anonymous optimized weapons when they inevitably break) is more valuable than getting seven or eight stalwart innings from traditional-style starters. And not a little more valuable — a lot more valuable. The Jacob DeGrom model — throw as hard as possible for as long as possible and then hand over to a series of relievers for the final four or five innings became the model of success.

Teams, whose only incentive is to win, seized on this knowledge and began implementing it widely. And that was a game-changer for players, because one of the primary results of the quest for stuff is that the number of pitchers appearing in the majors exploded as teams learned to look at the 40-man and the IL as simple extensions of their active pitching staff. Tampa was the forerunner in the exploding pitching staff. In 2010, the Rays employed 17 pitchers to get them through 162 games. But the end of the decade, in 2019, they used almost three times as many, 48 in total!

For pitchers laboring away in the minors, far from any prospect lists, there was a very clear opportunity being presented by this new way of managing staffs — and an equally clear path to taking advantage of that opportunity: increased velocity, increased spin rate, breaking balls that show outlier movement traits on Trackman and other forms of pitching lab technology that quickly became the key driver of improvement and evaluation.

Ryan Walker was a 31st round pick with very limited chance of calling himself a big leaguer someday. A funky cross-fire delivery that seemed to come at right-handed hitters by way of the 3rd base dugout made him effective enough, but in an earlier age, he would certainly have been tagged as an “org guy.” How did Walker go from that guy to one of the most dominant and valuable relievers in the majors? He started throwing a LOT harder! As LSU Head Coach Chris Martin said, as part of the discussion around MLB’s study, “velocity is THE key driver of performance.”

And because velocity is the key driver, the incentives, especially for the many, many Walkers out there, is to disregard the risk because the potential reward is a life changer. The potential rewards — financial and personal — of becoming a major leaguer, even an injured major leaguer, make the injury risks pale by comparison. As Tyler Glasnow said last winter — before signing a 5-year $136 million dollar extension — it’s really not a difficult calculation for modern pitchers. Big stuff gets you big rewards. And, if you get hurt? Well, big league clubs have good doctors and you can get fixed up and come back and make more money!

This is not a terribly surprising mentality — and not just because there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake for players. Elite level competitive athleticism is, at its core, an exercise in pushing the body to the limits of its tolerance…. and then training to increase that tolerance. Pushing the body to (and maaaaaybe just past) the breaking point is the devil’s bargain that every elite athlete undertakes in their training. And when the reward is the chance of living out life-long dreams and potentially generational wealth, it’s not hard to understand this line of thinking. Without changing the incentives — for both teams and players — there is no way to break this cycle.

Which leads us to complicating factor #2: the problem is well established long before players become pros.

Here’s another great chart from MLB’s study that helps show how pervasive the quest for velocity really is:

As my friend Brian Recca has noted several times lately, Tommy John is becoming normalized for 16- and 17-year olds with hopes of a big league future. And in countries like Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, where young arms are working for a life-changing payday at 16, there’s every incentive in the world to try to push pre-teen bodies past their inherent capacity for power. There’s really no level of youth baseball that isn’t being impacted by the push for power. Even as Little Leagues and Youth Baseball seek to adapt sensible pitching regulations, children from time immemorial will find ways to emulate the adult world they see around them. And those who dream of a baseball future understand perfectly well the importance of spin rates, radar guns, and crazy movement.

Let me go back to LSU Head Coach Martin, because he wrote an entire thread on Twitter that I think sums all of these topics up with a great amount of understanding and insight:

That’s really about as good a distillation of a 62-page report chock full of information as you’re ever likely to see, and I think Chris really has nailed the basics here — and let’s not sleep on the places identified where adults should be a little more caring about the young people in their care, but keep their eyes on their own bottom lines instead.

But let’s shift our focus from what MLB is going to do with all of this information — a very complex nut to crack, given the way that attempting to engineer new incentive structures tends to lead to unexpected consequences — and instead turn to the elements of this report that touch on player development specifically.

You probably noticed a couple of bullet points in Martin’s tweets that had to do with minor league workloads. Jeff Passan noted in his piece on the study the way that pitcher usage in the majors and minors have become disjointed over this century:

Twenty years ago, about 55% of major league starts and just over 50% of minor league starts came on five or fewer days' rest. In 2024, that dropped to about one-third of starts in the big leagues and barely 10% in the minor leagues.

He goes on to note that over that same time, the number of minor league starts of at least five innings has gone from over 70% to under 40%. Giants’ fans have seen firsthand some of the issues that result from that divergent workload. In 2023, the Giants babied Kyle Harrison through the first two-thirds of the year, never allowing him to push past 80 pitches, and often removing him with pitch counts in the 50s or lower. But within his first three starts at the major league level, he went over 90 pitches twice — and the results of the second of those did not go well. In his major league debut, the pitching-depleted Giants badly needed Mason Black to get through a 5th inning jam, and so let him face the middle of an imposing Phillies’ lineup while every pitch he threw set a season high.

The Giants have been imposing some exceptionally tight pitch limits on their starters in the minors — but they aren’t exactly out on an island in this as far as the industry goes. As my Dad used to say, I could probably count all the occasions I’ve seen a minor league starter throwing in the 6th inning the past couple of years and still have enough fingers left over to tie my shoes.

But while everybody is focused on starter limits, an even more extreme story is playing out for relievers. As Passan notes, big league relievers pitch on back-to-back days about 16% of the time — in the minors that number is less than 2%.

Let’s return to Walker a moment. During the course of his tremendous 2024 season, Walker pitched on zero days rest 19 times in the course of his 76 games. He pitched three times in four days 12 times — some of those daisy-chained together. There were multiple periods of pitching four times in six or even five games. You can pick out your own favorite measure of how much Walker was pushed into the red last year (performing brilliantly the whole while).

So how well was he prepared for this? In his minor league career, Walker appeared in back-to-back games two times. Both came in 2022 in Richmond — and neither appears to have been planned. On the first occasion, he entered with two outs in the 9th inning to protect a one-run victory after Chris Wright had walked the bases loaded. In the second, about two months later, he was the second pitcher to appear for the Squirrels in the 11th inning of an extra-innings game gone wrong. That is it as far as back-to-backs go over the parts of five seasons Walker spent in the minors. For the most part, he appeared about once every four days — sometimes only once in a week — threw an inning, and then got three or four more days of rest until his next one inning performance (oh yes, several of those back-to-backs this year involved going more than a single inning).

Frankly, given his level of preparation for the task, what Walker accomplished last year should be investigated by the Vatican research team as an authentic miracle.

The failure to adequately prepare relievers is, in a lot of ways, even more mystifying than the handling of starters. Part of the issue with starters giving length is that their training methods have changed dramatically with the pursuit of greater velocity. Previous generations of pitchers could always be seen running wind sprints across the field, and post-game interviews of an old war horse like Nolan Ryan were inevitably conducted with him on an exercise bicycle, because building up stamina and endurance was the primary focus of their physical training. But the training methods that lead to velocity upticks are power-based and focus on short-burst strength training. Today’s starters aren’t just working fewer innings because of the max-effort style of pitching, their training methods leave them well prepared to exert maximum power, but ill prepared to give maximum volume.

But no such mismatch exists with relievers, whose only goal is to go full-tilt for three outs — and yet they are being no better prepared for what awaits them than their more glamorous teammates. And a question that is implicitly being asked in MLB’s study is: “has the attempt to protect pitchers from being injured inadvertently led to more injuries?”

One person who answers this question with an emphatic “Yes” is Driveline founder, Kyle Boddy:

This is one area where perhaps MLB’s study can lead to some actionable good. Because while virtually all of the studies of the current issue are pointing to stuff and velocity as the prime driver of pitcher injuries, the approach to handling pitchers in the minors still seems to act on the older idea that pitcher usage — simply put, innings — were the primary factor.

Boddy didn’t say so in the above quote, but from comments I’ve heard from him in other places, I believe his view is that most of what is driving the incredible shrinking pitcher in the minor leagues is nothing more or less than a case of good old fashioned CYA. It’s easier to justify a non-action than an action when fingers of blame start getting pointed. Major league managers didn’t walk Barry Bonds 200 times a year because they thought it was a great path to victory. They did it because they didn’t want to answer the question: “why did you pitch to Bonds?” And something of the same mentality, I suspect, has been infecting player development strategies this decade, as innings totals in the minors have plummeted since the lost 2020 season. As the industry races to lower and lower levels of minor league performance, being the club that pushes pitchers harder demands answering the “why did you do it” question when those pitchers start breaking — as we know they invariably will (see graphs above). Boddy’s view that the body can be trained to endure far more workload than current trends are putting on pitchers is an outlier, but while he was working with the Reds, he didn’t shy away from that position.

Of course, there’s no need to take a purely cynical view of these trends. After all, given the spiking rate of surgeries for minor league pitchers, if teams want to see those guys pitch in the majors, it’s easy to understand the view that restricting their activity in the minors at least gives them a fighting chance at getting them there. Look at the struggles the Giants have had trying to get a look at Reggie Crawford, after all.

But one thing is certainly clear: reduced innings totals haven’t helped keep the youngsters healthy. I have nine pitchers in this year’s Top 50 who have undergone the knife in the last two years — and they are hardly a comprehensive list even within the Giants’ organization. And, while they’re failing to keep pitchers healthy, they’re adding a second obstacle in failing to adequately prepare them for life in the top level.

So where should all this go? What is actionable? For one, I think the conversation is useful to have — especially as it relates to youth baseball. Only by talking through the permutations and complex web of incentives can MLB hope to arrive at rules that help tip the balance of the incentive structure toward rewarding a different style of pitching — if just a little.

But I do think there are clear signals here that Player Development staff should spend serious time grappling with. Preparing their pitchers for the rigors of the major leagues is certainly one such issue. Pitchers should not be asked to hit the 90- or 100-pitch mark for the first times in their careers at the major league level — and they shouldn’t be asked to come back on zero days rest for the first time at that level either. This doesn’t necessarily mean a return to the days when Madison Bumgarner was throwing 160 innings as an 18-year-old, but some sort of tiered system where pitchers bump up their usage as they move into the upper minors does seem to be in order.

And then secondly, I think an even greater involvement with off-season training is probably in order, as Coach Martin suggests above — making sure that intensity in particular, is kept in check as players try to find the “killer app” that will lead them to major league glory. This might mean teams should try to have more of their players training in-house during the off-season, and trusting less to the players’ individual choices during the winter. Keeping pitchers at Papago Park or Felipe Alou Academy, where their work and workloads can be carefully monitored might be a better model going forward. But, at the very least, teams need to be in lock step with the pitching coaches and pitch labs around the country who are working with all of the minor leaguers to help them prepare. That’s a huge administrative lift that might need to be handled by greater staffing levels — something I think the Giants should really consider on their PD side anyway.

None of this is easy, of course, and finding the balance between intensity, volume, frequency, and adequate preparation will doubtless take lots of trial and error and experimentation — with results only showing themselves over the long term. But that also could mean that this is an area that is ripe for teams finding a competitive advantage. Now is the time for the Giants to be thinking critically about refining their pitching development plans going forward, and seeking ways to find an advantage for both the organization and the young players they are hoping to develop into big leaguers.

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Merry Christmas everybody! I’ll have one more podcast episode coming out tomorrow, and then the lights go dark here until January 3rd (but look for a mailbag prompt for questions sometime before then).

I hope we all have a great 2025!

(Oh, and if you’re wondering what inspired the title of today’s post, enjoy a little J. Geils on your way out the door…)