Hi friends-
As a reminder: We will be chatting tonight in the Substack app during the Rangers vs. Astros Sunday Night Baseball game at 7 PM ET/4 PM PT. I’m not going to send an email out because I don’t want to clog your inboxes, but you can always find us there each Sunday evening. :)
I apologize for my free Friday newsletter coming on Sunday this week. After an extremely busy first 10 days of the season reporting and climbing stadium stairs and staying up late to watch as many games as possible, I hit a wall and re-triggered some of my long COVID fatigue. I don’t need a stint on the IL just yet, but it’s a humbling reminder to pace myself during this 162-game + October season. And if anyone has any tips on dealing with bone-crushing tiredness besides resting, hydrating, light exercise and patience (grrrr!) please let me know. <3
While I’m lucky to be day-to-day, several top pitchers around the league got wrecked by season-ending injury news this week. First, the winless Marlins announced on Thursday that young phenom Eury Perez would have Tommy John surgery. Then on Friday, we learned that Guardians’ ace Shane Bieber would also undergo the procedure. On Saturday, the Yankees announced that reliever Jonathan Loáisiga would also miss the season due to the surgery. Then the Braves revealed that super-ace (and my Cy Young pick) Spencer Strider has a sprained UCL, and will hit the IL for an extended period of time while the team figures out what to do. Strider is scheduled to meet with renowned elbow doctor Keith Meister in Texas soon, to decide if he, too, needs Tommy John.
If these were the only four pitchers to suffer from exploding elbows, we might simply puke and then rally and chalk it up to a bad week. The trouble is, Perez, Loáisiga, Bieber and Strider join and obscene number of star pitchers currently out with arm injuries. An incomplete list of lost pitching talent includes Shohei Ohtani, Sandy Alcántara, Shane McClanahan, Jeffrey Springs, Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, Gerrit Cole, Walker Buehler, Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin, Clayton Kershaw, Brandon Woodruff, Lucas Giolito, Justin Verlander, Robbie Ray, Lance McCullers Jr., Kodai Senga, Kyle Bradish, Drew Rasmussen and Shane Baz.
How much talent has been lost to arm injuries? Consider that each of the last five AL Cy Young winners are currently sidelined because of this problem, and five of the last eight NL Cy Young winners as well.
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Everyone knows the sport is eating itself alive at the moment until it solves the riddle of how to encourage arms to get bigger, faster, and stronger without blowing out. The problem is, nobody knows what’s causing this issue, let alone how to fix it.
At 7:18 PM Eastern last night, the MLB Players Association released a statement attacking MLB’s recent rule changes for this crisis:
Three and a half hours later, MLB fired back at the union and blamed the players for their own injuries:
The players hate the pitch clock, and holding it responsible for the rash of injuries bolsters their case and absolves them of blame. While we know that playing tired can lead to injuries, we just don’t have the data to support that the pitch clock is causing this mess (at least not yet, anyway.)
If we do find out that the clock is destroying elbows, then, unfortunately, it will have to go. But it’s not like this problem started last season when the timer was introduced.
Pitchers are throwing harder than ever and remain hyper-focused on improving their spin rates because they understand that velocity and movement will earn them jobs on big-league rosters. Bieber spent the offseason at Driveline working on adding velo to his fastball and movement to his curve. Driveline’s director of pitching, Chris Langin, bragged in a February tweet that his winter instruction improved Bieber’s heater average to 93.2 miles per hour, two mph above the 91.2 he averaged last year. Langin also noted that the vertical break on Bieber’s curveball was back to 14 inches—where it was when he won the Cy Young in 2020. (He has not mentioned Bieber since the pitcher announced he needed season-ending surgery).
Bieber looked like the best pitcher in baseball over his first two starts of the season, striking out 20 in 12 scoreless innings. Then he confided in his team that his elbow was too sore to continue. He will miss the rest of 2024 and we’ll be lucky to see him before the end of 2025.
Unlike Bieber, Strider already underwent Tommy John surgery during college. If he needs the procedure again, he will attempt to return from it a second time, like Buehler will next month and Ohtani will next season. Pitchers bounce back from their first Tommy John surgeries at about a 90% rate. They recover from having the procedure a second time at about half that rate—though the science behind revision surgeries is getting better every day.
The arm injury epidemic might be caused by the pitch clock, the league’s recent obsession with velocity and spin rate—or both. Gentleman and scholar Tyler Glasnow offered a third theory back in 2021. Immediately after suffering an elbow injury, he went ballistic on MLB for banning pitchers’ using sticky stuff to grip the ball. His two-minute explanation is worth your time:
Some players have been calling for MLB to begin using the baseball that the professional league in Japan uses because it’s much easier to grip. The NPB also uses a six-man rotation. Teams like the Dodgers seem pretty confident that their starting pitchers are better on five days’ rest than the traditional four days, and are increasingly using bullpen games to push each of their starters back a day.
It’s not like the extra-rest strategy stopped the Dodgers’ pitchers from breaking, however. One of the reasons they went out and acquired Glasnow, Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto last off-season is because their homegrown starting pitchers Buehler, May, Gonsolin and Kershaw all dealt with significant arm injuries last season.
I can’t remember an MLB season that started with such bad headlines. The ugly, see-through uniforms dominated spring training talk. Ohtani's proximity to a gambling scandal overshadowed opening week. And now week 2 will go down as the week we woke up to terrible news about a star pitcher four days in a row.
Here’s hoping that by next week we’ll be talking about greatness, not shoddy clothing, scandals and endless injuries.
Hope you are feeling 100% soon.
The thought occurs to me that Tommy John was not noted for being an exceptionally hard thrower, which may mean the surgery named for him (to be fair, and with no offense meant to TJ, it should be named for Frank Jobe) results from ... stuff happening.
Ozzie Guillen said the other day that a player was injured because he was too well-toned and said, "You can't pull fat." Ozzie is now my idol.