It’s not fun to sit near me at a baseball game. Unless, of course, you have a good sense of humor and happen to enjoy watching a good-looking dude in a Mets jersey drink a lot of beer and criticize, loudly, everything my team decides to do. I cheer even louder than I criticize—a quality that has gotten me kicked out of my fair share of stadiums.
As a Mets fan, the criticism has typically outweighed the cheers. My criticism gets especially vocal when our manager, Terry Collins, slowly trots out to the mound to take out one of our stud pitchers because of his pitch count. Pitch counts don’t matter—I think—and if Matt Harvey is still striking everybody out, he should stay in the game.
My thoughts on pitch counts, however, should probably be taken with a grain of salt. I don’t know anything about how the damage of throwing a baseball as hard as possible may increase after a pitcher has thrown more than 100 pitches.
In my defense, neither do the people sitting around me nor do the people running most of the teams in professional baseball. And more importantly, the people responsible for taking care of the arms of baseball’s next generation of pitchers don’t know a thing either.
That’s the depressing truth I learned from The Arm, a soon-to-be-released exposé from Jeff Passan on the epidemic of elbow injuries that has made Tommy John the best-known name in baseball. Passan talked to anybody and everybody with an opinion on why more pitchers than ever are going under the knife and his book presents their thoughts, all with a heavy dose of skepticism.
His journey to understand the human arm took him back to the beginning—and I mean the beginning of human throwing. Two million years ago, an anthropologist told Passan, evolution gave Homo erectus an ability that monkeys didn’t have: the ability to throw overhand, and do it hard.
An increased range of motion in the shoulder gave us the much-needed ability to hunt, using rocks and spears as projectiles. Unfortunately for the development of the pitching arm, we eventually invented tools. Bows and arrows and eventually guns stalled evolution before the arm developed the ability to throw projectiles as hard as possible and repeatedly without injury, yet this is what America’s pastime requires.
Pitching injuries are nothing new and have existed since overhand pitching was made legal in 1884. That season Old Hoss Radbourne threw 678 2/3 innings, had 59 wins, and pitched in 40 of his team’s final 43 games. Of course his arm hurt, but Old Hoss would get drunk enough to dull the pain and pitch through it.
Eight decades later, Sandy Koufax was mixing anti-inflammatories now reserved for use on horses with codeine-cut aspirin to get him on the mound. His elbow would be drained after each start, yet he would still go out there and throw extra inning complete games when he had to.
Passan’s book is a perfect mix of anecdotes and information, weighted toward the types of anecdotes that those of us who live and breathe baseball love.
The anecdotes come from his interviews with some of the biggest names in baseball, including Koufax, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, the best orthopedic doctors in the business, Tommy John, and super-agent Scott Boras, who has handled more high-profile arm injuries than anybody.
He was also granted extraordinary access to baseball players such as Todd Coffey, who basically treated Passan like part of his family as he fought to make a baseball comeback using a dead man’s tendon that was transplanted into his right arm.
It is Passan’s ability to communicate so much information about the arm through stories of real players that makes The Arm a special book.
His decision to also focus on the lucrative baseball development industry, which forces young kids to participate in demanding showcases year-round to stay competitive in the ultimate race to the big leagues, makes it an important book. He talks to dads, who now use apps to track the number of pitches their kids throw. He also talks to kids, who now can’t have a bad game without being asked whether their arm is okay.
Raising a baseball player these days is pure stress. Passan tells cautionary tales of pitchers who get overworked by coaches and end up with busted elbows, but he also tells stories of young pitchers that get babied with measured pitch counts and end up with arm issues too. There is no clear best way to handle a young athlete, aside from getting him to play a different sport.
The uncertainty of how to handle pitchers has spooked professional teams into living by arbitrary pitch-count benchmarks such as the feared 100, which was set for no statistical reason and means next to nothing (I was right about that!), but still is used as the benchmark for when a pitcher is on his last legs and should be taken out.
Teams treat arms like delicate flowers, likely out of fear that they could be blamed for abusing an arm into collapse. The truth is that any arm can snap at any time, and nobody has figured out a way to change that.
Despite this, there is an optimistic "this problem can be fixed" tone to Passan’s writing. His big argument is that Major League Baseball needs to take charge, create a huge health database out of its pitchers, and get people working together to get definitive answers to baseball’s mysterious epidemic.
There currently is no team effort. Any individual with a promising idea on how to fix the arm quickly gets snatched up by a team. It's becoming a big race: the competitive advantage gained by the team that figures out how to keep its pitching arms healthy could lead to winning the World Series and transforming a franchise.
For the MLB, there should be an even bigger incentive to figuring this out. As elbow injuries become such a certainty, talented young athletes could start being turned away from baseball and commissioner Rob Manfred knows this. "It’s a huge issue," he told Passan. "Because that’s a competitive space, and the single biggest advantage baseball has in that space is the fact that it may be the safest sport your kid can play."
It is time for Manfred to step up to the plate and do something about it.