At one point, humans developed the ability to throw. Granted, we aren't the only ones. Monkeys are known for throwing…different things. As civilization evolved and life wasn't so "life-and-death" all the time, we figured out ways to pass the time. Eventually, to cut to the chase, baseball was invented, and the human ability to throw gave rise to the pitcher.
Pitchers have one of the more specialized roles in sports. They also make up an outsized proportion of your fantasy rosters. That's certainly true in season-long leagues, but even in DFS, you need two starting pitchers in your DraftKings lineup, and you need one at FanDuel as well. Now, for MLB DFS, pitcher injuries are not as inconvenient. They limit your options, but you pick from the healthy pitchers and go from there.
For season-long fantasy baseball, on the other hand, watching a pitcher go down to an injury is a bummer. Every year, fantasy players deal with multiple top-tier pitchers being lost long-term, often for the entire season, due to injury. But you don't have to spend much time on social media or on baseball websites to find people asserting, often in cataclysmic tones, that pitching injuries are "out of control" at the moment. So what's going on there?
What's going on with pitcher injuries?
It's tricky, because a lot of people do like to wring their hands when given the chance. Also, there's always the risk of running into the "man bites dog" phenomenon at times like this. "Nothing Bad Happens!" isn't a headline. At RotoWire, we don't do player news updates for the hundreds of pitchers in a given day who don't get hurt. However, it does feel like Tommy John gets name-dropped quite often, afflicting pitchers both old and young. As a Tigers fan, I'm still waiting on Casey Mize to emerge, with his elbow injury having sidelined his career. Let's take a look at some pertinent details. Here are the top 15 pitchers from RotoWire's roundtable rankings right before the season started:
- Spencer Strider
- Corbin Burnes
- Zack Wheeler
- Luis Castillo
- Kevin Gausman
- Zac Gallen
- Pablo Lopez
- George Kirby
- Tyler Glasnow
- Logan Webb
- Aaron Nola
- Tarik Skubal
- Framber Valdez
- Yoshinobu Yamamoto
- Max Fried
ESPN's live draft results are fairly similar. Skubal and Fried drop out, while Freddy Peralta and Shohei Ohtani are in. I'll get back to Ohtani in a second. Before that, here's a look at the AL and NL Cy Young voting for 2023.
The reason Gerrit Cole wasn't in the RotoWire rankings or the ESPN draft results is because he was already on the 60-day IL before the season even began due to an elbow issue. Bradish started the year on the IL with an elbow injury of his own, namely a partially-torn UCL. And it was already known Bautista was going to miss the entire 2024 season after he underwent Tommy John surgery in October.
As for the guys who weren't on the IL when the season began, Strider has since undergone an internal brace procedure in his right elbow (a surgery that isn't quite Tommy John but is pretty close) and will be out for the year. Valdez is on the IL with elbow inflammation, but at least he's expected back before May. It's weird that Ohtani is included with the pitchers by ESPN, given that he's limited to hitting in 2024 because, yes, he's recovering from elbow surgery. His second major elbow surgery since he entered MLB in 2018, though apparently something different from traditional Tommy John this time around. Steele, who finished fifth in NL Cy Young voting last year, at least is offering variety, as he's merely dealing with a hamstring injury. Not pictured is 2020 Cy Young winner Shane Bieber, out for the year with an elbow injury, while the Rangers are currently trying to get by without both Jacob deGrom (recovering from Tommy John) and Max Scherzer (recovering from back surgery).
Let's look at the 2013 Cy Young voting for comparison:
Scherzer would pitch 200 innings in each of the next four seasons. Yu Darvish pitched well in 2014 but missed 2015 with an elbow injury that required Tommy John. Hisashi Iwakuma's shoulder flared up in 2017 and he was done in MLB at that point. Clayton Kershaw was re-signed by the Dodgers with the idea he'd join them for the stretch run as he works his way back from a shoulder injury, but he's spent much of his career "healthy, but banged up." He's always dealing with something, it seems, but he's always managed to pitch at least 120 innings. Adam Wainwright, though he pitched into his forties, missed most of 2018 with an elbow issue, and he had Tommy John in 2011. Matt Harvey is perhaps the greatest cautionary tale here, as he missed 2014 with Tommy John and then neck and shoulder issues effectively kneecapped his career (though his actual kneecaps, to the best of my knowledge, were fine).
Sure, if you look at 1993 you see names like Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Kevin Appier, and even largely forgotten dudes like Jack McDowell and Jimmy Key racked up 200 innings on the regular. There is a bit of "Back in the day guys got hurt and that was that" in the mix, but it also does certainly seem like pitchers are getting injured, specifically hurting their elbows, more often. Pitching a baseball, especially a breaking ball, has never been a natural human arm action, but why more injuries now?
What could be causing more pitching injuries?
Well, just to nip it in the bud, the pitch clock certainly isn't the root cause. Just looking at the Dodgers, Walker Buehler's Tommy John happened before the pitch clock was introduced to MLB. Dusty May did pitch in 2023, but his Tommy John surgery is already his second. Tyler Glasnow is healthy right now, but had Tommy John himself back in the day. The pitch clock is new and different, which makes it an easy boogeyman. There are also athletes who, as physically gifted as they are, are just injury prone. Some people's bodies are just fundamentally different that way. DeGrom is a great pitcher, but he's the kind of guy who was going to have injury issues because his skills and his durability are not anywhere near one another, percentile-wise, when it comes to athletes. It's also, possibly, just sequencing. That being said, there are possible reasons.
One theory out there is that modern pitchers go overexert themselves. Starters are not asked to go, well, I was going to say nine innings, but really that aren't asked to go seven innings anymore. The idea is that you go out there and you let it loose as a starter for as long as you can, but that's a lot of torque on the arm. When you add in the increase in fastball velocity, that's probably taking a toll on the ol' elbow. A whopping 48 pitchers averaged 96 miles per hour or more on their four-seam fastballs in 2023. Now, a lot of them are relievers, but Ohtani is not. Cole is not. Eury Perez, who is having Tommy John after injury his elbow, is not. Over at FanGraphs, their fastball velocity data shows that in 2022, the average fastball was 93.6 miles per hour. In 2002, it was 89.0.
Here's the thing, though. FanGraph's table also shows that in 2002 fastballs accounted for 64.4 percent of pitches thrown. In 2022, that was down to 49.1. Splitters and slider (and admittedly, to a slight degree, changeups) are up. You don't have to look far to see the name "Keith Meister" pop up when it comes to discussing arm injuries, as the physician is vocally denouncing the rise of the sweeper and the "power changeup" in terms of stressing elbows. One of the places is in this USA Today article, but article also makes a point I concur with: If there was an obvious reason, somebody would have pinpointed it, and they would be a (very rich) hero.
To sum up...
If you drafted Strider or Bieber, that's a bummer. You have my sympathy. If you are a Yankees fan…well, sympathy is a stretch, because you are a Yankees fan, but I am sure you lament the loss of Cole before the first pitch of the season. It does seem like pitcher injuries, specifically elbow injuries, are up. It might be fastball velocity. It might be pitchers going all out for five innings knowing that's all they are asked to get. Maybe, when we have enough data, the pitch clock might look like something of a culprit, but for now it is just an easy scapegoat, especially in the most change-resistant sport of them all.
If I may wring my hands like many of my sportswriting brethren for a moment (we've got to do something with our hands when we aren't typing), what strikes me is that this feels like a "toothpaste out of the tube" thing. Pitchers can tweak their repertoires some, sure, but are pitchers going to ease off their fastballs? Are we going to go back to starters working 200-plus innings a season on the regular? Dudes are ripped and rocked up and will never again be physically built like the pitchers of the past, because we understand exercise and nutrition and that smoking cigarettes in the locker room after a game is a bad idea. What I wonder is if the game of baseball has outpaced human evolution. If you are going to be an MLB pitcher, you will make a lot of money, maybe generational wealth. You may become famous and adored, get a spot in Cooperstown. In return, you will probably have one, maybe two or three, serious elbow surgeries. Maybe the ethos of the baseball pitcher needs to be, "Buy the ticket, take the ride," and maybe more people have to ponder if that works for them.
Anyway, sorry again about Strider, all you fantasy players!
