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BOSTON — Yankees ace Gerrit Cole. Cleveland’s former Cy Young winner Shane Bieber. Atlanta’s rising star Spencer Strider. Marlins top prospect Eury Perez.
The list goes on of starters who have received devastating injury news this season, and names are likely to be added. Pitcher injuries are stacking up — especially season-ending ones that require major surgeries like Tommy John elbow reconstruction — and Orioles ace Corbin Burnes thinks, like many others in the game, that there’s a main reason: the pitch clock.
“I think we have a problem,” Burnes said. “MLB is going to tell you it’s not pitch clock-related. I would argue that long-term injuries are up the last two years and the rate we are having injuries this year is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. There’s a problem. It has to be fixed.”
The pitch clock was implemented for the 2023 season as a way to speed up pace of play to keep fans entertained. Last season, pitchers had 15 seconds to throw when the bases were empty and 20 when there was a runner on. It worked in shortening game times — MLB games averaged just under two hours and 40 minutes compared to three hours and four minutes in 2022 — but the league seems to have found itself a new problem.
“As a starting pitcher, we’re sprinting 100 times in a start,” said Burnes, referring to the exertion that comes with each throw. “To go out there and put a clock on us and limit the amount of time you get to recover, it’s going to have an effect on you. What that effect is, I don’t know. But, anytime you do anything that’s an endurance-type sport, your heart rate is elevated, and [if] you shorten the recovery, that has to be questionable.”
Burnes is not alone in expressing this sentiment. On Monday, Cole, who is on the injured list with nerve inflammation in his right elbow, said players’ concerns aren’t being heard.
“We are going to really understand the effects of ... the pitch clock maybe five years down the road,” Cole said to reporters. “But, to dismiss it out of hand, I didn’t think that was helpful to the situation. I think the players are obviously the most important aspect of this industry and this product. And the care of the players should be of utmost importance to both sides.”
It’s something the Major League Players Association has been trying to point out all year, especially as the MLB committee voted to reduce the clock with runners on base to 18 seconds. During spring training, as Executive Director Tony Clark made his rounds to every camp, he made it clear the union is behind the players on this issue.
“It’s simply hard to believe that usage and the lack of recovery time against the backdrop of how that usage is manifesting itself during a course of a game or otherwise is [not] a determining factor,” Clark said that day.
He added in a statement this week that “the league’s unwillingness thus far to acknowledge or study the effects of these profound changes is an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset — the Players.”
MLB responded, saying in its own statement that the union is ignoring “empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trends, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries.”
The league said it is investigating the issue, working with prominent medical experts across baseball. MLB cited an independent analysis by the Johns Hopkins University that concluded there was “no evidence to support that the introduction of the pitch clock has increased injuries.”
“In fact, JHU found no evidence that pitchers who worked quickly in 2023 were more likely to sustain an injury than those who worked less quickly on average,” the league said. “JHU also found no evidence that pitchers who sped up their pace were more likely to sustain an injury than those who did not.”
The rise of injuries could be attributed to other things. As the Ringer notes, the number of pitchers needing Tommy John surgery peaked at 316 in 2021 — the year after the pandemic-shortened season when spring training was altered — and had been steadily rising for the 10 years prior. It fell to 241 in 2022 but jumped back up to 263 in 2023, the first year of the pitch clock.
Dr. Keith Meister, one of the specialists best known for performing Tommy John surgery, said during an appearance on the YouTube show “Foul Territory” that he performed 230 elbow ligament repairs last year. He’s done 70 already this year and expects to do 40 this month.
He sees pitches with horizontal ball movement as one of the biggest risk factors because of how hard players have to grip the ball and how hard they have to cut it. He has seen a similar spike in injuries at the high school and college levels.
“I think there’s a broader picture than this,” he said. “I think what I like to call the designer pitches has had a significant impact equally as well. ... I can look at an MRI scan almost and tell you that this pattern of injury is something we are seeing with particular pitches. We can almost look at an MRI and the time of tear and say this guy is throwing this kind of pitch.”
Still, pitchers like Burnes feel the difference since the pitch clock was implemented. He has altered his training, focusing more on conditioning in the offseason and during spring training to increase his overall fitness to keep up with the new clock.
He admits, though, that there is only so much he can do. And he knows other pitchers who have tried similar tactics and still ended up on the injured list.
“It’s hard to train conditioning-wise, play at a game speed with that kind of adrenaline and stress, but I know I did it, talked to other guys around the league who just tried to be in better shape physically to adapt to it,” Burnes said. “Some guys have been able to stay healthy, knock on wood, but there’s a lot of guys this year who have gone down.”
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Danielle Allentuck covers the Orioles for The Baltimore Banner. She previously reported on the Rockies for the Denver Gazette and general sports assignments for The New York Times as part of its fellowship program. A Maryland native, Danielle grew up in Montgomery County and graduated from Ithaca College.
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