{"id":123359,"date":"2025-08-06T10:32:25","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T10:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/123359\/"},"modified":"2025-08-06T10:32:25","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T10:32:25","slug":"baseball-reaches-its-breaking-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/123359\/","title":{"rendered":"Baseball Reaches Its Breaking Point"},"content":{"rendered":"

Keith Meister, in the operating room of his private practice, draws a six-centimetre line on the elbow of a baseball pitcher. He slices the elbow open and stares into a mix of ligaments, tendons, and bone\u2014any of which could be severely injured or disfigured. He pulls the player\u2019s skin taut with a two-pronged retractor, then pulls out a modified arthroscopy camera and begins documenting the damage.<\/p>\n

First, Meister assesses the severity of a suspected tear in the ulnar collateral ligament, one of the most important parts of a pitcher\u2019s musculoskeletal system. He snaps a photograph for his data library. Then he uses a tendon, collected from the player\u2019s wrist or thigh, to encase the U.C.L., taking more photos as he goes. To reinforce it further, Meister uses a two-millimetre-wide piece of synthetic braided fibre. The fibre looks like a shoelace. Meister positions it over the ligament and sews it along the length like an embroidery stitch. This technique, a combination of traditional Tommy John surgery\u2014a procedure pioneered by Frank Jobe in the nineteen-seventies\u2014and new technology, is known as a hybrid surgery.<\/p>\n

\u201cI take fifteen to twenty photographs of every case I do,\u201d Meister said. \u201cIt\u2019s helped me to go back and look at injury tear patterns and correlate them with the MRI scans. It\u2019s certainly helped my own ability to see, evaluate, and treat some of these things in a more logical way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meister, who is based in Texas, performs surgery on seven pitchers\u2019 elbows a day during what he calls his \u201cbusy season\u201d\u2014the weeks leading up to and immediately after major-league baseball\u2019s opening day. It is at this time of year that pitchers are statistically most likely to need elbow surgery. Theories about this phenomenon revolve largely around the way that a pitcher trains during the off-season, though experts have yet to come to a consensus. What they do know is that elbow injuries are happening at an alarming rate, and that elbow surgery is now an expected consequence of high-intensity pitching.<\/p>\n

Last year, the two-way megastar Shohei Ohtani<\/a>, who plays as a hitter and a pitcher, was limited to hitting as he recovered from his second elbow surgery. Spencer Strider, a twenty-six-year-old star for the Atlanta Braves, is expected to pitch in a regular-season game soon after blowing out his U.C.L. during his second start of the 2024 season. (Meister did Strider\u2019s operation; he decided to use only the internal brace procedure rather than the full hybrid method.) This year, the Yankees ace Gerrit Cole underwent elbow surgery during spring training. \u201cWe as baseball fans should be thankful for the orthopedic-surgeon community,\u201d Cole told me. \u201cFrom Dr. Jobe who pioneered the surgery, to the world-class surgeons performing these surgeries today at a high level all too often, they are doing a service for the players who want to compete.\u201d<\/p>\n

Historically, pitching has been an art in which the player relies on a deceptive windup and a precise ability to land throws in the strike zone. Throughout the past decade, pitchers have turned their focus to training techniques that increase their average velocity and the over-all movement of the ball\u2014even at the expense of throwing strikes. The goal of this philosophy is to get a hitter to swing and miss and strike out that way. (If a batter is able to make contact with the ball at all, he has a chance to get a hit; therefore, this modern method of throwing is \u201csafer\u201d for the pitching team.) In this new environment, a pitcher such as Greg Maddux, a Hall of Famer, might never have been a star prospect. Maddux threw more than five thousand regular-season innings and a hundred and nine complete games. He was a master of precision and often threw pitches that resulted in batters weakly hitting the ball, but by today\u2019s standards he didn\u2019t throw hard enough or strike out enough batters.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe game is in a really bad spot in terms of pitching,\u201d Max Scherzer, an eighteen-season veteran and, like Maddux, a multiple Cy Young Award winner, told me, \u201cdespite having the most amount of ninety-eight-mile-per-hour fastballs you\u2019ve ever seen. Pitching is in a bad spot. It\u2019s in its highest effort,\u201d and, he continued, pitchers are continuously suffering from health issues. \u201cIt\u2019s not sustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though elbow injuries have been on the rise for the past two decades, Meister has become increasingly concerned with the kinds of tears he\u2019s been seeing lately. The trauma he finds beneath the skin is noticeably different from the injuries he was treating just five or ten years ago. He attributes this to the dramatic pitches that have become a regular part of the game, which rely on horizontal movement. Meister can often immediately identify on an MRI that a pitcher throws a sweeper\u2014a hard slider that the pitcher whips to get about fifteen inches of horizontal movement from the ball. \u201cIt puts a tremendous amount of load on the extremity,\u201d Meister said. \u201cWe\u2019re getting very recognizable tear patterns as a consequence of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the injuries have grown worse, the medical interventions have become better. Part of the problem, as The New Yorker\u2019s Zach Helfand reported last year, in a Profile<\/a> of one of Meister\u2019s contemporaries, Neal ElAttrache, is that surgeons have become more effective at treating pitchers\u2014creating a situation in which players aren\u2019t necessarily as worried about suffering the kind of injury that, in an earlier era, might have been a career ender. The teams, too, are unwilling to give up any kind of edge. As Tony Clark, the executive director of the professional baseball union, told me, \u201cOur guys are simply doing what they\u2019re being told is most valuable.\u201d He went on, \u201cUnless or until the value proposition changes and pitcher health moves more into the forefront of the conversation, we\u2019re going to have challenges. We\u2019re seeing it play out in real time at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many general managers, rather than focus on protecting their pitchers\u2019 health, have instead focussed on creating a deep bench for their teams, so that they have a replacement on hand for when their star players inevitably get hurt. When one pitcher gets injured and requires surgery, he begins a lengthy rehabilitation program, and another pitcher is slotted in. In 2010, there were six hundred and thirty-five different pitchers used across the thirty teams during the season. In 2024, there were eight hundred and fifty-five\u2014an average increase of more than seven pitchers per team.<\/p>\n

And yet it\u2019s not always fun to root for a team whose lineup is constantly changing. Fans want to see their favorite players and are stuck hoping for productive seasons for their understudies. The onus is now on Major League Baseball to find a way to regulate the epidemic that is harming its entertainment product. Currently, the league is only in the brainstorming phase of what to do about the problem.<\/p>\n

Previously, the M.L.B. has attempted to simply mitigate the effects of high velocity on the game by experimenting, in an independent league, with initiatives like moving back the mound\u2014a change that didn\u2019t make a meaningful difference. Now M.L.B. is discussing potential rule changes to curb future injuries. The league has sought the help of the biomechanics expert Glenn Fleisig, to advise on ways to keep pitchers healthy. One idea that Fleisig has proposed is to make the baseball itself either heavier or larger. \u201cToday\u2019s athletes are bigger and stronger and faster than ever before,\u201d Fleisig told me, \u201cbut they\u2019re throwing the same size and weight baseball they used to throw. We\u2019ve done some preliminary biomechanics work, and it looks like when you throw the heavier ball\u2014I\u2019m saying moving a baseball from five ounces to six ounces\u2014it actually produces less stress on your elbow. The reason is that with the heavier ball your arm moves slower.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a change would likely take years to implement, which is frustrating to people, like Meister, who have called on the M.L.B. to act as soon as possible. In January, he gave a presentation to the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society. \u201cI showed one part of M.L.B.\u2019s report on injuries, and then I showed a picture of a guy with his head in the sand,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

Meister and ElAttrache are potential competitors who behave more like collaborators these days, working together to persuade the M.L.B. that it needs to expedite its efforts. \u201cMy conversations with Neal are awesome,\u201d Meister told me. \u201cThere\u2019s no ego. It\u2019s just, \u2018Hey, man, we\u2019ve got to figure this stuff out.\u2019\u00a0\u201d ElAttrache said, \u201cWe talk several times a week. It really helps to be able to have somebody that can add to your knowledge and to your ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

ElAttrache works primarily with professional athletes. Though he also treats football and basketball players, he reports performing an average of seventy-five ligament-reconstruction elbow surgeries each year. Meister, who is almost completely focussed on baseball injuries, operated on nearly three hundred ligaments in 2024. He estimates that slightly less than half of his surgeries are on \u00e9lite college players and amateurs.<\/p>\n

The elbow-injury epidemic has spread through every level of baseball. Surgeons who are used to operating on superstars now find themselves repairing the elbows of children attempting to imitate what they see their favorite pitchers doing in the major leagues. There is a difference between operating on a physically mature adult versus a child whose growth plates are still developing, Meister told me. Children heal faster, he said, and yet the spike in youth surgeries also bodes poorly for the future of the sport. The greatest indicator of a future elbow injury is having suffered an elbow injury in the past. This is perhaps the true threat of the elbow-injury epidemic\u2014that the younger generation of players will enter the big leagues already broken.<\/p>\n

On a recent Saturday, in the Bay Area, a fourteen-year-old stepped onto the mound to practice throwing with his coach. The boy was mostly accustomed to throwing fastballs, cutters, and curveballs. This outing, though, may have been a turning point in his baseball career. The teen, whose father asked that he not be named, threw ninety-two pitches that day. Roughly seventy per cent of them were sliders, which move horizontally and are one of the most strenuous pitches one can produce with the human body. He struck out eleven hitters, and his eyes lit up with the results.<\/p>\n

I relayed these stats to three World Series-winning pitchers. Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander were blown away. (\u201cMy God,\u201d Verlander, a three-time Cy Young Award winner, who just began his twentieth M.L.B. season, said.) \u201cThe kid gets it,\u201d Collin McHugh, who recently retired after eleven M.L.B. seasons, said. \u201cHis flexor tendon does not.\u201d<\/p>\n

The teen-ager went home and spent his recovery time watching TikToks and YouTube videos of big-leaguers striking out hitters. He told me that he often studies videos from pitch-training centers that explain how to get the most velocity and movement out of the ball.<\/p>\n

Kids have come to understand that this approach to pitching is the way to impress scouts and make their way to the big leagues. On the other side of the relationship are the professionals, who feel the upstream effects of younger players aiming to take their jobs. \u201cWhy are these injuries creeping in heavily?\u201d D. J. Wabick, who works at the professional baseball union on issues in amateur baseball, asked. \u201cThere are a lot of good people in the youth-baseball space and a lot of good parents,\u201d Wabick said. \u201cBut, collectively, who is really looking out for these kids?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Keith Meister, in the operating room of his private practice, draws a six-centimetre line on the elbow of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":123360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[5157,591,76177,13117,1884,1266,62,65493,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-123359","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-elbows","11":"tag-injuries","12":"tag-major-league-baseball","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-surgeries","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114981368183730819","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}