Matt Moore becomes the 20th TJ surgery so far this year. Photo AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez via baynews9.com
If you havn’t read the latest Tom Verducci article, please do so. It has some great facts related to the rise in pitching velocity, driven by the rise of travel-league baseball and the overuse of kids’ arms as youth pitchers in show-cases (a completely new and “American” development system, he adds, in that just one of the 20 Tommy John surgeries suffered so far this year was on a non-american hurler). At least 1/3rd of MLB pitchers have now had the surgery and it seems like that number will only rise.
This past weekend, there was a rather large uproar in the scouting ranks when NC State’s phenom Carlos Rodon was pushed back out on the mound so that he could throw pitches #119 through #134 on the night for his under-performing college team that looks like it may miss the post-season after being ranked in the pre-season top 5 by most publications. And with good reason; the studies Verducci found show that kids have something like a 36-fold increase in pitching injuries when they throw after reaching a fatigue state. If i’m Houston, Miami, or one of the Chicago teams … i’m looking long and hard at Rodon right now anyway (he’s regressed badly this spring and has fallen out of the 1-1 discussion), and having him throw 130+ pitches when that’s only happened a few times in the past few years in the pros would scare me. You’re committing multiple millions of dollars there; you want damaged goods?
Scary stuff, especially if you have a kid out there who’s looking like he’s a stud and is getting a ton of pressure to play multiple travel schedules.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mlb/news/20140415/tommy-john-surgery-high-school-pitchers-jameson-taillon/index.html