Passan: Pitching injuries are out of control — and it’s time to take action
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
It’s all so ugly. Every day, it seems, another ulnar collateral ligament falls prey to the mere act of throwing a baseball. In a recent 48-hour period, Eury Perez, Shane Bieber and Spencer Strider — the best young pitcher in baseball, the 2020 American League Cy Young winner and the game’s current strikeout king, respectively — all went down with damaged elbows. A game already too thin on starting pitching continues to lose its greatest talent at an alarming rate.
The elbow crisis has been building for decades, from youth levels to the major leagues, and nobody in a position of power has done anything of substance to address it. This is not a bad stretch of luck or an anomaly. It’s an existential problem for baseball.
In addition to the absences facing Perez and Bieber, who will soon undergo Tommy John surgery, and Strider, who might need his second at 25 years old, the list of players already recovering from elbow reconstruction includes an MVP (Shohei Ohtani), Cy Young winners (Jacob deGrom, Sandy Alcantara, Robbie Ray), All-Stars (Shane McClanahan, Walker Buehler, Lucas Giolito, Felix Bautista) and young standouts (Dustin May, Andrew Painter, Shane Baz, Kumar Rocker). Reigning AL Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole is out until at least the end of May with elbow issues.
On and on it goes, this unrelenting train of bad news, and if this isn’t a call to action for everyone with a whit of influence in the baseball universe to pour their energy into confronting it, nothing is. For the sake of the game, the whole of the sport must work together to crack a dilemma with no obvious solution.
Which made the dueling statements from the Major League Baseball Players Association and MLB on Saturday so disappointing. An issue this complex, this difficult to wrangle, demands cooperation from all parties with the ability to affect change. Instead, the public proclamations in the wake of the latest Tommy John surgeries oozed pettiness.
The union’s statement focused on the pitch clock, implemented in 2023, and the two-second reduction with runners on base amended this season. It did not mention the sport’s drastic increase in pitch velocity or the constant maximum-effort approach pitchers take or the extreme emphasis on spin or the proliferation of year-round baseball or any number of other possible contributing factors. It relitigated a single issue — a not-unreasonable one, but one nonetheless — of a multipronged problem, saying: “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’s response did not help matters. It discussed velocity and spin — and trumpeted the league’s efforts to combat elbow injuries through a research study it’s undertaking. But in trying to defend the pitch clock — one of the defining accomplishments of commissioner Rob Manfred’s tenure — the league cited a study from Johns Hopkins University “that found no evidence to support that the introduction of the pitch clock has increased injuries.”
Without any sense of the exact questions the study sought to answer, the data it combed through and the specificity of its conclusions, it’s difficult to glean anything meaningful from the league’s proclamations. Considering the study remains in peer review, using its unverifiable findings, even as a rejoinder to the union’s statement, speaks to a lack of the transparency that’s imperative in tackling the problem.
Here’s what progress would look like: The voices of current pitchers — the ones who step out onto the mound knowing their elbows are ticking time bombs — factoring heavily in MLB’s decision-making. They are the ones who feel the pain, who internalize the fear that what’s expected of them — throw harder, spin faster — predisposes them to major surgery. They’re the ones who exist in an industry that asks ever more of them — more velo, nastier stuff, full tilt all the time — and leaves behind those who don’t offer it.
Pitchers have always gotten hurt — and will always get hurt — but at the highest levels the causes have morphed from longer-term overuse injuries to shorter-burst, higher-intensity, muscles-and-ligaments-can’t-handle-it ones. Teams incentivize pitchers to throw in a way that many experts believe is the root cause of the game’s injury issues. As much as velocity correlates with injuries, it does so similarly with productivity. Throw harder, perform better. It’s a fact. It’s also bad for the health of pitchers — and the game.
At the same time, it’s not the only factor. The fact that the union wants more information on the pitch clock should matter to MLB. Even if the league did bargain during negotiations with the MLBPA for a far shorter window to implement on-field rules changes, it can’t ignore what players continue to begrudge. This isn’t idle bellyaching. Pitchers want to understand why the extra two seconds shaved off the clock this year were so imperative. And why they aren’t entitled to one or two timeouts a game when they feel discomfort — a nerve sending a shock of pain up their arm, a muscle spasming and in need of a break. And why there still isn’t an accepted grip agent to help with balls they believe remain inconsistently manufactured. All issues of health.
Pitchers know the injury data. They’ve seen the number of Tommy John surgeries ballooning at the big league level. It’s even more pronounced in the minor leagues, and the surge over the past decade aligns with the implementation of the pitch clock at lower levels. But it also coincides with baseball’s pitch-design era, in which the use of technology — Trackman and Rapsodo machines that gauge spin characteristics, and super-slow-motion cameras that capture grips and releases — allows pitchers to fabricate new pitches not based on their comfort or ease throwing them but on detailed movement measurements to which they aspire.
Maybe it’s the clock. Maybe it’s pitch design. Maybe it’s velocity. Maybe it’s all of the above. Regardless of what it is, one truth the baseball universe knows is that the greatest predictor of a future arm injury is a past arm injury. In other words: The litany of pitchers who are hurt now are at far greater risk of getting hurt again.
When a sport has evolved to the point where half of its participants are encouraged to compete in a way deeply detrimental to their short-term — and in many cases, long-term — health, there is no room for politicking, bickering, blaming. With a sound process and commitment from both sides to it, all of the important questions would be asked and, hopefully, answered. This is about the people, and it is about the game, and it is about the awful place where the two are intersecting.
If anything in baseball deserves max effort, this is it.
JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.
The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.
“Dear Mr. Abbott …”
“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”
“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”
“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”
For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.
There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.
That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.
Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.
The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.
“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”
In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.
“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”
“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”
One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.
She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”
Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.
Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.
“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.
“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”
Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.
Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.
Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.
“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”
Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”
Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.
“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.
“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”
Griffin.
Pickett.
Newell.
Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.
When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.
“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”
But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.
“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”
NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.
Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.
He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.
“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”
Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).
Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.
Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.
Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.
Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.
As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.
Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.
A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.
Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.
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