Passan: 5 biggest takeaways from MLB’s landmark pitching study
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Jeff Passan, Senior MLB Insider
In Major League Baseball’s much-anticipated Pitching Injury Report, the league spends most of the 62 pages breaking little new ground. This is by design. To address the game’s rash of arm injuries with a sense of urgency, MLB couldn’t undertake the years of research necessary to better explain where the sport has failed and where it must go. More than a solution, this is, quite literally, a call to arms.
Over the last year, MLB officials talked with more than 200 people: pitching coaches, athletic trainers, former big leaguers — really anyone who might offer a nugget of insight or wisdom. Alongside bringing some clarity to the issue, MLB endeavored to answer lingering questions. Did the pitch clock cause arm injuries to soar? (There is no evidence to suggest as much.) What about the lack of sticky stuff to give pitchers a better handle on the ball? (Still unclear, though with the amount of ink devoted to the importance of grip, logic suggests it could be a factor for some.)
The larger issue is that arm injuries are a problem bigger than MLB. They exist in every crevice of the baseball universe, from college to youth baseball to the international game. This means fully dissecting the issue takes nuance and space better provided by a book, which I undertook a dozen years ago. Like the league, I came to no a-ha conclusion, beyond the brokenness inherent in a game fruitlessly trying to breed pitchers to do the very thing that gets arms hurt and the accompanying trajectory that portended trouble. In nearly a decade since The Arm was published, almost nothing has changed. In fact, arm injuries have gotten worse.
This report is an adequate, if banal, first step. Sound the alarms from the top, and hope to pull the right levers so a decade from now the game, at all levels, looks different. At the very least, it’s an acknowledgement that this is a matter worthy of the league’s time and energy. And while MLB isn’t explicit in its plans going forward, the main takeaways from the report are clear.
1. Early-season injuries have become especially worrisome to teams
In a memo sent to executives and team medical staff with the report Tuesday, MLB outlines the next phase of its research: “a detailed examination of offseason training regimens and early-season workloads.”
Injured-list placements between spring training and Opening Day have spiked precipitously in the last two years: nearly 100 in 2023 and more than 110 last year after never exceeding 80 over the previous five full seasons. And with spring training report dates less than two months away, how pitchers work in the offseason is at the forefront of clubs’ minds.
Professional pitchers now strive to show up at camps in Arizona and Florida looking near-ready to pitch in the big leagues. Over what should be their offseason, they use available technology to perfect current pitches and learn new ones, and, after a long season, rest insufficiently. Early in camp, they try to impress their team with the quality of their stuff — valuing spring measurables over staying healthy for a full season. Spring-training workloads, in the meantime, have dipped, even as pitchers bypass using camp to build arm strength.
“Although well-intentioned,” the report says, “this trend of reduced spring training workloads has coincided with an increase in early-season and spring training injuries, which contributes to the conclusion of some experts that pitchers are exposed to a higher risk of injury because they are not prepared for the dramatic increase in workload and intensity when the season begins.”
Undertaking this sort of a study necessitates buy-in from players, trainers and teams. Years of data will be needed before any sort of conclusion — and that is often the issue with the arm: Even data alone won’t necessarily lead to a satisfying explanation. What makes the arm such a puzzle is that any number of things can ruin it.
2. MLB is now on the record saying the most significant causes of arm injuries are velocity, spin-chasing and maximum-effort pitching
At this point, anyone familiar with how the arm works understands that the modern style of pitching is incompatible with arm health. Teams prize velocity and spin in the players they draft, promote and eventually keep on their rosters. If going deep into games led to better career outcomes, pitchers would adjust their behavior. It hasn’t. So they don’t.
Everything starts with velocity.
“Despite a direct correlation with injury risk,” the report says, “average fastball velocity in MLB jumped from 91.3 mph in 2008 to 94.2 mph this year. Velocity has been pursued by pitchers because it is advantageous in achieving positive performance outcomes, can be quantified and acquired, and is valued by major league clubs. Private facilities that specialize in velocity-focused methods of training have grown in popularity.”
Further, the report says, the culprits of injury proliferation include “the emphasis on optimizing ‘stuff’ (a term referencing the composite movement characteristics of pitches, including horizontal and vertical break and spin rate) and the modern pitcher’s focus on exerting maximum effort while pitching in both game and non-game situations.”
Partially at fault, the report posits, is that MLB teams’ response to this has not been to change the behaviors antithetical to health but rather work around them. More teams have resigned themselves to arm injuries and instead sought roster depth, taking advantage of rules that allow them to churn their pitching staff. In each of the last four years, teams have averaged more than 32 pitchers used per season. In 2010 that number was 22.8, in 2000 22.5, in 1990 20 and in 1980 15.1.
3. Technology runs the game
Never does the report explicitly ask what could join velocity, spin and max-effort pitching on the Mount Rushmore of Blown-Out Elbows, but it alludes implicitly and, at times, explicitly to technology’s part. This is not to suggest tech in baseball is inherently bad; on the contrary, it has done wonders for the game. But one quote in particular, from an athletic trainer, accurately reflects the environments in which pitchers are being taught.
“They’ll turn around and look at the Edgertronic and TrackMan, and they’re married to it,” the athletic trainer said. “And they’ll ask, ‘Where was that? Am I tunneling?’ I think it’s deadly. You’re challenging them on the mound to grip it, rip it. They come in and are asking, ‘What’s my carry?'”
First, a few definitions. An Edgertronic camera takes super-slow-motion video and allows pitchers to see how their pitch grip relates to the spin they seek on a certain pitch. TrackMan is a radar system that tracks ball flight and measures velocity and spin. Tunneling is trying to create difficult swing decisions for hitters by releasing different types of pitches from the same point. And carry is a pure-backspin fastball that isn’t pulled down by gravity as much as one even slightly off-axis, giving it the illusion of rising.
To be a pitcher at almost any competitive level today means fluency in this language. This is what pitchers are taught. And because the technology provides accurate and objective numbers with which growth can be tracked, it is fully embraced by the next generation of pitchers.
The consequences of this can damage pitchers who see TrackMan and Rapsodo data not as a tool but as their hammer. And who can blame them? When teams are interested in pitchers, the first thing they want to see is his data. With that being the case, of course pitchers are going to focus on juicing those numbers any way possible. It’s just another case of misplaced incentives running amok.
4. The minor leagues do not prepare pitchers for the demands of the major leagues
Twenty years ago, about 55% of major league starts and just over 50% of minor league starts came on five or fewer days’ rest. In 2024, that had dropped to about one-third of starts in the big leagues and barely 10% in the minor leagues. The same trend applies to relief pitchers: Big league relievers pitch on back-to-back days around 16% of the time; in the minor leagues, it’s closer to 2%. Want to know why the number of major league starts going at least five innings has dropped from 85% to 70% in the last two decades? Maybe it’s because over the same period, minor league starts of that length have gone from around 70% to less than 40%.
By and large, young players are no longer training — or, better put, being trained — to do what major league teams ask of them. One can’t reasonably expect a pitcher to throw deep into games when they’ve trained to air it out for five innings. Going back-to-back is a physical test that far too many relievers fail because nobody bothered telling them it’s an imperative skill for a big league bullpen arm.
And at the same time, the starting pitcher has been deprioritized. With the emergence of a seemingly endless supply of high-velocity relief pitchers, starters’ inability to go deep into games and the fear of the third-time-through-the-order penalty, the slow death of the starting pitcher has accelerated, much to the league’s discontent.
“Starting pitchers are no longer incentivized to establish their durability in games over the course of the championship season because clubs are more willing to rely on relief pitchers than ever before,” the report says. “Instead, they now pursue max-effort performance over much more limited periods of time — putting them at more substantial risk of future injury. These trends similarly raise questions about whether rule changes can be considered to make it more appealing for pitchers to prioritize durability over max-effort performance, in order to improve pitcher health.”
Perhaps the easiest rules changes the league can make are limiting moves back and forth between Triple-A and the big leagues and limiting the number of pitchers a team can roster, forcing starters to chase innings over stuff and strikeouts. The blowback would be strong — from teams and players — but when the league says modern pitching theory’s outcomes have “a noticeable and detrimental impact on the quality of the game on the field,” it’s the sort of damning statement that tends to prompt change.
5. The danger of amateur trickle-down
Perhaps the most damning graphic in the report comes on page 33. It covers 11 years of pitchers at the Perfect Game National Showcase, at which the largest company in youth baseball invites the best high school juniors in the country to play in front of an endless supply of talent evaluators. In 2014, five pitchers threw at least 95 mph. Same in 2015. Over the next three years, it was seven, six, three and eight. In 2020, it doubled to 16. Since then, the report says, it has more than doubled again, to 36.
High school players are simply doing what will get them recruited to college, where they’ll simply do what gets them drafted, where they’ll simply do what gets them promoted. Everything filters down from the big leagues. Kids aren’t using TrackMan and Rapsodo if big leaguers don’t. Compound that with the encouragement by travel-ball operators to participate in year-round play via showcases, the adoption of misguided weighted-ball programs from people ill-suited to properly monitor such training tools and the straight-up ignoring of PitchSmart guidelines recommended by a panel of medical experts, and far too often, players are coming into MLB systems already broken. Twenty years ago, less than 5% of drafted pitchers had reconstructive surgery on their pitching elbow’s ulnar collateral ligament, typically known as Tommy John surgery. Now, it’s more than one-third.
“The risks of arm injury due to overuse largely have been ignored in favor of year-round travel baseball and showcases (a longstanding concern with amateur baseball that experts view as only worsening in recent years),” the report says. “Indeed, high-level amateur players perform year-round with intense pitching schedules that put them at greater risk of future injury. Although some suggest that current youth and amateur development models may be primarily responsible for an increase in pitcher injuries across all levels, we conclude that improving pitcher health requires both adjusting professional incentives and implementing changes to amateur baseball so that appropriate training and performance practices trickle down to the amateur level.”
The report, which generally skimps on recommendations in favor of additional research, does no such thing with youth baseball. It recommends closing loopholes in PitchSmart guidelines, enforcing standards on participating tournaments and leagues, and increasing education. Even more, it suggests blackout periods that prevent professional scouts from evaluating players and allowing them proper rest and recovery during the offseason.
This is where the baseball universe must converge. All the stakeholders. For the sake of the kids. For the sake of the game. Solving arm injuries won’t ever come in one fell swoop. With so many pathologies, answers are built, not found. And though it will take years to see progress, it’s vital for MLB’s report to be just the beginning, not a standalone effort that stops where it started.
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Alden Gonzalez
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Sometime around mid-August last year, Mookie Betts convened with the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ coaches. He had taken stock of what transpired while he rehabbed a broken wrist, surveyed his team’s roster and accepted what had become plainly obvious: He needed to return to right field.
For the better part of five months, Betts had immersed himself in the painstaking task of learning shortstop in the midst of a major league season. It was a process that humbled him but also invigorated him, one he had desperately wanted to see through. On the day he gave it up, Chris Woodward, at that point an adviser who had intermittently helped guide Betts through the transition, sought him out. He shook Betts’ hand, told him how much he respected his efforts and thanked him for the work.
“Oh, it ain’t over yet,” Betts responded. “For now it’s over, but we’re going to win the World Series, and then I’m coming back.”
Woodward, now the Dodgers’ full-time first-base coach and infield instructor, recalled that conversation from the team’s spring training complex at Camelback Ranch last week and smiled while thinking about how those words had come to fruition. The Dodgers captured a championship last fall, then promptly determined that Betts, the perennial Gold Glove outfielder heading into his age-32 season, would be the every-day shortstop on one of the most talented baseball teams ever assembled.
From November to February, Betts visited high school and collegiate infields throughout the L.A. area on an almost daily basis in an effort to solidify the details of a transition he did not have time to truly prepare for last season.
Pedro Montero, one of the Dodgers’ video coordinators, placed an iPad onto a tripod and aimed its camera in Betts’ direction while he repeatedly pelted baseballs into the ground with a fungo bat, then sent Woodward the clips to review from his home in Arizona. The three spoke almost daily.
By the time Betts arrived in spring training, Woodward noticed a “night and day” difference from one year to the next. But he still acknowledges the difficulty of what Betts is undertaking, and he noted that meaningful games will ultimately serve as the truest arbiter.
The Dodgers have praised Betts for an act they described as unselfish, one that paved the way for both Teoscar Hernandez and Michael Conforto to join their corner outfield and thus strengthen their lineup. Betts himself has said his move to shortstop is a function of doing “what I feel like is best for the team.” But it’s also clear that shouldering that burden — and all the second-guessing and scrutiny that will accompany it — is something he wants.
He wants to be challenged. He wants to prove everybody wrong. He wants to bolster his legacy.
“Mookie wants to be the best player in baseball, and I don’t see why he wouldn’t want that,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I think if you play shortstop, with his bat, that gives him a better chance.”
ONLY 21 PLAYERS since 1900 have registered 100 career games in right field and 100 career games at shortstop, according to ESPN Research. It’s a list compiled mostly of lifelong utility men. The only one among them who came close to following Betts’ path might have been Tony Womack, an every-day right fielder in his age-29 season and an every-day shortstop in the three years that followed. But Womack had logged plenty of professional shortstop experience before then.
Through his first 12 years in professional baseball, Betts accumulated just 13 starts at shortstop, all of them in rookie ball and Low-A from 2011 to 2012. His path — as a no-doubt Hall of Famer and nine-time Gold Glove right fielder who will switch to possibly the sport’s most demanding position in his 30s — is largely without precedent. And yet the overwhelming sense around the Dodgers is that if anyone can pull it off, it’s him.
“Mookie’s different,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “I think this kind of challenge is really fun for him. I think he just really enjoys it. He’s had to put in a lot of hard work — a lot of work that people haven’t seen — but I just think he’s such a different guy when it comes to the challenge of it that he’s really enjoying it. When you look at how he approaches it, he’s having so much fun trying to get as good as he can be. There’s not really any question in anyone’s mind here that he’s going to be a very good defensive shortstop.”
Betts entered the 2024 season as the primary second baseman, a position to which he had long sought a return, but transitioned to shortstop on March 8, 12 days before the Dodgers would open their season from South Korea, after throwing issues began to plague Gavin Lux. Almost every day for the next three months, Betts put himself through a rigorous pregame routine alongside teammate Miguel Rojas and third-base coach Dino Ebel in an effort to survive at the position.
The metrics were unfavorable, scouts were generally unimpressed and traditional statistics painted an unflattering picture — all of which was to be expected. Simply put, Betts did not have the reps. He hadn’t spent significant time at shortstop since he was a teenager at Overton High School in Nashville, Tennessee. He was attempting to cram years of experience through every level of professional baseball into the space allotted to him before each game, a task that proved impossible.
Betts committed nine errors during his time at shortstop, eight of them the result of errant throws. He often lacked the proper footwork to put himself in the best position to throw accurately across the diamond, but the Dodgers were impressed by how quickly he seemed to grasp other aspects of the position that seemed more difficult for others — pre-pitch timing, range, completion of difficult plays.
Shortly after the Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees to win their first full-season championship since 1988, Betts sat down with Dodgers coaches and executives and expressed his belief that, if given the proper time, he would figure it out. And so it was.
“If Mook really wants to do something, he’s going to do everything he can to be an elite, elite shortstop,” Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said. “I’m not going to bet against that guy.”
THE FIRST TASK was determining what type of shortstop Betts would be. Woodward consulted with Ryan Goins, the current Los Angeles Angels infield coach who is one of Betts’ best friends. The two agreed that he should play “downhill,” attacking the baseball, making more one-handed plays and throwing largely on the run, a style that fit better for a transitioning outfielder.
During a prior stint on the Dodgers’ coaching staff, Woodward — the former Texas Rangers manager who rejoined the Dodgers staff after Los Angeles’ previous first-base coach, Clayton McCullough, became the Miami Marlins‘ manager in the offseason — implemented the same style with Corey Seager, who was widely deemed too tall to remain a shortstop.
“He doesn’t love the old-school, right-left, two-hands, make-sure-you-get-in-front-of-the-ball type of thing,” Woodward said of Betts. “It doesn’t make sense to him. And I don’t coach that way. I want them to be athletic, like the best athlete they can possibly be, so that way they can use their lower half, get into their legs, get proper direction through the baseball to line to first. And that’s what Mookie’s really good at.”
Dodger Stadium underwent a major renovation of its clubhouse space over the offseason, making the field unusable and turning Montero and Betts into nomads. From the second week of November through the first week of February, the two trained at Crespi Carmelite High School near Betts’ home in Encino, California, then Sierra Canyon, Los Angeles Valley College and, finally, Loyola High.
For a handful of days around New Year’s, Betts flew to Austin, Texas, to get tutelage from Troy Tulowitzki, the five-time All-Star and two-time Gold Glove Award winner whose mechanics Betts was drawn to. In early January, when wildfires spread through the L.A. area, Betts flew to Glendale, Arizona, to train with Woodward in person.
Mostly, though, it was Montero as the eyes and ears on the ground and Woodward as the adviser from afar. Their sessions normally lasted about two hours in the morning, evolving from three days a week to five and continually ramping up in intensity. The goal for the first two months was to hone the footwork skills required to make a variety of different throws, but also to give Betts plenty of reps on every ground ball imaginable.
When January came, Betts began to carve out a detailed, efficient routine that would keep him from overworking when the games began. It accounted for every situation, included backup scenarios for uncontrollable events — when it rained, when there wasn’t enough time, when pregame batting practice stretched too long — and was designed to help Betts hold up. What was once hundreds of ground balls was pared down to somewhere in the neighborhood of 35, but everything was accounted for.
LAST YEAR, BETTS’ throws were especially difficult for Freddie Freeman to catch at first base, often cutting or sailing or darting. But when Freeman joined Betts in spring training, he noticed crisp throws that consistently arrived with backspin and almost always hit the designated target. Betts was doing a better job of getting his legs under him on batted balls hit in a multitude of directions. Also, Rojas said, he “found his slot.”
“Technically, talking about playing shortstop, finding your slot is very important because you’re throwing the ball from a different position than when you throw it from right field,” Rojas explained. “You’re not throwing the ball from way over the top or on the bottom. So he’s finding a slot that is going to work for him. He’s understanding now that you need a slot to throw the ball to first base, you need a slot to throw the ball to second base, you need a slot to throw the ball home and from the side.”
Dodgers super-utility player Enrique Hernandez has noticed a “more loose” Betts at shortstop this spring. Roberts said Betts is “two grades better” than he was last year, before a sprained left wrist placed him on the injured list on June 17 and prematurely ended his first attempt. Before reporting to spring training, Betts described himself as “a completely new person over there.”
“But we’ll see,” he added.
The games will be the real test. At that point, Woodward said, it’ll largely come down to trusting the work he has put in over the past four months. Betts is famously hard on himself, and so Woodward has made it a point to remind him that, as long as his process is sound, imperfection is acceptable.
“This is dirt,” Woodward will often tell him. “This isn’t perfect.”
The Dodgers certainly don’t need Betts to be their shortstop. If it doesn’t work out, he can easily slide back to second base. Rojas, the superior defender whose offensive production prompted Betts’ return to right field last season, can fill in on at least a part-time basis. So can Tommy Edman, who at this point will probably split his time between center field and second base, and so might Hyeseong Kim, the 26-year-old middle infielder who was signed out of South Korea this offseason.
But it’s clear Betts wants to give it another shot.
As Roberts acknowledged, “He certainly felt he had unfinished business.”
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Jorge Castillo
TAMPA, Fla. — New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner on Friday emphasized that he has not ordered his front office to drop the team’s player payroll below the highest competitive balance tax threshold of $301 million this season.
Steinbrenner, however, questioned whether fielding a payroll in that range is prudent.
“Does having a huge payroll really increase my chances that much of winning the championship?” Steinbrenner said. “I’m not sure there’s a strong correlation there. Having said that, we’re the New York Yankees, we know what our fans expect. We’re always going to be one of the highest in payroll. That’s not going to change. And it certainly didn’t change this year.”
In the wild-card era (since 1995), 21 of the 30 teams to win the World Series ranked in the top 10 in Opening Day payroll. However, just three teams since 2009, the year the Yankees claimed their last championship, have won the World Series ranked in the top three in payroll: The 2018 Boston Red Sox (first in the majors), 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers (second) and 2024 Dodgers (third).
This year, Steinbrenner said the Yankees, one of the most valuable franchises in professional sports, are currently projected to have a CBT payroll between $307 million and $308 million after a busy winter that included losing Juan Soto in free agency but adding Max Fried, Devin Williams, Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt. Cot’s Contracts, which tracks baseball salaries and payrolls, estimates the number to be $304.7 million, ranking fourth in the majors behind the Dodgers, New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies.
The Yankees have ranked in the top three in payroll in 16 of the 17 seasons since Steinbrenner became chairman and controlling owner of the franchise in 2008. The exception was 2018, when the team finished seventh.
The team was one of the nine levied tax penalties last season — the Yankees paid $62.5 million as one of four clubs taxed at a base rate of 50% for exceeding the lowest threshold in three or more straight years — and one of four levied the stiffest penalties for surpassing the highest threshold. As a result, their first-round pick in the 2025 draft dropped 10 slots.
This season, any dollar spent over $301 million will come with a 60% surcharge.
“I would say no,” Steinbrenner said when asked whether dropping below the highest threshold is a priority. “The threshold is not the concern to me.”
The Yankees, however, have tried to trade right-hander Marcus Stroman to shed salary and perhaps allocate the money elsewhere, according to sources. Stroman is due to make $18.5 million this season, but he isn’t projected to break camp in the team’s starting rotation.
The two-time All-Star started the Yankees’ first Grapefruit League game of the year Friday against the Tampa Bay Rays, tossing a scoreless inning a week after missing the first two days of workouts and emphasizing he would not pitch out of the bullpen this season. He maintained his stance Friday.
“I haven’t thought about it, to be honest,” Stroman said after departing the Yankees’ 4-0 win. “I know who I am as a pitcher. I’m a very confident pitcher. I don’t think you’d want someone in your starting rotation that would be like, ‘Hey, I’m going to go to the bullpen.’ That’s not someone you’d want.”
Steinbrenner also reiterated that he would consider supporting a salary cap for the next collective bargaining agreement if a floor is also implemented “so that clubs that I feel aren’t spending enough on payroll to improve their team would have to spend more.”
The current CBA is set to expire after the 2026 season.
Reds manager Terry Francona plans to opt out of elective participation in the automated ball-strike challenge trial during spring training but is willing to let Cincinnati’s minor league players accustomed to the procedure use the system.
ABS allows pitchers, hitters and catchers an immediate objection to a ball-strike call. Major League Baseball is not fully adopting the system — which has been used in the minor leagues — this season but began a trial Thursday involving 13 spring training ballparks. Teams are allowed two challenges per game, which must come from on-field players and not the dugout or manager.
“I’m OK with seeing our younger kids do it because they’ve done it,” Francona said. “It’s not a strategy for [the MLB teams], so why work on it? I don’t want to make a farce of anything, but we’re here getting ready for a season and that’s not helping us get ready.”
ABS was used for the first time at Camelback Ranch in Thursday’s spring training opener between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs.
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