THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

When I was a kid in Belgium, we used pitching machines much later than I assume is typical in the US (I remember when I was eleven my league still using a pitching machine), and I thought it was fine.  Of course, for god knows what reason the league also allowed stealing, and we were the only team smart enough (or, less charitably, unscrupulous enough) to realize that no catcher in this league had a chance of throwing out even the slowest baserunner…

We never had any pitching machines when I was growing up.  There was 1 league for everyone under 13, and the league covered several towns, each with its own field.  When we moved to a town big enough to have its own leagues and to fund several leagues for various age groups, we couldn’t believe things like pitching-machine or coach-pitch leagues existed (we were too old for them by then, but the new town had them).  The whole idea seemed very foreign.  It still seems really weird to me.  It makes sense, but for some reason, the concept has never really settled with me.

By the time I was around 12, most of the coaches were still not letting us throw curveballs, even for the competitive tournaments against the teams from other towns.  We had one coach would always give this speech about how Nolan Ryan never through a breaking ball until he was in college (which is kind of a weird speech since Ryan went pro out of high school and never pitched in college).  There was this one kid, though, who was probably the only one of us who looked like he had much of any chance of pitching competitively past high school, and he threw curveballs all the time.

The coaches who were against kids our age throwing curveballs didn’t care, and called for them regularly when he pitched.  They said something like, “He’s been throwing them for years, his arms gotten used to it.” And as much as they could, they made sure he pitched in all the most important or most difficult games, and they never took him out.  By the time he got to high school, he was not that far ahead of the rest of us anymore.

By the way, I love this analogy:

“If you give a 14-year-old a pack of cigarettes every day, which I don’t recommend...”

I’m not saying the author’s wrong, because I know close to squat about physiology, but I have to ask: how long do athletes need for their bodies to repair those tears?  He writes,

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“ Fleisig continued: “When a 14-year-old pitches and his arm gets tired, and then he rests a good amount, it’s a good thing. It’s like when you or I are working out, and a few days later with proper rest, we’re stronger. A young pitcher does want to have micro-tears, and then your body does something amazing—it repairs while you rest. And it gets bigger and stronger.”

It repairs ... while you rest.

But when do kids nowadays rest? They don’t. Specialization is to blame. Occasionally the parents, who want a scholarship for little Johnny, are unwittingly to blame. Instead of playing two or three sports, giving each game a few months a year, kids are locking into one sport and going all year with it. And if that sport is baseball, and if that kid is a pitcher? Well, kids have the surgery to show for it. “
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I’ve always thought that muscle-building works by pushing the limits of our bodies and then resting for brief periods of time.  Not for months.  So if one were to workout on Monday, then he would need to take Tuesday and maybe Wednesday off to allow his body to heal and to build strength.  The author is essentially arguing that pitching all year is a bad idea because it does not allow the body ample time to rest and therefore to heal itself; when, I think, that is not how the process works with regard to the tearing of micro-fibers. 

Where my biologists at?

I agree with him overall though.

It is not pitching that damages young arms.  The problem in blowing out arms is likely due to the reliance on the slider.  A great strikeout pitch for a pitcher with a good fastball, throwing it repeatedly simply places too much stress and torque on the human arm.  There are no magic techniques that can eliminate the wear’n’tear it generates. 

Many arms simply can’t handle the slider’s physical effects, but good luck banning a pitch that has become the basis of so many pitchers’ careers.

I think the micro-tears he’s referring to are to the tendons and ligaments, not the muscles. Muscles recover much more quickly than connective tissues.

We never had pitching machines when I was younger. We started pitching at age 9, prior to that was coach-pitch. I started pitching at age 10. My arm broke down junior year of HS and I pitched through it for the remaining 6 years of my baseball career. By my senior year of college, I had gone from firing 85 as a HS soph to flipping 75 mph cutters and 65 mph curveballs Jamie Moyer style.

I ran into precisely one pitcher who threw a slider prior to college (at least one that moved enough to be called a slider). I played in a lot of advanced leagues. The particular pitcher who was throwing the slider was a 3rd round draft and follow from the Orioles (don’t know what happened to him or even remember his name). So I think you’re making an outlandish statement when you say sliders ruin young arms. Most youngsters throw the easier combination of 4 seam, 2 seam, curve in my experience.

In reference to the title, from the experts I’ve talked to, the prime time to develop “proper” mechanics is prior to puberty. Of course, we don’t know what proper really is precisely, but the point is that it’s very hard to teach a post-pubescent arm new tricks.

I plan to teach my kid (if/when I have one) how to pitch in non-game situations when he’s young and then allow him to relieve in high school if he shows an affinity for it.

And with any luck I’ll be a big baseball name by then and will have the clout to tell his high school coach how he’s going to use him

This is a parental issue as far as I’m concerned.  There are over 5 million children 15 or younger that play organized baseball worldwide.  .2% of that number pitches in professional baseball.  We should protect the children from unnecessary risks like overuse, but no use at all until age 16?  That’s very unfair to the overwhelming majority of children who will not play baseball after the age of 15 or 16.  I knew I was never going pro, but I loved pitching.  I played back in the late 70s and early 80s.  We didn’t know anything about pitch counts or any of that stuff.  I started throwing a curve ball at the age of 5.  There’s little doubt that I did some damage to my elbow.  I know I did.  It hurt every single game I pitched from the age of 10 through my last game at the age of 17.  But I was one of the many, many kids who had no chance of going pro and loved every minute of it.  I’d hate to take that away from the majority of the children just so we can protect the Strasburgs of the world.

If some child shows tremendous ability, his or her parents become very knowledgeable about that skill and what it can do for their child and what they need to do to help their child reach his/her potential.  They know the risk.

@Dave #8:
Wow...I was going to say the exact same thing. I LOVED pitching. I was very good at it from age 7 to about 14. I probably pitched 3 games a week (organized and sandlot games - remember those?) during those summers. Then my arm pretty much fell off from overuse. I wouldn’t do a damn thing differently.

It’s foolish to deny a lot of kids the chance to pitch because a minuscule percentage might someday entertain the rest of us and get paid for the privilege. At its heart, baseball is a game played by kids for fun. Let’s get out of the way and let them have their fun. Pitching arms are not some kind of essential public good that must be regulated to this extreme.

I grew up in a decent size town (100k) but I don’t recall having leagues until age 11. I didn’t play organized ball until 14, pitching from then until 20.

A problem I saw is kids who played the field when they weren’t pitching. I remember well that my arm felt the worst two days after a start, because that’s when I was trying to throw from the outfield. Pete Vuckovich would throw 110-120 innings in two months, then play shortstop the other games. And that’s in the summer league, follow his high school and college seasons.

i do remember those sandlot games.  I’ve wondered how much of an impact those have on the arm and they aren’t games that coaches or managers or parents can oversee either.  I remember days where I threw at least 150 to 200 pitches in game like that.  These would be days with 2 or 3 games and the total time spent playing was 3 to 4 hours or longer.  I loved it.  My arm definitely took a beating from it, but I guess the point I’m making is that if you don’t allow kids to pitch in organized baseball, they’re still going to pitch and they’ll pitch more frequently with less oversight.  Come up with some sensible rules to protect their arms and leave it at that.  If the parent wants to further protect their child’s arm, so be it.  It’s up to them.  It won’t help though, because the child will just go pitch away from his parents.  They’re children after all.

There was a documentary I watched about long-distance runners in Kenya. Basically, it’s all about attrition. They have enough people who want to run that they push everyone as hard as possible and stick with the people who don’t break down. Is it possible that baseball is facing a similar phenomenon?

I know that in Japan, it’s really bad. The High School tournaments are huge here, and pitchers get abused (Matsuzaka threw 148 pitches, and then 250 the following day during the summer tournament). Kids just break down. It’s especially bad because of the relative lack of minor league systems here and the lack of professional baseball spots on the roster.

Yes, kids can screw up their arms on their own. However, most kids won’t have that much time to play outside of the summer, and that’s 3 months a year. If they’re in organized leagues, they can abuse their arms all year, and doubly in the summer with pickup games too. We should try our best to minimize damage we can control (from organized leagues), even if some kids will find a way to abuse their arms on their own.

Isn’t this the same way they found witches?  You drown them, and if they survive, they are witches.  If not, they are dead regular people.

Same idea, but applied to arms of Americans and feet of Kenyans.

I think it’s the way most of the world works—baseball, witch hunts, or otherwise.

Teachers push kids to go into the subject they teach if they show aptitude (regardless of what else they may be better suited for), managers at work push you to keep doing what you help them the most in doing, even if it may not be best for the company, etc.

Public servants, lawyers, doctors—a lot of their success depends on their ability to just hang in there beyond what would cause a normal person to give up. Because they don’t want normal people.

It’s a balance. Do we stop figure skaters and gymnasts from practicing non-stop, and require them to go to school rather than getting tutored? Do we ask future violinists or piano players to spend more time on homework than on their art? Those things definitely also ruin lives/bodies/minds, etc.

I think that we should be encouraging kids to do what they enjoy, and get really good at something, but at the same time work hard to prevent parents from pushing their kids to make those choices for a pie in the sky image of their kids doing the statistically improbable. For every Tiger Woods or Tim Lincecum there are a million shattered dreams (and arms, and whatever).

Also note that regardless of what we do in the US, there will be a million kids in Latin America who will happily throw their arms off for a shot at a signing bonus.

Sal,

To combine your two comments, Japanese youth undergo a process called shi no renshu (I might be misspelling that) which translates to death practice. They basically play baseball whenever they aren’t doing school (and in some schools they have periods for baseball).

I thought I did a lot of baseball when I was younger. From 8th grade to the end of HS I would go do 3 hours of batting practice, throwing, and defense after school in the offseason. Then 5 of those days I’d have some kind of work out following that. Suffice it to say I was in much better shape than I am now. I actually broke down to the point where I can’t do much more than core as a workout. Once the HS season started it was like a temporary vacation. In the summer months I did the training in the morning and games 6 days a week.

Anyway, the point of that was to say that the dedicated among the Japanese spend closer to 9 hours a day including a before school session and then well after school.

This is all from a paper I wrote freshman year of college so the details are quite sharp.

I grew up in New England, and was encouraged, both in school and at home, to do multiple sports/activities. Most people would play different sports in different seasons, and that was encouraged by the schools (they have no baseball outside of baseball season, etc.). This may be different in other parts of the country, I don’t know, but I’m guessing for the most part the US is like that.

Japan is a totally different beast. When you enter Junior High School (age 13) you pick your extra-curricular activity, and you’re more or less stuck with it. Year round. Every year. Until you graduate from university. It is a major commitment, and kids who switch from one activity to another are usually treated with a lot of shit due to the hierarchies in these clubs.

So when it’s winter, and you can’t play outside, you will be doing other activities with your baseball club as a baseball club, rather than playing basketball or table tennis or something.

Each school has clubs with a different level of activity. A big baseball school will have absurd time commitments expected of people who join the baseball club. Other clubs may be absurdly relaxed.

The big baseball schools (the ones that have a chance of making it to the spring/summer Koshien tournament) probably do practice close to what you say. There aren’t really minor leagues in Japan, and a lot of very famous players have been drafted right after the summer tournament. One of the more famous guys Tanaka Masahiro (Maakun) graduated in 2006 and was pitching for the pro team in 2007 with a 3.82 ERA (he has a 2.46 this year so far):
http://bis.npb.or.jp/players/11215114.html

So, yeah, it’s a big deal in baseball schools like PL Gakuen and the like.

In Junior High some clubs will practice before school (school starts at 8:30 here), and will practice after school (3:30 to about 5:30 or 6:00, depending). Most clubs don’t practice for more than 3 hours a day at least at that level, but I’m sure in some schools/some coaches go above and beyond that.

Summer vacation is very short (a month and a half—242 school days a year here), and practice is generally held several times a week, even in junior high school.

You’re right about “shi no renshuu” (死の練習) meaning “death practice” or “practicing dying” or something of the sort, doesn’t seem to be too popular of a phrase over here though (not in the dictionary as a phrase at any rate, and only 1.9 million results).

But also bear in mind that in Japan, the IMAGE of working hard is as important as actually working hard. A lot of what these clubs do is teaching discipline through busywork. Even if they are at practice 9 hours a day, my guess is that much of that 9 hours has very little to do with learning to play baseball better. Clubs are VERY hierarchical and arbitrary. I’d say it’s more like Sumo than Western baseball, but that’s a whole other can of worms…

one thing that is glossed over is that the reason most of these injuries are to players from the warm weather states is that those states produce the overwhelming majority of players.  Coming from wisco, we could only play baseball maybe 6 months a year at absolute most and the lack of year round throwing is a huge disadvantage to build up enough arm strength to have a chance at the major leagues.  and the lack of strength probably creates more arm injuries when you do go out and throw 100+ pitches (i hurt my shoulder junior year from an impingement which is basically a lack of muscle strength).  Not having players throw a lot at an early age would create a bunch of 85 mph pitchers who would break down with the same amount of frequency.

In western Pa, I’d throw against a wall until it got so cold my fingers couldn’t grip the ball properly (about 15-20 deg)

@Brian #18:
Western PA? Whereabouts? I thought I was always the last one every season to put away the baseball glove for a football.