Pitching too much presents an even more serious problem for boys below ages fourteen or fifteen. The ends of the bones usually remain undeveloped until a child is fourteen years old. Because the bones have not fully developed, pitching too much can grind the ends of the bones down, preventing their full growth. The problem can be serious enough to cause deformities and require surgery. In some cases, even surgery cannot fix the problem, and the boy grows into a man with arms lacking ordinary reach and range of motion.
When I called Glenn Fleisig, ASMI’s research director, he told me to look at two major studies of young pitchers, published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine in 2002 and 2006. Researchers at ASMI, including Fleisig and ASMI founder Jim Andrews, coauthored both papers.
The data in those papers confirm what experts have been saying, with greater and greater urgency, for years.
The 2006 article, “Risk Factors for Shoulder and Elbow Injuries in Adolescent Baseball Pitchers,” compares two groups of 140 ten- to thirteenyear-old pitchers. Ninety-five of them have significant histories of arm problems, while another forty-five have no signs of arm problems. Not surprisingly, the injured group pitched more—more months in the year, more games, and more total innings. They also threw more pitches in games and more warm-ups before games than the healthy group.
The study crunched some scary statistics. Players who pitched eight months a year were five times as likely to suffer an injury as players in a baseline group who pitched five and a half months a year. Throwing more than eighty pitches in a game made an arm injury almost four times as likely as throwing fewer than eighty pitches a game. Pitching with fatigue made an arm injury thirty-six times as likely.
Players with iced arms were a common sight at the LLWS. Hawaii’s Vonn Fe’ao took steps to protect his arm after the championship game.
The most telling finding might concern the players’ perceptions about their coaches. Half of all the survey’s participants said their coach was “more concerned about winning the game and of having a successful season than the pitcher’s long-term success.”
The 2002 study, “Effect of Pitch Type, Pitch Count, and Pitching Mechanics on Risk of Elbow and Shoulder Pain in Youth Baseball Pitchers,” tracked 476 pitchers, from nine to fourteen years of age, on 146 teams throughout Alabama. The researchers interviewed the players and coaches regularly over the course of the season.
That study also produced scary stats. To develop a point of comparison, the researchers figured out how much a pitcher would complain after throwing between one and fourteen pitches. Then they compared how much more (or less) a pitcher was likely to experience elbow or shoulder pain after throwing more than that baseline number of times. Throwing twenty-five to fifty pitches increased elbow and shoulder pain only slightly (3 and 15 percent). But the results turned alarming when the pitcher threw fifty to seventy-four pitches (21 and 23 percent), and seventy-five to ninety-nine pitches (35 and 52 percent).
The researchers also wanted to see the effects of throwing all season long. The point of comparison here was throwing a total of one to 200 pitches. Elbow and shoulder pain increased dramatically for pitchers throwing 201 to 400 pitches (63 and 65 percent), 401 to 600 pitches (181 and 134 percent), and 601 to 800 pitches (234 percent and 190 percent).
These kinds of statistics are dramatic, but don’t often have much effect on coaches, pitchers, and their families. It’s a little like the Surgeon General’s pronouncements about smoking or obesity. The warnings are so abstract. The odds of long-term problems don’t usually motivate people to change their behavior right away.
Only one team’s pitchers threw less than the research shows is safe and advisable. In its three games, Russia’s pitchers made eight appearances in the series, throwing fifty-five, forty-three, fifteen, thirty-eight, forty-six, twenty, thirty-four, and thirty-three pitches. Not a single pitcher ever came close to the danger zone of seventy-five or eighty pitches.
The pressure to use an ace pitcher just once more— one more batter, one more inning, one more game—increases as the team advances closer to Williamsport. Using an ace, even when he’s tired from a summer of throwing, can determine whether the team has a chance to make it all the way. The baseball cliché about playing “one game at a time”—which these guys believe, and which works—often leads coaches to sacrifice everything for the immediate challenge.
I met Mike Schweighoffer, the pitching coach for the all-stars from Farmington, Connecticut, during one of the state’s district tournaments. Farmington was widely considered the best team in the New England regional tournament. A star at Trinity College in nearby Hartford, Schweighoffer pitched in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ chain from 1985 to 1988. As a minor leaguer, his teachers included Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax.
Farmington’s ace pitcher, David Weigard, beat Maine, 5–0, in the tournament’s opener. Schweighoffer wanted to take Weigard out early since the win was so easy and the team might need to use his arm a couple more times in the tournament. But manager Bill Spracklin said no.
“Look at the scoreboard,” Spracklin told Schweighoffer. “He’s pitching a no-hitter.” Weigard gave up two hits, but achieved another milestone—getting all eighteen outs on strikeouts. He threw eighty-two pitches, not an excessive pitch count. But what if the game was 1–0, and what if the Mainers worked deeper into the count? Schweighoffer didn’t say whether he would have let the young pitcher stay in and throw 100 or more pitches.
The team from Connecticut—which dominated pool play with four straight wins—lost to Maine in the semifinals. Months later, parents criticized the coaches for not using Weigard in that game.
“We’ve been reminded many times that we could have done things differently,” Schweighoffer laughs. “More now than at the time, parents and others say, ‘Why didn’t you use David?’ But we just aren’t going to do that, because of his arm. We monitor his pitch count, and he threw something like 155 pitches in two games. We made a decision that we weren’t going to jeopardize his career. There was a 99 percent chance that he would have been fine, but that other 1 percent chance is what I worry about.”
A practical concern played a part in the decision to hold Weigard back. If he pitched in the semifinals, he would not have been available for the championship game two days later. “We use a decision tree to figure out what to do at different stages,” says Schweighoffer, an executive with a bank.
Connecticut allowed a pitcher to throw a lot of pitches for the sake of a landmark game—a no-hitter or an eighteen-K game. The team from Maine lost its top pitcher because of its desperation to quell a rally.
Maine’s Westbrook Little League all-stars started the regional tournament 0–3 but then won the next three games to take the New England championship from Connecticut and Rhode Island. In the semifinal game between Maine and Connecticut, manager Rich Knight turned to his top pitcher, Zach Gardiner, with the bases loaded and one out.
“That was the season for us,” Knight says. “On the second pitch, I said, ‘Whoa, he’s really bringing it.’ There were 6,500 fans there, all from Connecticut, all cheering for them. That pumped him up. The guy from Nutmeg TV [the local cable network] told me he was throwing seventy [miles an hour]. I said I don’t think so. That’s five miles an hour faster than he’s ever thrown before.”
In the excitement of the moment, Gardiner’s adrenaline carried him beyond his capacity—baseball people call it “reaching back for something extra”—and he blew his arm out in the process. After the game, Gardiner told Knight he was finished pitching for the year. Gardiner played in Williamsport, but he stayed off the mound. The injury affected his hitting and fielding. Originally, Knight thought Gardiner suffered from tendonitis or a strained muscle. But when the team returned home, a specialist said it was a problem with his growth plate. He prescribed rest.
Throwing too many pitches not only tires the pitcher and causes pain, but also distorts his pitching motion. And by the time his coach notices anything wrong with t
his mechanics, it might be too late.
A pitcher needs exquisite control of a long sequence of movements— maintaining balance, kicking the leg, rearing back, rotating the trunk and torso forward, whipping the ball forward, landing on the mound— and any disturbance can throw the whole sequence off kilter.
When any part of the “kinetic chain” falters, the pitcher eventually puts too much strain on his shoulder and elbow.
“I would keep an eye on the pitcher and look to see when his elbow drops,” Mike Ludwikowski, the Little League trainer whose day job is outreach coordinator for athletic training services at the Susquehanna Health System Sports Medicine Center, told me. “That’s when he’s going to put a lot of strain on his arm, and his elbow especially. It’s not always easy to see, especially when you have your eye on the result, getting the batter out. But if that’s your priority, you can do it.”
But that’s not always possible. Michelangelo Celestina, one of the Curaçao coaches, told me he was surprised when he watched videos of the games afterwards. In one game, the team’s second-best pitcher struggled to get the ball over the plate. Celestina was puzzled when he watched Sorick Liberia from the dugout, missing, missing, missing. Liberia had superb control all summer long. And his motion looked okay from the bench. But when Celestina started looking at videos, he noticed serious flaws.
When the game is going on, when you’re depending on a pitcher to come through for you, when you don’t have a lot of pitchers who can take over when one pitcher falters—and when you see the game from the odd angles of the bench—you’re going to miss a lot.
The impact of throwing too much, and using the wrong kinds of pitches, accumulates over time. Every pitch produces what the researchers call a “microtrauma.” And those traumas accumulate. At some point—no one knows quite when—the microtraumas become a macrotrauma.
People debate these points, but some experts advise avoiding pitching altogether until a boy fully develops his bone structure in adolescence. Rick Peterson, the pitching coach of the New York Mets, says he will not allow his son to pitch at all until he turns fourteen or fifteen.
Whatever approach teams take, doctors agree that joint pain is a clear sign to stop pitching. Shut it down. Muscle soreness is a normal, even healthy, part of physical development. As long as the athlete gets enough time to heal the small tears in his muscles, he will get stronger when he feels muscle pain from exertion.
But joints are another matter. Any pain in the shoulder or elbow—as opposed to simple tiredness—is probably a sign of an overuse injury.
It’s not just the number of pitches, but also the kinds of pitches that threaten young pitchers’ development and future prospects. Throwing a curveball risks ruining any young pitcher’s arm.
To throw a curveball, the pitcher brings his arm around like a fastball, but changes his motion when he releases the ball. Instead of letting the ball fall out of the hand with a bottom-to-top spin, with his hand in front of his body, the pitcher snaps his wrist to get a top-to-bottom spin. The pitcher twists his wrist and elbow. The ball falls out of his hand between the index finger and thumb.
Experts agree that pitchers shouldn’t throw the curveball until they reach puberty. The rule of thumb is that they should throw just fastballs and changeups until they can shave, a sign of physical maturation.
Most coaches say they cannot not let their pitchers throw breaking balls. The curve has become the essential pitch for success in Little League and other youth tournaments.
The research on curveballs is as dramatic as the research on pitch counts. ASMI’s 2006 paper found that throwing curves increased the chance of elbow and shoulder pain (14 and 52 percent), as did throwing sliders (86 and 77 percent). Throwing a changeup actually reduces the chance of elbow and shoulder pain (12 and 29 percent).
Only one manager at the Little League World Series—Alexey Erofeev of Russia—said he would not allow his pitchers to throw a curveball.
“We throw only the fastball. Sometimes we use a changeup,” he told me through an interpreter. “But the danger to the elbow, why would we have them throw a curveball? We fear about the health, we want them to have a long life in baseball. It’s important to play safe and grow, grow, grow. By fourteen, we can teach the curveball, but not before.”
In the Little League World Series, just saying no to the curveball is tantamount to unilateral disarmament.
For years, coaches have taught the “Little League Curve” as a way to have the best of both worlds—a breaking pitch that doesn’t cause too much strain. Also known as the twelve-to-six curveball because the pitcher throws the ball over the top, the Little League Curve is released like a football spiral. The hope is to get the pitcher to let the ball tumble out of his hand, rather than putting too much stress on his arm with a snap.
“If you’re going to throw a curveball—and I know that some coaches and players are going to do it, no matter what you tell them—there’s a way to do it with less strain,” says Mike Ludwikowski, the Little League World Series trainer. “Throw the ball over the top, without twisting your whole arm and putting your elbow out front. Throw it over the top, like a football. Get a good spiral on it.”
Little League coaches say they need a pitcher with a curveball to win national or even regional tournaments. Without the curveball, hitters will learn how to time fastballs. That could do even more damage to pitchers’ arms, since they will throw too many pitches, get frustrated, and try to be too fine with the location of pitches.
“Every kid I teach the curveball to, I keep away from that twisting and yanking and jerking,” says Rick Hale, the manager of the team from Owensboro, Kentucky. “We don’t have to get as many rotations as long as you get the perfect rotations. I try to teach my kids to throw the twelve-to-six and gravity helps you there.” But the pressure to win subtly changes the calculus. “As we go further, and we have a kid who can do that, I might tell him you can get a little more of this on it—dropping the hammer, giving it everything you got. I’d be a liar if I didn’t try to get them to put a little snap on it.”
The problem with the football spiral, says Marty Miller, is that it tends to be a “lollipop curveball.” The ball rides a parabola to the plate. It doesn’t really break sharply. You might as well just throw the ball more softly.
Every year, more and more pitchers want to throw a hard, biting curve. To do that, you have to twist the shoulders and elbows and wrists to make the ball come out of the hand like a finger snap.
Rick Hale squirmed when I asked about whether throwing too many pitches, or using the curveball, might deprive a pitcher of his potential for a college or pro career.
Of course, you can’t bet on anyone in Williamsport having a shot at a career in baseball. So maybe it’s not so bad to let them play their hardest when they have a chance at glory as a kid. If a player advances as far as a state, regional, or national tournament, letting a pitcher throw 100 pitches or snap off a curveball gives him a chance to win it all. The joy of that moment will live forever.
“My little brother David was a prime example,” Hale says. “He was not going to be a major-league pitcher. What’s he going to play? High school, at best. He had more fun playing Little League baseball and striking out fifteen Southern Owensboro players than anything he did in his whole life. A guy has to be realistic about a kid’s future.”
In the end, pitchers resort to the curveball to win a big game. Teams that eschew the curveball cut themselves out of the action.
“I don’t think they can do anything about a curveball,” Hale says. “You’re forced to use the curveball, just like you’re forced to use your ace as much as possible. But then we don’t advance, and it’s over and we go home. Nobody got [to Williamsport] that didn’t advance, and there’s a lot of pressure to keep the thing going. I feel a little guilt over that because there is a balance between winning and doing what’s best for the kids. If you want to advance, you have to do what you don’t want to do.”
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“It’s almost like in The Godfather,” says Hale. It’s probably not the literary allusion Little League wants to hear. “If they’re going to [sell] drugs, we might as well have a piece of the action. If kids are going to throw the curve, we may as well get involved and try to teach them the right way.”
Most managers in Williamsport say they aim to limit their pitchers to five or six curveballs a game. But those five or six curveballs have a way of expanding to ten or twelve, or even a couple dozen. The curveball has become the ultimate “out” pitch in Little League and other major tournaments.
And because all the other teams know it’s an out pitch, you have to fool ’em. That means using it before you need an out pitch, to set up an out pitch. Before you know it, the curveball gets sprinkled into every pitch sequence against every batter.
In the midst of the World Series, Steve Keener, Little League’s CEO, announced a new study of possible rules changes to protect pitchers’ arms. The most viable reform would be to restrict the total number of pitches a pitcher could make in a game and in a week. Little League’s study will assess the impact of different pitch counts in fifty different affiliated leagues in 2006.
Then, in December 2005, Little League announced a new set of optional rules that all member leagues could use. The rules would set a limit of eighty-five pitches in a day for eleven- and twelve-year old players. The rule also prescribes rest between pitching appearances— four full days for pitchers throwing more than sixty pitches, three days for forty to sixty pitches, two days for twenty to forty pitches, and one day of rest after throwing anything less than twenty pitches. Little League officials say they would consider making the rules mandatory after the 2006 season.
Little League, Big Dreams Page 16