It’s early May, The MLB season is just getting started, the World Series is still months away. Yet already in 2024 there have been enough pitcher injuries to make you think it would be late August. Spencer Strider, the ace of the Atlanta Braves, is out for the year, reigning Cy Young award winner Sandy Alcantara is out for the year, Shane Beiber is out for the year, and Gerrit Cole got hurt early in his spring training starts. All of these pitchers are out for one all too familiar reason that has been taking over the MLB in the last few years, injuries to the elbow or shoulder. Over the last few years, there have been more and more headlines about career-altering injuries to pitchers to the point that it has become a serious issue for Major League Baseball, one that needs to be addressed.
While there are many different conclusions on why there is this spike in injuries, there is one common theme, the hunt for velocity. In 2002, Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics built a team based on analytics and baseball was forever changed, it became less of a game and more of a math problem. Players were turned into numbers and stats and pitcher injuries could be one consequence of the analytical side of baseball. In a February interview, just a few months before he went down with a season-ending elbow injury, Spencer Strider addressed what MLB front offices are looking for, “front offices are paying for strikeouts and home runs”. Front offices are no longer looking for good pitchers or good fits for their team, they are looking at the numbers, who will get the most strikeouts, who throws the hardest, and who spins it the most”. In 2007 the average MLB pitcher velocity was 91.9 and it is now 94.2. Front offices are looking at the analytics, and the analytics say to find the hardest throwing guys.. However, analytics do not take into account just how well a player will hold up. In a recent thread on X, Oakland A’s pitcher Alex Wood talked about the rise in pitcher injuries, “When I first came into professional baseball in 2012 as soon as the season ended I usually wouldn’t touch a baseball until December…. If you told a young player today that they had to take 8-10 weeks off throwing in the offseason and couldn’t touch a mound until at least the middle of January they would think you’re crazy.” Wood makes a good point here, not only has velocity increased since 2012 but competition within the game as well. Pitchers have gotten so good that essentially if you take time off then you could be risking your job. Justin Verlander went as far as calling the pitcher injuries a “pandemic” in one of his early-year interviews. It is very clear that Major League Baseball has a problem, and the question is how do they fix it.
If MLB pitcher injuries continue to rise then there are a number of things that can happen, the first is the product on the field gets worse. People pay to watch the best of the best duel it out and if the best pitchers are sidelined due to injury such as Spencer Strider and Shohei Ohtani then it hurts the product and MLB as a whole. It also could affect the pitching market as a whole. Currently, in the NFL, running backs are being severely underpaid and are being signed to very short contracts because of how common injuries are. If injuries continue in the MLB something like this could happen to the market for pitchers and pitchers will not be paid what they are worth. While the solution might not be known, it is clear the MLB is facing a pandemic and one they need to fix for the health of their players for the good of the game.