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June 5, 2021

New Blog Topic: BASEBALL’S INJURY EPIDEMIC

[Ed. note; Unlike many of today’s players, yesterday’s sluggers, including Ted Williams, were not musclebound. But they still did pretty well. Here’s we see Jimmie Foxx scratching his head and asking Ted, “How do you manage to hit all those home runs with those scrawny arms?” Bill Gutman addresses that question in his blog post today. -GL]

In the movie Philadelphia, Denzel Washington portrayed a defense attorney who, when cross-examining witnesses, had a favorite line. He would say, “Explain it to me like I’m a five-year-old.” Not a bad line in certain situations, so let’s try it on for size. Would someone please explain to me, like I’m a five-year-old, why baseball players are getting injured in droves? After all, these are truly outstanding athletes with access to the best training facilities, top nutrition, college-educated and experienced physical fitness trainers and the best equipment money can buy. Yet major league baseball’s injury list is more crowded than Grand Central Station at rush hour.

When I first started listening to baseball as a kid it didn’t even occur to me that baseball players could get hurt. I still remember the first injury I heard about. I was listening to a Yankees game on the radio about 1952 when Al Zarilla was playing right field for the opposing team. There was a line drive to right and I can remember the announcer saying, “Zarilla running in hard, he dives . . . and Zarilla is hurt.” Okay, so baseball players got hurt. The more I read about the game the more I realized that injuries were part of it. I read about the tragic beaning of Ray Chapman, about Smoky Joe Wood’s “dead” arm, and that Ted Williams broke his elbow in the 1950 All-Star Game. I also learned about Pistol Pete Reiser, and how a great career was cut short because he kept running into outfield walls.

But I also knew that many players in the 1950s and ’60s played through injuries, as many earlier ballplayers did. With just 16 teams, a player had to protect his livelihood and knew if he sat out too long, or even for a short period, he might become Wally Pipp to another Lou Gehrig. In other words, lose his job. So most soldiered on. Today it’s just the opposite. Players go on the IL for every little ding, and they’re even given days off simply to “rest.” Yet no matter how many days of rest, it doesn’t seem to stop them from being injured.

In the first two months of the 2021 season, injuries are up more than 15 percent from the same period in 2019, the last full baseball season. Sure, there are going to be injuries. Batters are going to foul balls off their shins and ankles or get hit on the hands or worse by pitches. There will still be the occasional collision in the outfield or a guy hitting the wall the wrong way. Or hand injuries from headfirst slides into the bag. That will always be part of the game. But it’s the way many players are being injured that I don’t quite understand.

Just recently the Mets lost two players, Jeff McNeil and Michael Conforto, to hamstring strains in one game. Both got them the same way – running to first base. Mike Trout, who has been baseball’s best over the past decade, is on the shelf with a calf strain. He said he heard something pop while running from second to third, and supposedly not that hard. Calf strains have become all too common and sometimes can keep a player on the shelf for a month or more. Other all-to-similar injuries are the quad strain and the shoulder strain. That’s a lot of strains. Why?

Then there is a word you never heard years ago. Oblique. An oblique strain involves the muscles on the side of the ribcage and most times they occur when a players swing the bat. But isn’t swinging the bat what ballplayers are supposed to do every day? In today’s game, every swing is an all-or-nothing job, long and violent. And apparently, players do the same thing in the batting cage and in batting practice. But if swinging hard is causing this injury, why can’t the trainers figure out how players can avoid it? A player can hurt an oblique on just a single swing. But is the cause too many hard swings before that? And it’s an injury that can take time to heal. The Yanks Aaron Judge had an oblique strain two years ago and missed 54 games.

One theory is that today’s players are overtrained, especially with too much weight and strength work, and don’t spend enough time stretching. Some of today’s most imposing physical specimens, such as the Yankees Giancarlo Stanton, can’t seem to stay off the injury list. There has to be a reason. I remember going to Yankee Stadium in 1987 and arriving early to watch all the pregame preparation. I noticed a Yankee player sitting on the infield grass and then going into a stretching routine that must have lasted 20 minutes. It was a reserve infielder named Paul Zuvella, who never played much, but you could see how much emphasis he put on stretching, working on both legs and holding them in positions I hadn’t seen before, some while sitting; others while laying on his back. He obviously wanted to be loose and supple. It’s the tight muscle that pulls and strains more easily and I wonder how many of today’s players put as much emphasis on stretching and they do on weight lifting?

I’m also curious about what today’s players would think if they saw shirtless photos of a young Ted Williams [ed. note: see featured photo], Stan Musial or Joe DiMaggio. They were all very thin with no real noticeable muscles in their arms.

Yet all three were great hitters who hit for both average and power. It’s obvious they did it without weight lifting, but with long and loose muscles that certainly didn’t deter them, but may well have helped them become Hall of Famers. Knowing this, wouldn’t a player who bench presses 300 pounds to make himself a better hitter stop and question his routine? You would think so.

Then there’s the pitchers and the Tommy John surgery epidemic, a procedure that some 25 percent of major league hurlers have already undergone. I’ve talked about this before, but years ago it was the shoulder injury that felled pitchers most often. Yes, it’s a serious injury, but shoulder injuries were never as widespread as Tommy John elbow surgeries are today. Yet MLB and the individual teams seem to just accept it as part of the game, even though young pitchers in high school and college are now tearing that ulnar collateral ligament. Some pitchers have had the surgery two and even three times trying to save their careers. And it’s not always easy to return from it successfully. Some do; others don’t. So why not try to find the reason it is now so prevalent and try to teach and train young players differently. Babying them with pitch counts and innings limits obviously isn’t the answer. Nor is taking starters out after five or six innings. One inning relievers blow out their elbows, as well. Today’s theory seems to be let them throw as hard as they can for as long as they can.

And this is where I’d like someone to explain this to me as if I were a five-year-old. Has baseball ever gathered a group of surviving great pitchers together, guys who regularly threw 200-300 innings a year, completed games and are in the Hall of Fame. Pitchers like Jim Palmer, Steve Carlton, Ferguson Jenkins, Juan Marichal, Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson and a few others. Why not ask them how they trained and prepared to pitch, what their routines were that enabled them to rarely miss a turn and continue to pitch at a high-level year after year. And most importantly, why they never blew out their elbows. Don’t those who run baseball think something good may come out of ongoing discussions on that topic? Maybe it will lead to changes in the way pitchers are handled today – from Little League on up – something that will allow them to become more durable and less likely to get the dreaded elbow tear. Why isn’t that a way to go?

It’s the same with position players. Why not get input from players of the past who trained differently than they do today and didn’t get calf strains, obliques, hamstring pulls, shoulder strains, etc. There has to be a reason these injuries are so prevalent today. Why isn’t it Major League Baseball’s mission to at least try to learn why and how they might once again make everyday players more durable and less injury-prone. I simply don’t understand why these things haven’t been done and why nothing seems to change as the injuries continue to proliferate.

Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure even that inquisitive five-year-old wouldn’t understand.

Bill Gutman

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