Matt Harvey, meet Tommy John...

[Fear The Chorizo]

Just breaking that Matt Harvey of the Mets has at least a partial UCL tear and would likely need Tommy John surgery...

 

young pitching with dominant stuff is the most valuable commodity in baseball, but keeping it healthy enough to build a consistent contending team is like trying to catch lightening in a bottle.

[Patrick425]

Well, some comments I have read on this board would suggest that this is a good thing for Matt Harvey and he will be a better pitcher after the surgery..you know, like Henry Rowengartner in "Rookie of the Year"

[fondybrewfan]

Its almost like Tommy John is an automatic for hard throwers nowadays. Kind of amazing Verlander hasn't gone under the knife yet.

[owbc]

Sad to see another young, promising pitcher go down with an injury. It makes me wonder if those pitch limits are actually doing anything...although twitter has some stuff about a 157 pitch game in college which seems kind of sketchy.

 

Anyway, it sounds like it is still undecided if he will have surgery or not, although he might just want to get it over with.

[trwi7]

If he was allowed to throw 157 pitches in college (April 2010 against Clemson) imagine how many other times he was allowed to throw 110, 120, 130 pitches in college.

[TigerUppercut]

Pitch couts, piggy backing, inning limits, etc, etc, etc. It really is tiring, particularly when there is no hard evidence to suggest any of it helps/hurts longevity. When are people going to simply realize there are genetic freaks like the Verlanders, Maddux's, Felix, CC and then there is everybody else? This has been the case throughout the history of baseball and based on that, I don't expect it to change anytime soon. Pitchers, for the most part, are always going to be fragile. Let's just embrace that fact and stop worrying about guys going 160 pitches in an outing 8 years ago.

[markedman5]

I wonder how many pitches Warren Spahn and Nolan Ryan used to throw in a game? Spahn started 30 games or more for 17 seasons in a row....

 

Steve Carlton once threw 346 innings and had 30 complete games......just amazing.

[torts]

I wonder how many pitches Warren Spahn and Nolan Ryan used to throw in a game? Spahn started 30 games or more for 17 seasons in a row....

 

Steve Carlton once threw 346 innings and had 30 complete games......just amazing.

 

I agree to an extent, but how many of those old era pitchers began pitching from when they were kids? Its an honest question, something ive always wondered.

[markedman5]

"Steve Carlton once threw 346 innings and had 30 complete games......just amazing."

 

Started 41 of their 156 games

 

 

 

That had to be one of the best pitching seasons ever….to pitch as well as he did for an absolutely awful team.

 

27-10 for a team that won 59 games…….ERA under 2 and a .93 WHIP

[Baldkin]

Pitch couts, piggy backing, inning limits, etc, etc, etc. It really is tiring, particularly when there is no hard evidence to suggest any of it helps/hurts longevity. When are people going to simply realize there are genetic freaks like the Verlanders, Maddux's, Felix, CC and then there is everybody else? This has been the case throughout the history of baseball and based on that, I don't expect it to change anytime soon. Pitchers, for the most part, are always going to be fragile. Let's just embrace that fact and stop worrying about guys going 160 pitches in an outing 8 years ago.

 

Except, you see, there is hard evidence. There have been studies done. The pitch count idea is not something randomly pulled out of thin air.

 

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/20020522woolner.shtml

 

31% of all injured pitchers had above average career PAP totals for their career pitch counts.

9% of all healthy pitchers had above average career PAP totals for their career pitch counts.

This suggests that high PAP pitchers are more than three times as likely to be injured as low PAP pitchers of who've thrown similar numbers of pitches. We have our first piece of evidence that PAP provides predictive information beyond what pitch counts alone can tell us.

 

And further down:

 

For now, however, we can confidently say that PAP^3 yields information about pitcher performance and durability not answered by pitch counts alone under current playing conditions. Long pitch count outings noticeably decrease expected short-term performance, and high stress workloads over time increase the chances for serious injury.

[danzig6767]

"Steve Carlton once threw 346 innings and had 30 complete games......just amazing."

 

Started 41 of their 156 games

 

 

 

That had to be one of the best pitching seasons ever….to pitch as well as he did for an absolutely awful team.

 

27-10 for a team that won 59 games…….ERA under 2 and a .93 WHIP

 

Even for the Brewers one day i was going back to look at Gorman Thomas's career stats and in doing so i saw the stats for pitcher Mike Caldwell. In 1978 he had an amazing 23 complete games and 16 more the following year. That's 39 complete games over only two years, yet the current Brewers went i believe almost two full seasons without a complete game.

 

For whatever reason, some pitchers are just blessed to have a socalled rubber arm, while others breakdown much easier, even if they have good mechanics and were generally treated carefully on pitch counts.

[brewcrewdue80]

Kills my Fantasy Baseball Teams! Not to mention sadly not getting to keep him for next season likely.

 

What's sad in this is that he only had about 15-21IP left on the season before being shut down. Such a talent to lose potentially for all of 2014

[LouisEly]

With hitters getting bigger/stronger (whether through weightlifting or chemicals) pitchers feel they need to throw harder/pitches that put more strain on the arm to get them out, more strain = more injuries.

 

I'd be willing to bet that the average major league pitcher today throws a lot harder than pitchers in the 70's or before. Actually, I know they do - I remember when I was a kid any pitcher who threw 90mph was throwing gas. Now that's a soft-tosser. Now you have to throw 90+ just to get drafted. Young pitchers try to dial up the fastball a few ticks more to get noticed/drafted, or throw more curveballs to get strikeouts, and thus more strain on the arm at an earlier age.

[RockCoCougars]

I think that 'Baseball Dad' gets some of the blame for this, and would guess that the rise in 'organized' youth baseball may be positively correlated. How often do you see a couple of young kids playing catch when you are out driving around? Hardly ever for me. When I was a kid I threw some type of a spherical object almost every day that there wasn't snow on the ground. Not competitive pitching, but just playing catch or hotbox or even pitching wiffle ball or just chucking a ball against a wall. These days, I have a feeling that Junior would be on a between starts training regimen preparing for his start the coming weekend's 8-9 Class 2C sanctioned tourney in Beaver Dam. Also, when I was young, most kids didn't even start pitching until they were 11 or 12 years old. From what I hear, it's much younger these days. I think that our little league seasons may have been 12-15 games in their entirity, and I'd guess that would be about two weeks for today's traveling teams.

 

Bottom line, I feel that less throwing at a young age combined with many more competitive innings in youth ball probably plays a role in all these injuries we are seeing at the pro level these days.

[homer]

 

Bottom line, I feel that less throwing at a young age combined with many more competitive innings in youth ball probably plays a role in all these injuries we are seeing at the pro level these days.

 

I agree with this but have no proof obviously. It also could be that plenty of guy threw their arms out years ago but they just never made it past the minors. At least in this day and age you can come back an elbow injury.

[Baldkin]

http://joeposnanski.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-long-sad-history-of-injured-pitchers.html

 

Pitchers have been getting hurt forever. We just never knew what the injury was until 25 or so years ago.

[The stache]

Kills my Fantasy Baseball Teams! Not to mention sadly not getting to keep him for next season likely.

 

What's sad in this is that he only had about 15-21IP left on the season before being shut down. Such a talent to lose potentially for all of 2014

 

Players I've lost for the year:

 

Matt Harvey

Ryan Braun

David Wright

Jason Marquis

Jason Heyward

 

Players that have missed a substantial amount of playing time:

 

Yadier Molina

Troy Tulowitzki

Matt Moore

Matt Cain

Domonic Brown

Carlos Gomez

 

I also planned on Oscar Taveras coming up in September, but he, too, is out for the season.

 

My team has been absolutely decimated by injuries this year, and somehow I'm still 25 games over .500.

 

It's been my young pitchers that have carried me. Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Jose Fernandez, Matt Moore, Shelby Miller, Julio Tehran, Madison Bumgarner, Hyun-Jin Ryu.