Because everyone is throwing max effort every pitch, quite obviously. And putting ridiculous torque on the ball like the pitchers of 40 years ago never dreamed of.

I'm old enough to remember banjo-hitting 150-pound SSs and their slightly heavier but no less puny-offense teammates at catcher. before 1973, you also had pitchers batting in both leagues.

now the Braves, entering today, had batters with HR totals of 43, 32, 32, 32, 28, 20, 20, 17, 13, and 10. (Pillar has 7 HR in 132 AB and might join the club.)

no rest for the weary pitcher in 2023, to a large extent.

admittedly another extreme example, but the Braves' top 3 sluggers have 107 HR while the entire 1969 Padres TEAM had 99. the Padres only had 4 batters with more than 4 HR all season - that's a lot of breathing room !

It's their usage from 7th grade to high school ( and college ) that's the issue.

Because everyone is throwing max effort every pitch, quite obviously. And putting ridiculous torque on the ball like the pitchers of 40 years ago never dreamed of.

So, stop doing that. It's not working.

Of course it's some combination of the first 3 posts. You don't see many soft tossers these days. Junkballing lefties, knuckleballers, guys who get by with guile; they are rare. Back in the day, if you were a junkballer and made a mistake to the quintessential light hitting SS(I'm looking at you Foli and Belanger, etc), the batter might have had a gapper and be standing on 2nd. Now, everyone just hits the ball 400 feet, there is just no margin for error for pitchers...so everyone throws max effort all the time. At least that's how I see it. I don't watch any high school ball but I imagine it's similar. You throw 84 and wham, some 15 year old hits the ball 375 feet. You throw 92, you've got more margin for error.

So, stop doing that. It's not working.

Injuries are the price of being competitive now. "Stop doing that" maybe prevents some injuries, but at the loss of your MLB job because you're pitching to an ERA of 6.

It's because pitchers these days are a bunch of molly-coddled pansies, that's why! Back in my day, we [descriptions of several clearly impossible and/or illegal things]! Yessir, we was men back in the old days...!

All sports seem to evolve in this direction, up to the limits set by their substitution and roster-size rules. One-platoon football or hockey with 14-man rosters could not have been quite as intense as today's sports.

There are ways of using roster and substitution rules to place analogous constraints on pitcher effort. Of course, as everyone's noting, that would mean a lot of baseball games with scores like 22-18. So then you have to tweak the composition of the ball, the dimensions of outfields, etc. It's worth some minor-league experimenting, but there isn't much pressure for it right now.

So, should the ball be made less hard?

It's their usage from 7th grade to high school ( and college ) that's the issue.

Sure n of 1, but I know of an 11 year old who tore his UCL playing club baseball. Apparently the healing time is so much less at that age. Still crazy.

SP are now as disposable as middle relievers. It's evolution.

Pitchers get injured because throwing a hard sphere as quickly as possible again and again and again, is an unnatural act. The human arm isn't designed for this nonsense.

Boxers wear all the fancy headgear and keep having concussions. Back in my day, no boxer ever had one. They all saw the world kind of blurry and couldn’t talk without slurring. But no concussions. No sirree.

(Seriously, how many undiagnosed arm and shoulder injuries led to the lost velocity of old time pitchers back in the day? It must have been more than a few.)

ha, yeah, my memory insists the phrase "developed a sore arm" always used to crop up in discussions of flashes-in-the-pan or young phenoms who didn't go on to long careers - as well as the occasional grizzled veteran-cum-journeyman - when i was a young lad reading about old-timey base ball.

and back then - circa 1979, '80 - the dreaded contemporary diagnosis was "torn rotator cuff."

Time to mandate pitching underhanded.

and back then - circa 1979, '80 - the dreaded contemporary diagnosis was "torn rotator cuff."

Has anyone ever looked into what (if anything) changed in terms of thinking on mechanics to end up with, seemingly, so many fewer shoulder injuries but so many more elbow problems?

Pitchers today are also (probably) throwing a lot more breaking balls which (probably) are even more injurious. Leading to this wild, uninformed speculation regarding #15: today's pitchers are more likely to have an elbow injury before they get a chance to develop their shoulder injury.

A brief history of third time effects ... OPS 1st, 2nd, 3rd time, AL only to keep pitchers out of the batting (oddly the sample sizes are about the same -- all around 15,000 -- from 1977 through 2012. In the last 10 years, they've dropped about 30% to about 10,500. The 1st/2nd sample sizes should increase with expansion. That means less random variation in 1st/2nd in the later periods, a bit more random variation in 2017 and 2022 in 3rd time but we're talking very lager samples so it's not much of a concern.)

1977 725/731/754
1982 725/731/772
1987 735/777/766
1992 701/719/750 (1993 started the change to sillyball)
1997 747/791/804
2002 739/775/781
2007 752/760/800
2012 726/757/772 (pretty similar to 1987)
2017 739/780/786 (pretty similar to 1987)
2022 688/714/775 (seems to be something of a fluke, 2023 numbers up a good big in 1st/2nd but still more like 82 and 87)

If there's a trend in there, other than the declining PAs, I don't see it. For the most part, the 3rd-time PAs avoided are guys lower in the lineup who you might think could lower the overall numbers, not raise them. Maybe missed #4/5 starter vs #3 through #5 hitter PAs skipped are keeping things under control. Still I surmise that most of the reduced starter workload is not about injury reduction and maybe not even 3rd-time effects but a tactical move to get fireballing relievers into the game earlier.

I wish there was a by PA split for every few PAs. We've gone from about 26 BF/start to 22 ... can we compare PAs 23-26 then and now?

Of course relievers get hurt too. But hey, they're fungible and you can't spell fungible without fun!

I was gonna say 'there are a lot more pitchers so of course there are more injuries by count" ... but then I thought for a second and of course the number of innings thrown and batters faced (per team) is pretty much constant over time so if the number of injured pitchers goes up, so does the injury rate per inning pitched.

I can't decide if the AAA shuttle could make it look like injuries are more likely? There are guys who never would have seen the majors in the old days. Some of those guys would have gotten hurt in AAA and we never would have noticed, now (by random chance essentially) some of them get hurt during their 2-3 week stint in the bigs.

In 1977, AL teams averaged 15 pitchers for a season. So you started with your 10-11 and, along the say, 4-5 guys would get hurt or stink. In 1997, it was still only 20; in 2012 still only 23. Then it was 28 in 2017 and 30 in 2022. (That 2017 to 2022 change might just be position players.) It might be interesting to look at something like the injury rate for those that started the season (or the spring projections) in the minors. Anyway, give or take, 30 pitchers would have been a team's entire ML, AAA and at least half their AA staff to start the season. Now all of those guys will see the majors at some point pitching who knows how many total innings across majors and minors. A fair (but not feasible) comparison might be too look at injuries and injury rates for MLB 2022 vs combined MLB and AAA for 1977 or 1997.

Anyway, more fringe pitchers, more fungible pitchers, more guys who know they've got to throw 95 with movement to even get a shot then have their 9 innings to prove they belong. So more guys on the fringe overdoing it to prove themselves, teams happy to let them do it. It wouldn't be surprising if there was a quite high injury rate in this group, either in the minors or the majors. But I have no idea if that's true.

(Seriously, how many undiagnosed arm and shoulder injuries led to the lost velocity of old time pitchers back in the day? It must have been more than a few.)

And it feels like one of the differences between then and now is that guys used to be able to come back from those injuries, with reduced velocity, and still pitch as journeymen for another 5-10 years. Now, it feels like those guys just get lit up and are out of baseball pretty quickly.

Has anyone ever looked into what (if anything) changed in terms of thinking on mechanics to end up with, seemingly, so many fewer shoulder injuries but so many more elbow problems?

A hypothesis that at a glance appears to fit the evidence is that shoulder injuries are likelier to result from too much work--too many pitches thrown--whereas elbow injuries are likelier to result in too intense work--pronating/supinating while also throwing the ball as hard as you can, pitch after pitch, as all modern pitchers do.

Shoulder injuries have no answer to Tommy John surgery and still do not infrequently end pitching careers--for the relatively few modern pitchers, as Walt suggested, whose elbows don't disintegrate first.

By the way, Bill James on his soon-to-be-defunct site just posted a study a couple days ago wherein he looked at all instances across history of a pitcher falling off sharply from his established level--probably a better proxy for injury than IL trips or innings pitched, and better suited to compare pitchers today to pitchers 100 years ago--and found that, yes, that is happening more often on a per-pitcher basis than it did 5, 10, 20, any number of years ago.

#20 Hadn't heard that James' site was going away. Did he say why?

I just drifted away from the site many years ago and I don't think I'm the only one, but it's kind of sad to me if the answer is that he doesn't feel like writing about baseball any longer.

I'd have to see James' methodology (except I probably don't care enough to actually go look and test it so not really) but mainly I'm not sure there's any point comparing pitchers today to 100 years ago. Velocity, breaking balls, staff sizes, complete games, surgery, etc. have just changed too much. But these things come in waves ... but mainly the 60s-70s and 90s-00s. Here's a table that might surprise folks -- I hadn't really thought of it this way before ... career games started:

Young 815
Ryan 773
Sutton 756
Maddux 740

... already ... how many career pitching tables aren't dominated by 19th c guys but here's one covering 100 years within 4 guys. That seems more suggestive that a "start" is a "start."

Niekro, Carlton, Clemens, John, Perry, Pud Galvin round out the top 10. So we're 10 deep and I've seen 8 of these guys pitch.

Blyleven, Glavine, W Johnson, Spahn, Seaver, Moyer, Kaat, Tanana (!!), Wynn, Roberts, R Johnson, GC Alexander

That's everybody with 600 starts. That's just 22 names ... and whether you want to think of it as 20 seasons of 30 starts or 15 seasons of 40 or somewhere in between, almost no pitchers ever make it. Poor performance and injury obviously the main culprits.

The most recent guys are CC at 560 and Colon at 552 (28th and 30th), active is Greinke at 537 (35th), Verlander passed 500 recently (47th). Exactly 50 guys have made it to 500 (Joe Niekro). He didn't make it to 500 but Buehrle had more starts than Feller, Lyons, Tiant, Gibson, Hunter and plenty of old-timers.

Now without question SP usage has changed dramatically over the last 5 years or so. They're obviously not going to put up big IP totals, we're probably going to see more use of 6th starters for at least part of the season, etc. But a lot of the guys I mentioned above pitched most/all of their careers in the 5-man rotation era (sometimes the 4.5 man) but they must have stuck around longer to still get their 500-600 starts. Maddux got his 500th start near the end of his 15th full season ... it will probably take a current guy 16-17 to get there.

But still, maybe once every two years, a guy debuts who makes it to 500 starts. It's probably not a coincidence that the 60s and 90s expansion era produced more than its fair share. It's been 25 years since the last expansion -- in terms of long-career pitcher debuts, how does that compare to 1970-1994 or 1915-1940? Both of those periods seem like they had a shortage of great pitchers debuting too. (Note lots of great pitchers pitched during the 70s but many of them debuted before the 2nd expansion.)

#20 Hadn't heard that James' site was going away. Did he say why?

Because it takes up too much of his time and isn't making any money. He's 74 years old now and I think has three different books mostly written that he wants to finish, and then after that he wants to try to write another Historical Baseball Abstract. From scratch.

As far as I know it's being taken down entirely in a week or two, and since most of it is paywalled you won't be able to get anything off the archive sites once that happens. A lot of his writing over the past 15 years is going to disappear. I guess I'm one of maybe a few dozen people left who still enjoy his writing and will miss it.

Maybe some of that work is one of the books.

I don't remember the subject matter of the third book he talked about, but the other two aren't about baseball.

It's just hard to believe that pitching or hitting could really have changed so much from way back in the olden days of 2011 when Justin Verlander was still able to throw 251 innings (and go 24-5). Weren't pitchers basically throwing max effort on every pitch even back then? And lineups have been stacked with sluggers since the 90's (look up say, the 1996 Orioles or 1997 Mariners), yet top pitchers were still tossing 260+ innings.

#26: Yes and no. Those 50-80 innings no longer being thrown by Verlander ... and more relevantly Fister, Masterson, Kennedy, Daniel Hudson, Saunders, Guthrie, Cahill, etc. ... are now being cranked out by pretty fungible guys in 1-innings stints. The Mastersons are being told to give everything they used to give in 27 batters (Joe Saunders, 26.5 BF per start) are now being told to give it their all for just 22 batters. Ks were still plenty high but guys like Saunders, Pavano and Buehrle were getting by under 5/9 and Wolf, Dickey, Guthrie under 6 -- I assume there are still a few like that (Hendricks?) but it's different.

Again, to the extent that SPs are required to K 8/9 now and SP innings are being replaced by easily replaceable relievers desperately clinging to jobs and being asked to K 9 or 10 per 9, that sounds like a pretty dramatic change.

Average K/9 has gone from 7.1 to 8.7 ... about a 23% increase. HR/9 was 0.9 in 2011 and is 1.2 now, a 33% increase. But pit/PA s only up a couple of % from 3.81 to 3.89, seems like that should be a bigger change.

Yeah I mean I think Walt nailed it when he was talking about how many pitchers shuttle back and forth now. Pitchers being fungible AND pitchers being known to be less reliable than position players it seems likely you are going to end up with more guys having bad days. That was a very interesting read back there in post 22.

There was some sports betting site I was reading last year and they were saying that the only reliable data pts for pitchers for fantasy league stuff was the last three outings. I dont know if that's true, or it if its BS, or if its maybe true with caveats but it sounds like they are really volatile and bringing more of them in for lesser innings (read less data pts) SO SURE there's going to be more IL.

But pit/PA s only up a couple of % from 3.81 to 3.89, seems like that should be a bigger change.

Im probly missing your pt but what are you getting at? You dont need more swings to hit balls deeper, right? Its just a function of strength, and bounciness etc. So you just need one big swing. Why would we expect pitches thrown to change?

Walt, #22 is very interesting. I never quite thought it through that far, but that's why I search for pitching comps by Games Started and ERA+. Searching by Innings Pitched limits comparisons chronologically, which sometimes one might want. But I think it's more interesting that, say, Doug Drabek had exactly as many starts as Jesse Haines. Actually that's spectacularly uninteresting in itself. But it does provide a way to see which starters in an era had an impact, relative to other starters in their era, across time.

we're talking very lager samples

I always wondered how you fueled your observations on baseball statistics :)

I always wondered how you fueled your observations on baseball statistics :)

Mostly APAs, IPAs and Scotch ales. :-)

Average K/9 has gone from 7.1 to 8.7 ... about a 23% increase. HR/9 was 0.9 in 2011 and is 1.2 now, a 33% increase. But pit/PA s only up a couple of % from 3.81 to 3.89, seems like that should be a bigger change.

I assume you'd need more pitches to get the K/9 to go up from 7.1 to 8.7. For your K rate to climb by almost a quarter it means that a bunch of your ABs have to be at least three pitches and probably more. Some of those were going to be 1 or 2 pitches, but the underlying p/PA only moved a tiny amount. Were that many AB already that long? Maybe those extra HR were coming early in the count? It feels like more and more of th game is working the count but the count isn't going up.

I assume you'd need more pitches to get the K/9 to go up from 7.1 to 8.7.

well OK yeah I didnt think of that. But I guess how many more pitches on an AB that ends in K? Perhaps 1? and then its only 22% of the time anyhow so that's not a huge amount.

Isnt the real number we're looking for Swinging strikes? Right? because in the old days that 90 mph 2-2 pitch was put in play. And nowadays that same pitch is 95 mph and its swung and missed. So you'd have to figure out how many more times that is happening. Do we have that info?

It seems really ham-handed to use innings pitched or number of pitches in a game to judge "pitcher usage" nowadays. Lots of talk above about max effort, I'd love to see this article written about pitches above 98 mph or breaking balls that are above 88 and break so many inches or something.

I have to think that pitchers nowadays throw more "pitches" in game-like practice conditions (extended spring training and such), and less long toss. Is this true?

There has to be a better way to measure usage, but that data may not be available or exist.

#32 Pretty sure the swing and miss data is available back to the late 80s. Not sure if Retrosheet ever got the Stats data. There was a time that info was only available in things like Stats scoreboard.