Strength in Numbers #53
A week has passed, and I still stick to my gut as to why we have so many pitching injuries, especially in starters.
You can review Part 1 here, but the premise is that errors in managing workload are a significant problem that I’ll dive into further this week.
“MORE POMERANIAN THAN PIT BULL…”
Jeff Passan, an MLB authority on pitching arm health, recently communicated in an ESPN+ article that the starting pitcher in professional baseball is a fleeting position in the game due to diminishing workloads to keep pitchers healthy.
Passan states, “This season, pitch counts for starters have cratered to an average of 84.4, 10 fewer than the standard that held for decades. The typical start — long, steady, around six innings — has fallen to barely five. Complete games have almost vanished.”
It begets the question—will we ever see a pitcher go a complete game more than once, even if once, in the athlete’s career? And if we see a complete game pitched, will we blame the team and think that elbow doom and the operating table are coming next?
PITCHER ABUSE POINTS
Early into my doctoral education, a little-known sabermetric was created to connect workload to injury. There is a good chance you have never heard of Pitcher Abuse Points (PAP), which has been under the radar for a while.
PAP metrics have never been scientifically validated to predict injuries, but the premise is that throwing more than 100 pitches is injurious to the starting pitcher. So there is some conventional wisdom there, but where things get muddy is at what point are we expecting to see an elbow explode?
For example, one of your starters throws 100 pitches, and you decide to keep the pitcher in the game. How much is one pitch over the infamous 100-pitch limit more harmful than the 110th pitch?
Common sense should tell you this is not scientific and that each individual responds differently to throwing workloads.
STRENGTH MATTERS MOST
The key is that we need to individualize.
In my career, I have heard from pitching coaches, front office staff members, and even medical staff members that pitching injuries are “the cost of doing business,” but does it have to be?
Imagine a world where pitching coaches would know how close a pitcher was to their breaking point, especially as they approached 100 pitches?
I can! Because strength measurements tell the story.
Knowing a player’s strength can minimize our preconceived notion of throwing arm abuse and validate its level of fatigue.
Thus, the fundamental error leading to many arm injuries is not knowing a player’s strength changes and instead relying on arbitrary stopping points or, at best periodic assessments to determine how a player is responding.
And if baseball implemented better strength tracking, we would find a training error in how we manage workloads.
THE CRITICAL TRAINING ERROR
Just as a refresher, here’s the current training plan for a starting pitcher:
- Post-Pitching Training is Mobility-Driven, Cardiovascular, and Light for the Throwing Arm
- 24 hours Post-Pitching is a Heavy Lower Body Training Session
- 24 hours Post-Pitching is a Heavy ArmCare Session that is Repetition Heavy
- 48 hours Post-Pitching, Weekly Bullpens are Scheduled for the Starting Pitcher
I believe that this schedule creates critical errors that influence throwing arm strength that is a crucial aspect causing injury.
Megadosing
The standard approach to training starters generally entails prescribing the hardest lift and arm care day in their schedule within 24 hours of their start.
That means on Day 1, after a start, we are perpetuating nervous system dysfunction and adding more stress that requires recovery.
Just as I have seen with the non-throwing arm, the nervous system does not know the difference between sympathetic drive caused by pitching or by training, and therefore, you can assume that the megadose training day just one day after the start is like having another start back-to-back.
This does not make sense as the high-intensity training day 24 hours post-pitching will prolong autonomic and central nervous system dysfunction. Just as a reminder from last week, starting pitchers have the greatest autonomic disturbance 24 hours post-pitching.
Bullpens
Now let’s talk about the bullpen placement in relation to the megadose day within 24 hours. Most professional teams have the bullpen day scheduled on Day 2 after pitching, which means…
the hardest throwing day, follows the hardest training day, which follows the hardest competitive day.
So when it comes to nervous system fatigue, we added approximately a half-game of competitive throwing workload into the mix.
In a nutshell, we have had back-to-back-to-back starts from a physiologic standpoint.
This furthering of autonomic, central, and peripheral nervous system fatigue leaves little wonder why more career-threatening injuries happen in practice rather than in games in pitchers.
Coupled with the fact that pitchers often experience greater soreness from microdamage at 48 hours post-pitching, the Day 2 bullpen is not the way to go, in my opinion.
The Future of Pitching
Okay – I have given you another chunk to piece together from last week.
I’m spoon-feeding this information because it’s essential, and I want you to be mentally refreshed, as you need to identify with the current training errors before I share the solution next week.
If you want to dive deep, become a Certified ArmCare Specialist, and you will be able to diagnose and manage autonomic nervous system disruptions and customize your training programs to meet your athlete’s needs rather than them fitting in your program. We have to be agile and adaptable, that’s the key to solid coaching and high performance.
In closing, I really like the PAP metric.
I like that it is an addition-based point system and not subtraction, but I would like to make this metric a positive metric and rename it Pitching Accumulation Points.
This means starters are robust, they can throw more, they provide quality starts, they stave off the bullpen from being burnt up, they earn their living, and they help teams win big. The future of pitching health is not a reliever-based solution in my opinion, as relievers throw too frequently, throw too hard, and are not conditioned for long innings, so the workload sharing model will be out of balance and teams will use too many pitchers per game.
We need our starters because if we don’t, we will likely see more injuries and not less due to pitching frequency, higher throwing velocities with shorter rest, and prolonged inflammatory cascades to heal microdamaged tissue. Like age, 100 is just a number, and before we complete this week’s edition of Strength in Numbers, I want to give you some words to live by.
First – when it comes to training and workload, we need to individualize, not generalize, or we will continue to hospitalize. Second – train smarter, throw harder, be stronger, play longer.
In a game dominated by offense, I am hoping with the use of ArmCare.com, we will one day see the return of the once insidious complete game.
