As an avid baseball fan, there’s nothing I enjoy more than heading to the ballpark on a cool summer evening. Even watching my Mariners blow a lead in the eighth inning of a close game can’t ruin the experience. Being a baseball fan and player for most of my life, I have grown up alongside America’s pastime and watched as the game itself has evolved. In my lifetime, I have witnessed baseball digitize and change its rules. But most noticeably I have watched an epidemic of arm injuries creep into the league.
Coming off one of the most dominant team pitching performances in 2024, I had high expectations for the Mariners rotation as the 2025 season began. My anticipation was quickly dissolved when immediately two of our top pitchers went down with arm injuries. If you are a baseball fan, you have likely felt the sinking disappointment when your team’s ace is suddenly out for a year or more with a busted elbow. It’s happening far too often. What used to be a rare, career-saving operation has become alarmingly routine. In fact, roughly one-third of active MLB pitchers have already had Tommy John surgery.
This epidemic doesn’t stem from bad luck or random chance, it’s a crisis of baseball’s own making. The hard truth is that the sport’s culture and incentives are practically manufacturing these injuries, pushing players to overexert themselves until their arms quite literally break.
The MLB has done their own research into the causes of the Tommy John epidemic and highlighted their findings in a 62-page comprehensive report. Their analysis only touches on the symptoms of this epidemic while turning a blind eye to the root causes. A system of training, expectations, and incentives that practically guarantees pitchers will risk their health for short-term rewards.
So why would any sane athlete push themselves to the point of a blown elbow? The simple answer: the system rewards them for doing so. In today’s MLB, the incentives are skewed toward short-term performance and eye-popping stats, even at the cost of long-term health. Teams pay millions for triple-digit arms and nasty breaking stuff. Coaches and front offices rave about “spin rate” and strikeout totals. If you can dial your fastball up to 100 mph, you’ll get a contract, or at least a spot on the roster, even if it means you might break down in a year. But if you choose to throttle back and preserve your health, you risk being labeled mediocre or falling behind the competition. It’s a brutal cycle. Pitchers know throwing at max effort every time is dangerous, but easing off can mean sacrificing a prosperous career.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Baseball can and must do better if we want to keep seeing our favorite players actually play. I’m no doctor or GM (yet), but it’s clear that a change in mindset is needed, from Little League all the way to the Major Leagues. As someone who wants to build a career working in baseball, no better place to start than trying to solve the epidemic plaguing the game. The best way to start doing that is adjusting the incentive structure to value health and durability.
What if pitchers and teams were rewarded for keeping arms healthy? There could be limits placed on pitching changes, minimum pitch counts and roster management rule changes all targeted at making it more valuable to have a pitcher who has durability and not making pitchers so easily replaceable. Contracts could be structured to where players earn significant bonuses for pitching a certain amount of innings rather than being rewarded for simply having impressive numbers essentially, to “increase the value of pitcher health and durability, and decrease the value of short-duration, max-effort pitching.”
Maybe it means celebrating the art of pitching, not just the speed of it. Teaching young players that it’s cool to be the next Greg Maddux, painting corners for 15 years, not just the guy who throws 100 mph for a couple seasons and disappears. Coaches at all levels should be educated (and incentivized) to protect their players’ arms, even if that means less trophies or strikeouts. Most importantly, we fans and observers need to change what we applaud. When a pitcher guts through seven innings with savvy and finesse, that should earn as much respect as a closer hitting 102 on the gun. Every time a pitcher grabs his elbow on the mound or we hear “Tommy John surgery,” we’re watching a preventable tragedy unfold. These are human beings, young men with careers and dreams, not just interchangeable names on our fantasy rosters.
When the system pushes them to sacrifice their bodies for our entertainment, something is fundamentally broken. As a baseball community, we shouldn’t stand for it. The beauty of baseball has always been the duel, the chess match between pitcher and batter, not just the radar gun reading on a July afternoon. If MLB and those who love the game don’t start prioritizing pitcher health over the radar gun arms race, we’ll continue to feed players into the meat grinder and call it progress.
It’s time to draw a line. For the sake of the players and the sport’s future, let’s put health first. Otherwise, we’ll keep getting those 100 mph highlights and a lot more heartbreak to go with them.