MLB: Predicting Arm Injuries Has Become the New Market Inefficiency

MLB arm injuries have become more apparent over recent years, at the same time that pitchers have been throwing harder than ever.

Whether or not there is a correlation remains to be proven, but the team that figures out the arm the quickest will be the one that the rest of baseball ends up chasing after.

Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports released a book all about pitchers’ arms and all of the forces at play that can lead to a hurler needing Tommy John surgery. The Arm is a fantastic look inside the world of recovery, medicine and the dire heap of trouble baseball could find itself in if they can’t figure out how to predict or prevent injuries in the future.

Just a couple of days ago, USA Today published a report stating that “there is a correlation between increased fastball usage and eventual Tommy John surgery to repair broken down ulnar collateral ligaments.” The report that they used was from the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery.

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So how much is too much? The study is stating that pitchers that throw their heater more than 48% of the time was a “significant predictor” of future injury. The piece focuses on the New York Mets, who have an entire rotation built around hard-throwing pitchers, so I took a look at each player’s Fangraphs page to see if their fastball usage has declined at all.

Bartolo Colon only throws fastballs. Matt Harvey, one of three Mets pitchers to have already had the surgery, has actually been throwing his heater more, increasing from 56.9% before surgery to 60.9% both last year and this one. Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom and Steven Matz have all lowered their reliance on the pitch to varying degrees, but Sydergaard’s 57.7 percent usage rate is the lowest of the trio, still ten percent more than the recommended rate. At the same time, these are MLB pitchers and adjusting at this level is much more difficult with more of the club’s revenue streams invested in the outcomes.

With that investment in the success of the team, there have been some clubs, like the Los Angeles Dodgers (according to The Arm), that have hired their own think tanks in order to try and solve their injury issues. The name featured in the book, Dr. James Buffi, is officially listed as a Senior Analyst for the Dodgers, but his goal is to “allow athletes to minimize injury risk while pushing the limits of human performance.”

With the seemingly unlimited funds flowing out of Dodger Land, Los Angeles could already have a leg-up on the competition in gaining an advantage when it comes to pitcher injuries. That said, Brandon McCarthy, Brett Anderson and Hyun-jin Ryu are all on the Dodgers disabled list.

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The common thread that I have noticed in many discussions is that it’s not velocity, pitch usage, or the now-and-again high pitch counts. It’s mechanics. While increased velocity increases the stress on the area in question, Glenn Fleising, the research director at ASMI (which was founded by Dr. John Andrews, today’s go-to Tommy John surgeon) said in the USA Today piece, “Not all fastballs are the same.” Daniel Hudson, one of the notable figures in the book, changed his mechanics after two consecutive surgeries and has avoided the disabled list since his return to the big leagues in 2014 as a bullpen arm.

While the headline of the piece “Study Shows Connection Between Fastballs and Tommy John Surgery” points to a breakthrough in the study of arm injuries, a lot of what is said is also talked through in the piece and leaves the question open-ended. At this stage in the research, each injury – or non-injury – is a data point working toward the collective future of baseball.

Noah Syndergaard can touch 100 miles per hour and has not needed Tommy John at this point in his career. In 2010 Jamie Moyer threw his fastball 46.6% of the time and at just below 81 miles per hour. He needed the surgery in 2011. In Moyer’s case it could have been the accumulation of throwing over 4,000 innings in his career to that point, but in the last ten years of his career Moyer never averaged more than 83 miles per hour on his fastball.

Yet, even if we will be able to predict which pitchers can avoid injury in the future, the question of effectiveness will also come into play. Say that the bulk of the problem does in fact lay somewhere in fastball usage and with high velocity pitchers. Does this mean that a team will suddenly flip to having a slew of arms that rely on location while velocity is lacking? Only time will tell what the future of the arm will be.

Next: The Mechanics of Matt Harvey

Arm injuries in baseball will remain a mystery for the foreseeable future, and the first team to unlock its code will have changed the game – and set up its own future nicely.