Is The Pitch Clock Causing An Increase In Injuries?
There are not many topics more controversial than the addition of the Pitch Clock to Major League Baseball. In addition, the data is pretty clear that the number of injuries across baseball is increased in 2023 compared to 2022. Is the Pitch Clock to Blame for this? Well, due to so many factors changing year to year, it is very hard to pinpoint one cause for an increase in injuries. In short, we do NOT believe that the Pitch Clock is as big of a causative factor for injury as it is being touted to be, but that it does play a role. In the same light, we cannot prove that to be true either at this point in time so we will explore both sides of the argument.
MLB.com
As you can see, 2023 shows a pretty significant increase in injures over both 2022 and 2019. 2021 put on a clinic in destroying arms with the huge increases in workloads following the shortened 2020 season. With all that being said, it would be incredibly irresponsible to blame this increase solely on the Pitch Clock. Injuries have been on a constant rise for decades and guys are throwing harder than ever with both FB’s and Off Speed Pitches. This has a far clearer and more proven increase in stresses to the arm so the increase in injuries should be no surprise.
In addition to velocity, the other clearest predictor of injury is having previous injuries. This seems obvious but it is consistently at the top of all injury prediction studies and models. Overlay this with us reaching a time in baseball where many of these young Major League Players were at the start of the “Year around competitive baseball schedule” growing up. This leaves many (Not All) of today’s young big leaguers with a larger Injury history than those debuting decades ago.
Now, let’s look at the other side of the coin. Pitcher’s are being asked to perform the same amount of work in less time. There is less time to recover between pitches on the micro level and there is less time to recover between innings on the larger scale. If this, for example, causes a decrease in strength or recruitment of the forearm musculature, it could lead to more stress being placed on the UCL at the same velocity.
Many Veteran pitchers have also voiced concerns over the Pitch Clock changing routines that they have used and were adapted to for their entire career. Valid Point as well.
It isn’t very fun to write an article laying out both sides of an argument then saying “We don’t know”, but that is what we did because it is just too early in the process to have a clear answer
At this point, we still believe that the 2 biggest injury risk indicators are Prior Injury History and Velocity. Neither of which are we going to change, one because we can’t change the past and the other because we don’t want to get shelled. This, in addition to injuries being so incredibly multi factorial is why nobody has or will completely solve injury prevention. The best we can to at this time is to make the body as resilient to these stresses as possible and properly apply workloads and stresses to the best of our ability.
In terms of actionable steps, if we see continued information pointing toward the Pitch Clock increasing injuries at a faster rate than the previous trend line, we can make adjustments such as training our bodies in these smaller interval windows in attempt to speed up how fast our arms can recover between pitches and innings. We can also use the same time between pitches in our Offseason and build up bullpens so that it is not an extra variable that is added come Spring Training Games.
