The greatest position player of 1970s baseball was probably Henry Aaron who was a major fan draw in ballparks around the league.

Among pitchers, in the 60s, Sandy Koufax was the standout, in a decade that also boasted Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale among others.

In the 1970s and 80s, arguably the most exciting pitcher to watch was Nolan Ryan. Ryan’s records, including 7 no hitters (almost twice as many as the next highest total, the 4 pitched by Koufax) and his 5714 strikeouts pitched, seem impossible to even approach in the modern, 2020s version of Major League Baseball.

A major reason is that pitchers today start fewer games, throw fewer innings when they do start, and finish fewer games than in the past.

And yet, despite working less, pitchers are getting injured at all-time-high rates.

The list of pitchers having Tommy John surgery just keeps growing. The days of a championship team being built on pitching, for example most of the championship Dodger teams, from the days of Koufax and Drysdale, to the 80’s teams built around dominating pitchers like Dwight Gooden and Roger Clemens, seem to be a thing of the past.

Instead, we seem to be in an era of almost disposable starting pitchers. According to data lovingly produced and published by baseball blogger Bill James, the average team had 9 to 11.5 pitchers per season, until about 1950. In 1984, James reports that the average team had 13.4 pitchers, “not that much different than it had been in 1911.”

And then the number began to rise. More pitchers. Fewer innings per pitcher. More relievers. More names. Fewer stars. By 2021, James says, there were 22.8 pitchers per team (not including those who pitched 9 or fewer innings in the year).

Remember when Steve Carleton pitched 300 innings in 1980? No one has done it since. Remember when teams could boast multiple 20 game winners? No more. Instead, more and more pitchers are pitching fewer and fewer innings each. The number of pitchers used by the average team in a season keeps growing.

Some observers and insiders claim that it’s all about winning. Maybe it is. But is it good for fans, or for the pitchers? Was winning a single regular season game (which the team probably would have won anyway) worth pulling Dodger star Clayton Kershaw while he was throwing a perfect game? In what world was that the “right move?” In the mind of Dodger manager Dave Roberts, this seems to be contradicted by the fact that the Dodger organization still uses for marketing purposed the (pirated?) recording of the radio broadcast of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game, which Koufax threw before most fans were even born.

With the trend toward disposable pitchers, will there ever be another Ryan or Koufax? It seems much less likely, and that seems like it’s bad for fans who care about specific pitchers, and who want to see those pitchers continue to play.

Is chewing through pitchers all about “winning”? Maybe. But maybe it’s about something else. Maybe it’s about economics.

Why Are Pitchers Getting Hurt More?

It seems to most observers that pitchers have been getting hurt at higher rates than previously. Bill James has convincingly demonstrated that the statistics support this belief.

“Why” is a natural question. To answer a why question requires looking for causes. In this case, I think that Aristotle’s taxonomy of four causes is informative. Those four causes are material, formal, efficient and final.

The material cause is what is the physical stuff that we’re discussing. In this case, the physical stuff is pitchers’ arms, and particularly the ulnar collateral  (UCL) in their pitching arms.

The formal cause is how that physical stuff is put together. In this case, it’s the tearing of the UCL.

The efficient cause is what we might think of as the kind of cause that we see when the bat hits the ball, causing the ball to fly off the bat. In the case of pitcher injuries, the efficient cause is not completely understood, but is widely believed to be related to pitchers now making “maximum effort,” throwing as hard as they can, with as forceful a grip as they can, every pitch.

Pitchers as a group are throwing harder than ever before. A 100 mile an hour fastball used to be exceptional. Not so much anymore. And it is commonplace to see pitchers routinely throwing in the high 90s.

Pitching has become in some ways a strength activity, perhaps at the expense of finesse, control (i.e. where the pitch goes in or out of the strike zone), and strategy.

Athletes, or perhaps more importantly, coaches, in strength sports have long realized that maximum effort is an extreme and cannot be an everyday activity. Indeed, maximum effort is (not surprisingly) associated with injury incidence in strength sports.[1]

Perhaps the too frequent resort to maximum effort is to blame for the rash of failures of pitchers’ UCLs.

Every system will fail at its weakest point when subjected to sufficient load.

It has become clear that in pitchers the weak link tends to be the UCL. Although the physical causality is not understood in complete detail, it seems to be the case that stronger pitchers generate higher arm speeds which puts more strain on the UCL.

Maybe the difference in forces required to throw 100 mph, as compared to 90 mph, is so large that in many people (most elite pitchers) that extra force can be generated by the muscles in a trained pitcher, but there is no (currently known) way to correspondingly strengthen the UCL.

Final Cause

Although “science” has by and large eschewed the Aristotelian idea of final cause, in human affairs the final cause is often the most interesting. The final cause is the will of the agent or agents involved. In other words, why does someone want something and make it happen?

In a case like pitcher injuries, we might phrase the question about final cause as “qui bono?” or “who benefits?”

Who does benefit from pitcher injuries? If we set aside the idea that the medical establishment that performs Tommy John surgeries and provides the associated care, it would seem that no one benefits directly from the injuries.

But perhaps someone benefits from the maximum efforts of the pitchers. Is it the pitchers, the managers, the general managers, or the owners who make the decisions that result in frequent resort to “maximum effort”?

Probably it’s all of them. Pitchers respond to the demands of managers. Managers respond to the demands of general managers, and they in turn respond to the demands of the owners. So at least arguably the ultimate responsibility rests with the owners.

Why would owners demand efforts that are predictably (at least in a statistical sense), going to result in more pitcher injuries, fewer complete games, more pitchers used, and shorter pitcher careers?

The initial answer that may occur to you is that pitcher injuries are a price that owners are willing to incur (though it’s not their arms) because they believe it will help their teams win.

Game Theory

If your team were the only team to demand pitcher maximum efforts “all the time” then at least there’s an argument that pitcher injuries would be part of the price of having a winning team.

But if all the teams resort to the same demands, the epidemic of pitcher injuries starts to look much more like a prisoner’s dilemma in game theory. The same idea was recognized in economics by the agricultural economist Dale Jorgensen in the 1950s, in regard to the competitive pressures on farmers to continually invest in additional technology. If one farmer bought a more efficient technology ( such as a tractor, combine, or engineered seed), that farmer’s productivity, and therefore profit, would increase. But if many farmers adopt the technology, the total production of grain (or whatever) would (and didn’t) increase, putting downward pressure on product prices, and thereby eliminating the hoped-for extra profits.

In the same way, if every baseball team burns through as many pitchers as necessary, no team gains an edge.

In the case of the farmers, the saving grace (or “social good” in modern utilitarian parlance) is that consumers enjoy grain prices that are lower than they would otherwise be.

However, in the case of maximum effort and pitcher injuries, I believe most fans do not believe the game is better. In fact, among those I’ve spoken to in a very unscientific survey, more injuries, fewer innings, fewer star pitchers, shorter careers, is a negative.

Economic Reasons?

Baseball owners, and the players’ union, could seek rule changes to address the problem of pitcher injuries.

Why don’t they?

Perhaps it is more profitable for the owners, and for the union.

Let’s consider the owners first.

One hypothesis is that it is cheaper to burn through, say, 20 pitchers in a year, than to play the season with half that number.

It turns out that among the top 100 pitchers (by salary) in MLB, there is strong support for the hypothesis. As pitcher careers get longer on average, they earn much more per season than when they were younger.

Consider the data shown in the graph below. The points are individual pitchers, graphed by years in the majors on the horizontal axis, and average annual earnings on the vertical axis.

The line is the fitted ordinary least squares regression line.

There is a strong positive relationship between tenure and average annual earnings.

In other words, it’s significantly more expensive to have pitchers stay around and become big stars.

The only real outlier in this data is the pitcher with one season pitched with annual earnings of $19 million. That’s Kodai Senga.

Without Senga, the relationship is even more pronounced.

Cost Savings

Arbitrarily dividing the above data into two groups: pitchers with 10 or fewer years of MLB experience, and those with more, we find that longer-tenure pitchers earned almost $2 million more per year than the shorter-tenured pitchers.

The flip side of that is that the shorter tenure pitchers cost the owners $2 million less per year.

These are the elite pitchers. Most pitchers will earn much less than any of these guys.

If as a manager/owner I can use a bunch of relatively low-cost pitchers to get the job done, I can save perhaps $10 or $20 million a year in pitcher salaries.

That seems a plausible, though admittedly unproven, explanation for why owners are not agitating for rule changes to protect pitchers.

Union Members

The players union faces somewhat different incentives. The main economic incentive of a union is to grow membership. If teams average 20 pitchers a year, that’s about 300 more potential union members every year than if, everything else equal, the teams average 10 pitchers per year.

Conclusion

I’m not saying that the above are the correct or complete reasons that the owners and union seem relatively uninterested in addressing the issue of rising pitcher injuries. But these factors seem worth considering.

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[1] Injuries Among Weightlifters and Powerlifters: A Systematic Review, Ulrika Asa, et. al. British Journal of Sports Medicine, October, 2016.