L’augmentation des opérations de type Tommy John dans le baseball pour jeunes de la région de Houston met en évidence l’inquiétude croissante des experts médicaux et d’entraînement
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Par JellyBelly_
Baseball
L’augmentation des opérations de type Tommy John dans le baseball pour jeunes de la région de Houston met en évidence l’inquiétude croissante des experts médicaux et d’entraînement
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Par JellyBelly_
9 Comments
It’s those god damn Middle School League pitch clocks
Maybe kids shouldn’t be put on MLB training regimens and expected to throw as fast as possible. Seems too obvious, need to dig deeper /s
> Valenzuela is not the only Houston-area teen we spoke with; Will Young is a recently graduated pitcher who had Tommy John surgery at the age of 17. Both have had to undergo extensive therapy to rehabilitate their ulnar collateral ligaments, or UCLs.
Professional athletes with access to the best doctors, trainers, and rehab in the world take 2 years to get back on the mound after TJ, I can only imagine how horrible the recovery is for an average person
thats it, all little leaguers throw the knuckler and nothing else
Granted, it’s been a long while since I’ve been in pony league or high school, but I remember playing 3-4 games per week at times with the same kid pitching every game…for a good 6-7 innings each time.
Get to all-star time (summer baseball), where you often played daily, and they would just alternate pitchers. A team was lucky if they had more than 2 solid pitchers and they would lean on those guys heavily.
At one point, a coach tried to turn me into a pitcher so I started training for it (I ended up not having the mental makeup even though I had the physical tools…really hard when you want every pitch and result to be perfect at that age). Trainer I had wouldn’t let me throw curveballs or sliders or anything with that kind of spin on it…I was 14 at the time. Said that I shouldn’t try to throw those until I was 16 or a little later, basically when I had finished growing and could really start lifting weights. Needless to say, lot of guys I was facing at the time were throwing curveballs. Trainer was right as a number of them ended up having TJ issues (Kip Wells was one of them…although he was still a first round pick, so I guess it was worth it).
Can’t even imagine what it’s like today with everything being even more competitive and more cutthroat.
My wife has three 22-24 year old former baseball players working for her who have all had Tommy John surgery. I’ve chatted with them and they all started playing year round travel way earlier than anyone did when I was growing up. Youth sports need some help
Self destructive players will stay valuable for as long as teams can still shrug off pitching injuries and stay competitive
This kind of stuff is happening in every sport, it’s wild.
Youth football players tearing ACLs at unprecedented rates, teenage basketball players with arthritic knees that you’d expect to see in 50 year olds; it’s not going to slow down now that youth sports is a money making machine.
They’ve managed to convince parents that you’re shitty parents that don’t care about your kid’s future if their kids aren’t spending 6-7 days a week hyper training in their single sport all year
Beyond the fact the UCL damage is an inherent consequence of the pitching motion, until coaches and analysts can come up with a pitching formula that
– reliably gets outs
– doesn’t require max effort velocity and spin rate
complaining about this is tantamount to yelling at the sky. That’s not to say it’s a good thing obviously, but that fact is the above works and not doing the above does *not* work reliably as you get more advanced in baseball. Guys are still going to chase contracts and scholarships by chasing velo and spin, and there are no good arguments or incentives for them not to, especially when TJ isn’t really a life altering injury like, say, a concussion.