“Why MLB must act now on alarming rate of pitching injuries,” the headline on the ESPN story read. “Pitching injury crisis has no easy fix, but baseball’s leaders better get to work on one,” The Athletic headline warned.
Is this some kind of joke? Days after Washington Nationals pitching great Stephen Strasburg, who left body parts on the mound, announced his retirement after 13 seasons of celebration and carnage, now the alarm is being sounded for a pitching injury crisis?
Is this some warped version of a tribute to Strasburg?
There’s a pitching crisis in baseball all right — some of baseball’s best pitchers are filling up the doctors’ offices.
Atlanta Braves pitcher Spencer Strider, 25, has a sore right elbow that might lead to his second Tommy John surgery.
The Cleveland Guardians just learned that their ace and former Cy Young winner Shane Bieber, 28, will be right there next to him undergoing Tommy John surgery.
SEE ALSO: LOVERRO: Strasburg earned place in hearts of fans, teammates
Miami Marlins ace Sandy Alcantara, 28, had the surgery in October of last year. He’ll miss the entire 2024 season.
The Marlins also just found out their other young pitcher, 20-year-old Eury Perez, will also need Tommy John surgery and won’t be on the field for the rest of the season. Cincinnati Reds reliever Tejay Antone will be having his third such operation at the age of 30.
The list goes on and certainly should be a wake-up call for those who care about baseball — from the major leagues to the Little Leagues — to stop in their tracks and not let the business go on as usual without some major study.
But the wake-up call should have come on Sept. 3, 2010 — the day baseball’s most heralded young pitcher in decades, Stephen Strasburg, underwent Tommy John surgery.
It should have been a five-alarm call for action.
Strasburg, 35, had a celebrated pitching arm before the Nationals selected him with the first pick in the 2009 draft.
He was a hard-throwing star at San Diego State, called “the most hyped and closely watched pitching prospect in the history of baseball” by Sports Illustrated.
And that was before he exceeded the hype when he made his major league debut on June 8, 2010, by striking out 14 Pittsburgh Pirates in seven innings in a 5-2 victory.
Nearly three months later, after going 5-3 with a 2.91 ERA in 12 starts and averaging 12.2 strikeouts per nine innings, Strasburg was on the operating room table, having Tommy John surgery.
After that, it was stretches of excellence and stints on the disabled list, until his greatest triumph — the 2019 postseason and an MVP World Series performance.
The next four years, he suffered nerve problems, underwent a surgery that removed ribs and neck muscles, made just eight starts and gave up 25 runs in 31 innings pitched.
Finally, after an ugly settlement on the money due from the $245 million contract the late Ted Lerner gave Strasburg after the World Series, the pitcher said enough.
Strasburg’s 13-year career is defined by “what ifs” as much as what he accomplished, and now there is a pitching crisis?
It was a crisis when I wrote this in 2010 following Strasburg’s surgery:
“So now baseball sits and waits for one of its newest and biggest young stars to return after missing an entire season of play, wondering whether he will heal well enough to regain his form. Meanwhile, nothing has changed. There will be others like Strasburg — more young star pitchers sidelined by performing the very act they are paid to do — and nobody really knows why this seems to be happening at such an alarming rate.
“With the injury to such a high-profile young star, baseball has an opportunity to study and come to some sort of conclusion about why the impression exists that today’s young pitchers are far more fragile than the generations that came before them. The perception, much of it anecdotal, is that the game has a serious pitching problem with its young hurlers. Just look at Washington’s staff. Its two top pitchers — Strasburg and Jordan Zimmerman — will have undergone Tommy John surgery in consecutive seasons. These young pitchers are too important a commodity to the game simply to let this continue or to come to conclusions without significant study.
“Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig should consider forming one of those blue-ribbon panels he puts together from time to time made up of medical experts, players, baseball executives and coaches from colleges, high schools and youth baseball to come up with an in-depth study as to whether pitchers really are not as durable as their predecessors. And if not, why not? And what can be done to address it?”
This, too, should have been Stephen Strasburg’s legacy — when baseball seriously tried to help those who would follow him, like the ones filling the injured lists now.
• You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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