Are the pitch clock and spitball crackdown to blame for MLB’s rash arm injuries?

Form your hand as though you’re preparing to throw a baseball, and then flex your fingertips like you’re trying to dig as hard into the leather cover as possible.

Focus on the feeling in your elbow. Then, imagine the same forces as you’re trying to push a 5 oz weight through the air at maximum velocity using your arm as a lever. Think about how it feels to repeat that action three times within the space of a minute, with perhaps 30 sets spread over the course of two hours.

Pitching is hard. It is bad for arms, and it’s not even necessary to throw a ball to be certain. Major League Baseball’s current rash of pitching injuries may not have a simple cause, but it will take a herculean combined effort to find a solution.

The Players’ Association and the league traded barbs over the weekend, with a statement from union director Tony Clark on Saturday placing the blame on the newly-shortened pitch clock.

“The league’s unwillingness thus far to acknowledge or study the effects of these profound changes is an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset — the Players,” the statement read in part.

As negotiated into the most recent collective bargaining agreement, the league’s competition committee includes a majority of seats appointed by the commissioner’s office, and so players were unable to prevent the pitch clock being shortened with runners on base from 20 seconds to 18.

Miles Mikolas, the St. Louis Cardinals’ union representative, said Sunday that he wasn’t inherently opposed to the pitch clock as a concept, but that players didn’t feel that only one year of data collection was sufficient to determine what the effect would be on arm health.

“Now you’ve got guys that threw a lot last year on the pitch clock and they’re gonna do it again this year on maybe even a more abbreviated note,” Mikolas explained. “I think it’s just something maybe we would have liked to get some more numbers on before they went ahead and changed it.”

In its own statement, the league challenged the veracity of the union’s conclusions on the basis of a scientific study from Johns Hopkins University that has not yet been publicly released and is currently in the peer review stage.

“This statement [from the MLBPA] ignores the empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trend, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries,” the league said without attribution to any individual. “JHU found no evidence that pitchers who worked quickly in 2023 were more likely to sustain an injury than those who worked less quickly on average. JHU also found no evidence that pitchers who sped up their pace were more likely to sustain an injury than those who did not.”

Whatever the cause, the issue is rapidly gaining salience as high-profile pitchers see their seasons cut short.

Atlanta’s Spencer Strider, Miami’s Sandy Alcantara and Eury Pérez, Cleveland’s Shane Bieber and Gerrit Cole of the New York Yankees are all currently out with damage to the ulnar collateral ligament – the ligament repaired by Tommy John surgery – in their pitching elbows. Among that group, which is not inclusive of every example around the league, only Cole is currently expected to return this season.

The search for increased spin from the pitching mound is at the center of any explanation for the pitching injury emergency. A fastball thrown with more spin will see increased velocity and “ride,” in some cases creating the optical illusion of rising as it approaches the batter. A breaking ball with more spin can break later and more sharply, dipping and diving around bats rather than rolling into them.

For years, before a step up in MLB enforcement, pitchers found their way to increased spin rates through the application of foreign substances to the ball. Though officially forbidden, the practice was widely accepted for the sake of allowing pitchers to maintain control in difficult environments, and only challenged once the competitive imbalance it created proved too great.

One veteran Cardinals pitcher, granted anonymity to discuss past rule breaking, said that he “absolutely” felt increased stress in his elbow after he was forced to stop using a tacky substance while pitching. Following the enforcement crackdown in 2021, MLB began research on either a universally accepted grip substance or a baseball with a pre-tacked surface, such as those used in Japan’s top professional league.

Players uniformly agreed over the past several days that they’d heard nothing about that effort in recent months. A league spokesman did not respond to a request for comment when asked if MLB was still pursuing those projects.

What’s clear is that disincentivizing the search for spin will take an effort beyond anything the league or the union can handle on its own. When Cardinals shortstop Masyn Winn was 15 or 16 years old, a sophomore in high school, he pitched in front of an advanced radar which tracked the spin and break of his pitches for the first time. That gave him a baseline and data points which he could then train to improve.

Within months, he suffered a stress fracture in his pitching elbow.

Blaming data is retrograde. Asking players at any level, amateur or professional, to simply ignore information for fear of chasing it through dangerous means is not a workable solution. Players are well aware that pitchers with the nastiest stuff get the most opportunities and, in theory, make the most money.

At least, those who make it to free agency with nominally healthy arms have that potential.

The Houston Astros announced on Monday night that Framber Valdez would be scratched from his start that night with elbow soreness. He was the most recent, but absolutely will not be the last.

It is incumbent upon the game’s stakeholders to work as hard as possible to taper those disappointments for the sake of all involved.