MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
The New York Yankees will be without their ace Gerrit Cole for the entire 2025 season, as the righthander was scheduled to undergo Tommy John surgery yesterday in Los Angeles.
It marked the second consecutive spring with an injury issue for Cole, who was sidelined last March by right elbow inflammation and edema that delayed his regular-season debut until June.
There is no expected timetable for Cole’s return, but pitchers generally need 12 to 18 months for a full recovery, and as former Baltimore Orioles lefthander John Means knows, sometimes even that doesn’t work.
Meanwhile, the Orioles’ aspiring ace Grayson Rodriguez has been sidelined indefinitely with elbow soreness after missing the final month-plus of last season with a lat injury (shoulder), which is not a good sign, although this setback is being diagnosed as inflammation of the elbow. Rodriguez received a cortisone shot and will be shut down for seven to 10 days before beginning a throwing progression.
All the while, the Orioles are closely monitoring and holding their breath for closer Felix Bautista, who has made three spring training appearances after missing all of last season following Tommy John surgery; and if you recall, the Orioles also had to shut down Kyle Bradish, Tyler Wells and Means last season so they could undergo the Tommy John.
For Means, who is now with Cleveland, it was his second TJ that came over a year after his first. Bradish and Wells are still recovering and might be available to the Orioles after the All-Star break.
There are a number of reasons pitchers’ elbows keep exploding – modern training, modern theory based on analytics and maximum effort on every pitch, youth and travel baseball, chasing spin rate, chasing velocity, pitch counts, no tackified grip, fewer former MLB pitchers coaching, and training with any Tom, Dick or Harry whose social media site your dad found.
If pitchers are going to put in maximum effort every pitch, their muscles need a certain period of time to reset before they max-effort again. The time between pitches, though, has lessened while the effort has increased.
It all begins with analytics, with maximum effort on every throw being the gospel of the analytics.
Pitchers used to throw 85% of their maximum effort for most of the game. Now they are all encouraged to “sit” at 95% of whatever their maximum is, which is why we don’t see complete games anymore.
Sure, there are short-term results, but the long-term results are (see above).
Dr. James Andrews is the father of Tommy John surgery, and he told MLB.com last year that the rash of elbow injuries can be traced back to amateur baseball.
“I started following the injury patterns and injury rates in the year 2000,” Andrews said. “Back in those days, I did about eight or nine Tommy Johns per year in high school aged and younger. The large majority of Tommy Johns were at the Major League level, then the Minor League level, then the college level and then just a handful of high school kids.
“In today’s situation, the whole thing is flip-flopped. The largest number is youth baseball. They’ve surpassed what’s being done in the Major Leagues. That’s a terrible situation.”
Andrews believes the obsession with velocity and spin at the youth level is the biggest culprit.
“These kids are throwing 90 mph their junior year of high school,” he says. “The ligament itself can’t withstand that kind of force. We’ve learned in our research lab that baseball is a developmental sport. The Tommy John ligament matures at about age 26. In high school, the red line where the forces go beyond the tensile properties of the ligament is about 80 mph.”
Our old friend Leo Mazzone, of course, authored many historic baseball accomplishments as pitching coach of the Atlanta Braves and the Orioles. Leo is a disciple of the great Johnny Sain, former MLB pitcher and pitching coach, who believed pitchers should throw more often (between starts, etc.) and use less exertion. The arm, Leo has said a million times over, is a muscle, and a muscle needs to be strengthened by using it.
Seven years ago, I interviewed Leo concerning a number of issues that remain constants for pitchers today, “It’s the analytics like every (bleeping) thing else in the game now,” Leo said, citing baseball’s velocity obsession.
“I do a lot of pitching seminars and John Smoltz and I both believe they ought to get rid of the (bleeping) radar gun in high school,” he said. “Get rid of the (bleepin’) gun. They’re ruining arms with that thing. They’re looking for nothing but velocity.
“And let me tell you something about that gun – just subtract five miles per hour from any number that comes up because those things have been jacked up so much. And now it registers the ball coming out of the hand, not across the plate … “
Mazzone said he has seen all kinds of voodoo being practiced in the developmental stages of aspiring millionaire baseball players’ lives that make him want to scream.
“I had a parent ask me if he should have his son get Tommy John surgery that he didn’t need so he could make his elbow stronger down the road,” he said. “And I said, ‘Are you out of your (bleepin’) mind? You’re (bleeping) kidding me, right?’ “
Tommy John surgery, of course, named for the former pitcher, is a surgical procedure in which a healthy tendon extracted from an arm (or sometimes a leg) is used to replace an arm’s torn ligament. The healthy tendon is threaded through holes drilled into the bone above and below the elbow.
It has extended many pitching careers, but is now sometimes used early in a young player’s career as a preventive measure, even when the measure is not needed.
“We all hear about the successful Tommy Johns,” Mazzone said, “not so much about the ones that are not. All those years in Atlanta, we had just two pitchers who had Tommy John and we set records for the least number of injuries.”
From 1991 through 1993, in fact, through 537 starts, Braves pitchers on Mazzone’s watch missed a grand total of one start.
“I never did care about velocity,” Leo said. “So what? It’s about throwing more often with less exertion. It’s the complete opposite now. It’s an embarrassment. It’s a joke …
“But now we’re worried about (limiting) innings pitched? Are you kidding me? Innings pitched is the greatest teacher a pitcher can have because it’s experience. It lets a pitcher find himself, to understand what he is and isn’t capable of doing, what his comfort level is …
“It’s a problem. Nobody pitches any innings.
“Unbelievable.”
If only that were so.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT