The Arm Read Online Free PDF

Perhaps it was usage, the volume of pitches or innings in a single game, over a whole season, or even longer. Certainly a player’s genetic makeup could factor in, too, or how hard he threw, or what pitches he preferred, or his between-start workouts, or his diet, or any other sort of measurable factor.
    Tommy John surgery, it turned out, was a paradox, the procedure that worked too well. It lulled baseball into a false sense of security, and by the time the sport realized what had happened, an epidemic was on its hands. Elbows are breaking more than ever and younger than ever. And while the rash of Tommy John surgeries that spread across Major League Baseball over the last five years took out some of the game’s finest pitchers, children ages fifteen to nineteen make up a disproportionately high number of patients. Baseball is thus left scrambling to figure out how to keep its million-dollar arms healthy while fixing a feeder system that keeps sending damaged goods to major league teams.
    â€œIt’s a huge issue,” said Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball’s commissioner. “You know why it’s a huge issue? Because that’s a competitive space, and the single biggest competitive advantage baseball has in that space is the fact that it may be the safest sport your kid can play. It still doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to make the play of the game as safe as possible for kids. And we do. We take that seriously.”
    Over the last two decades, baseball’s youth apparatus has been filched and privatized, and the single-sport-specialization craze has transformed the game. The best players spend most weekends year-round traveling to tournaments across the country. They participate in so-called showcase events, in which maximum-effort throws and pitch velocities that light up radar guns separate the elite from the rest.
    In hindsight, the results were predictable. Stephen Strasburg, the right-hander with a 102-mph fastball who shattered signing-bonus records out of college, blew out his arm twelve games into his rookie season with the Nationals. More big names followed: New York Mets ace Matt Harvey, Miami Marlins wunderkind José Fernández, Texas Rangers star Yu Darvish.
    Latin American countries, where the best kids spend their early teen years playing baseball for a living so they can cash in with bonuses at sixteen, were hardly spared: Iván Nova and Danny Salazar from the Dominican Republic, Martín Pérez and Carlos Carrasco from Venezuela, even José Contreras, the forty-year-old Cuban. Every day, it seemed, another went down. During onetwo-week span early in the 2014 season, nine players underwent Tommy John.
    The number one pick in the draft two months later, Brady Aiken, didn’t sign with the Houston Astros because of an abnormality in his elbow and eventually needed Tommy John. Two more first-round picks in 2014, Jeff Hoffman and Erick Fedde, were chosen despite their blown-out elbows, and potential number one picks in 2015 (Michael Matuella) and 2016 (Cal Quantrill) underwent Tommy John while still in college. “It’s almost like it’s a sci-fi film where they’re going to take the best and the brightest with a light ray coming down,” Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane said. “The ligaments remaining are the ones you don’t necessarily want pitching for you.”
    Arm injuries are nothing new. In the days of three hundred– and four hundred–inning seasons, plenty of pitchers were injured. Sports medicine, in its nascent stages, had next to no understanding of how the arm worked. Salaries were minuscule, and the cost of losing a player was negligible. Today, the science for progress exists. It’s lunacy to call arm injuries the cost of doing business when the business loses hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of them annually. Baseball nevertheless has fostered an environment in which all thirty