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teams treat pitchers’ health as proprietary information instead of banding together to solve the sport’s greatest mystery. “Teams are hesitant to invest because they think they’re going to seed the money and then everyone is going to share in the information,” New York Yankees president Randy Levine said. Competition gets in the way of the greater good, greed in the way of greater health, and any advances that could rejigger the system at lower levels stay in-house. “This is one where you need the it-takes-a-village approach,” Beane said. “We’ve got to stop pretending we know the answers. Because whatever we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working.”
    As injuries piled up, teams panicked and started treating their best young players with kid gloves. In 2012, the Toronto BlueJays sent their three top pitching prospects—Noah Syndergaard, Aaron Sanchez, and Justin Nicolino—to Class A Lansing. Syndergaard looked like a Nordic god, six feet six and 240 pounds, all muscle and blond hair. Sanchez was a six-foot-four twig with lightning in his right arm. Nicolino typified the command-and-control left-hander who kills batters softly.
    For their first five starts of the season, each was limited to three innings pitched. This seemed senseless. No studies showed that unusually short outings keep pitchers healthier long-term. The restrictions felt similar to the thinking that limits most current major league starters to around one hundred pitches: a guess. I emailed then–Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos and asked why the team was handling young arms with restraint bordering on alarm.
    â€œOverall, there’s not much science to what we do,” he wrote. “Just being overly cautious with our young arms. We have no evidence that shows it’s the right way to go but we prefer to err on the side of caution.”
    Never before had I heard Anthopoulos, a studious sort whose analytical bent helped him land his job, admit to making a choice about vital pieces of his franchise’s future with “no evidence.” He personified a game spending a billion and a half dollars a year on something it didn’t understand.
    Baseball is a constantly evolving sport, challenging itself and its entrenched beliefs with rigorous self-examination. The current trend toward defensive shifts stemmed from a simple, epistemological question: What is a position? No boundaries define it, so why confine players to certain areas when the numbers show hitters deposit balls in certain pockets more often than others? The game struggles more with macro questions. It’s why baseball has now settled on the reductive strategy for handling pitchers: throw them less. The fallacy of treating something as unique as a pitcher’s arm collectively may be the acme of baseball senselessness.
    Here’s the truth: they’re scared. And maybe they should be. A new generation of kids raised in travel-ball and showcase culture is throwing harder than ever, and the results are troublesome. “UCL reconstruction is becoming a victim of its own success,” wrote Brandon J. Erickson, an orthopedic surgeon, for the American Journal of Orthopedics , “as younger and younger athletes who will likely never play at the major league level are undergoing this procedure at an alarming rate.”
    For a 2015 paper, Erickson used a supercomputer to access a private medical database that cataloged five years’ worth of injuries. He typed in code 24346—UCL reconstruction with a tendon graft—and found 56.8 percent of cases were performed on teenagers. Surely some suffered from delusions of grandeur, others from overeager surgeons, but the reality of the numbers frighten those in baseball who understand what’s happening.
    This problem is only getting worse.
    A T A YOUTH-BASEBALL COMPLEX SOUTHEAST of Phoenix, a ten-year-old boy named Harley Harrington stood on top