In today's baseball landscape it's difficult to find a pitcher with more than five years service time who hasn't spent a day on the disabled list. Among the most notable names on that short list is Detroit Tigers right-hander Justin Verlander.
Now entering his 11th season (10th full), Verlander will look to make it ten straight with at least 30 starts and nine straight with no less than 201 innings pitched. It's a remarkable run of durability combined with dominance. And as we learned on Friday, the man behind it all his own theories on why younger pitchers are breaking down once they reach the major leagues.
In a new column from ESPN's Buster Olney, Verlander says that teams are spending too much time coddling pitchers before they reach the big leagues. In doing so, Verlander adds, teams are only managing to delay the inevitable breakdown until they start counting on those arms as major league contributors, which ends up costing them even more.
“I think baseball coddles guys so much now that you delay the inevitable. I think the reason you see so many big leaguers blowing out at a young age is because they would have done it before. But now teams limit pitch counts so much, even at the major league level, that now a guy in his second or third year will pop, when it would have happened in the minors.
“Before,” he continued, “when there wasn’t such an emphasis on pitch counts, I think you kind of weeded that out. Then guys would have surgery [in the minor leagues]. Then they’d come back. And then they’d get to the big leagues.”
In essence, Verlander is suggesting that teams turn their young pitchers loose and hope the blowout comes sooner than later. Based on recent statistics, particularly the numbers of pitchers requiring Tommy John surgery on a yearly basis, it almost sounds like a logical approach. However, as Dr. Glenn Fleisig counters, a lot more goes into the breakdown of each individual pitcher.
As the research director at Dr. James Andrews’ American Sports Medicine Institute, Fleisig has studied countless numbers of elbow injuries. He's looked at when they occurred, how a pitcher felt leading up to the injury and the extent of the damage. His findings suggest that poor mechanics and pitching while fatigued are often the biggest factors, which honestly sounds like a victory for coddling.
“I have tremendous respect for Justin Verlander. You and I are not Justin Verlander. We’ve never thrown 200 innings in the major leagues, or even one inning. So he has a different perspective than we have. But I also have a different perspective. I have science.”
"With biomechanics, we can now identify who has poor mechanics, and there are a lot of progressive organizations that are now modifying kids' mechanics in the minor leagues after they're drafted and as they develop."
Science is a powerful tool, no question about it. And the beautiful thing about this is method is the acknowledgement that no two pitchers are created the same. There are pitchers like Verlander, who are simply structurally and mechanically superior. There are pitchers who need to be coddled or molded. And there are pitchers in between, who can be turned loose but should be monitored.
All such pitchers exist, and the key to helping each of them succeed is to correctly identify where they fall. So no, Verlander isn't necessarily wrong. He just knows what works for him, and at 32 years old, there's no reason to change that thinking.
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Mark Townsend is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at bigleaguestew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Townie813
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