Stan Conte, the former head athletic trainer for the Dodgers and San Francisco Giants, once remarked that the human shoulder is made for throwing. But, he said, “it may not have been designed to throw as hard as it can 120 times in a two-hour period.”

If baseball were to create a rule to increase the risk of injuring its pitchers, it might look like the one announced Wednesday.

All Double-A and Triple-A pitchers will be required to deliver a pitch within 15 seconds when there are no runners on base. With runners on, pitchers will be limited to 20 seconds. These were among the new pace-of-play initiatives that Minor League Baseball created, in partnership with MLB, to be instituted this season.

There will also be limits on mound visits – six at Triple-A, eight at Double-A, 10 at Class-A. MLB has already restricted its managers, coaches and players to six mound visits in every nine-inning game this season.

Judging by the armchair reaction on social media, the final initiative elicited the most shock: a runner will automatically be placed on second base to begin each inning after the ninth. A variation on this rule has been tried at different professional and amateur levels, including last year’s World Baseball Classic.

In the 11th inning of a semifinal between Puerto Rico and the Netherlands at Dodger Stadium, each half-inning began with runners on first and second. Puerto Rico won in the bottom of the 11th, wasting little time. That was the point.

The purpose of the pitch clock is just as obvious. When the advanced-A Florida State League instituted a 15-second pitch clock in 2016, the average time of game fell from 2:41 to 2:35 according to data provided by Minor League Baseball. The introduction of 20-second pitch clocks in the International League (Triple-A), Pacific Coast League (Triple-A), Eastern League (Double-A), Southern League (Double-A) and Texas League (Double-A) in 2015 hastened average game times in each league, up to 16 minutes per game.

Some players who are familiar with the pitch-clock system were more wary of the consequences on the game than their health. Maybe their priorities are backward.

Officially, neither Minor League Baseball nor the Florida State League records injury data. Disabled list usage can be insightful, though it isn’t a perfect proxy for injuries. (Some teams, like the Dodgers, were notorious for their liberal use of the 10-day DL in 2017.) It’s even less meaningful in the minors, where a “player-coach” might reside on the disabled list all year, only to be activated in case of emergency.

Pitcher DL usage in the Florida State League, however dubious, rose as the time of game fell. According to a study by the analyst Jon Roegele, FSL pitchers made 89 trips to the DL in 2015 and 106 in 2016, the first year of the pitch clock.

Meanwhile, the California League and the Carolina League, baseball’s other “advanced-A” leagues, did not institute a 15-second clock. Their pitchers’ DL visits didn’t rise in 2016 – in fact, Roegele’s data observed the opposite. What might the data be telling us?

Michael Sonne earned his Ph.D. in Kinesiology at McMaster University studying workplace fatigue. He and colleague Peter J. Keir published a study in the Journal of Sport Sciences titled “Major League Baseball pace-of-play rules and their influence on predicted muscle fatigue during simulated baseball games.”

Sonne and Keir concluded that reducing the time between pitches to 20 seconds or less might impair recovery from arm fatigue, with negative implications for elbow injuries in particular. Sound science could have predicted the DL surge that was actually observed in the Florida State League.

Now, with a 15-second limit, Double-A and Triple-A pitchers could be at greater risk too. Pat O’Conner, the president of Minor League Baseball, said he hasn’t personally researched any injury-risk studies, but he offered a few reasons not to worry.

For one thing, O’Conner noted, the 20-second limit with runners on base is not new. Minor league pitchers have already had time to adapt. With the bases empty, he said that minor league pitchers are already pausing 12 to 14 seconds between pitches – an observation based on anecdotal evidence, not hard data.

“Fifteen seconds is not going to rush anybody,” he said.

Moreover, O’Conner said he began pace-of-play talks with officials from MLB and minor league clubs a year and a half ago. MLB’s baseball operations department communicated with all 30 clubs. Why, he asked, would teams agree to a rule that put their own players at risk?

“The players are all under contract to Major League Baseball,” he said. “It’s their players. I trust them implicitly and explicitly not to do something detrimental to the health of their players.”

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Hoornstra: MLB’s new pace-of-play rules are a warning to players – speed up That’s a fair point. And maybe it’s unfair to extrapolate what takes place in the lab to a full season on the field, where variables become hard to predict.

Still, the unintended consequences of these pace-of-play rules are worth monitoring. Will five-man minor league rotations disappear? Will two trends already in motion – stricter limits on prospects’ innings and pitch counts – only gain more steam?

The consequence of a pitch clock could even be something baseball hasn’t seen before – unlike the automatic runner on second, which at least had a trial run on an international stage. For now, it’s being counted as an acceptable cost of progress.

“You’re either growing or you’re dying, is a line out of a Lou Holtz commencement speech,” O’Conner said. “If we’re not evolving, what happens is we become irrelevant. A 20-game losing streak is nothing compared to losing your relevance.”