INSIDE THE GAME

“People ask me all the time, ‘Is pitching natural?’ I would say that excessive pitching, throwing 100 full-effort pitches every fifth day, is not natural.”

-- Dr. Glenn Fleisig, Research Director at American Sports Medicine Institute, in an interview with Grantland.com, published March 10, 2015

LOS ANGELES – Good pitchers are hard to come by and losing them is costly. Nobody knows this better than the Dodgers, who have already been denied the service of two starters – Hyun-Jin Ryu and Brandon McCarthy – for the rest of the season.

That’s more than $17 million in salary sitting on the disabled list due to injuries that came about simply by doing their jobs – throwing a baseball.

Ryu was lost to surgery on his shoulder, a joint that has bothered him to varying degrees for years. McCarthy, on the other hand, fell victim to what seems to be a rising issue across Major League Baseball – a torn ulnar collateral ligament that required Tommy John surgery.

Tommy John is a procedure in which a damaged UCL in the elbow is replaced with a tendon from elsewhere in the body. The surgery is named after the first pitcher to undergo it, a former sinkerballer who damaged his UCL while pitching for the Dodgers in 1974. John would recover from the surgery and end up pitching until 1989. Tommy John surgery has saved or prolonged the careers of numerous pitchers pitchers since, but it has become so commonplace in the last four years that it has alarmed many in the baseball world.

According to Stan Conte, the Dodgers’ Vice President of Medical Services, there was an average of 15.8 Tommy John surgeries per season in Major League Baseball from 1990 to 2011.

Then, in 2012, there were suddenly 36. The number dipped to 18 in 2013, but last season it rose again to 31.

“Is there an upward trend?” asks Conte, “There is. In the last three years it looks like an epidemic.”