January 16, 2025

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

Baseball has an influencer that needs to be suspended, for the good of the game and all who pitch. His name is Max Effort.

He sidles up to young pitchers in the midst of a bullpen session and whispers, “You need to throw harder.” He sets up computers and tracking devices and tells pitchers to concentrate on those, rather than hitters. He tries to convince them that the infielders and outfielders behind them are just there for decorative purposes, and that the pitcher’s purpose, beyond all else, is the strikeout. He is an evangelist for the Three True Outcomes — strikeout, walk, home run — when the Real Outcome he pushes is surgery.

Back when pitching was an art and not a laboratory experiment, pitchers didn’t listen to Max Effort. When they needed to add a little zing to the fastball, they could do that. When they sensed the hitters were getting a little antsy, they threw softer. Their pitches never were means to their own end, they were jigsaw pieces that set up the next ones, and worked together to get a mistimed grounder or a soft pop fly. Today’s pitchers would need Duolingo to figure out what that means. They try to be unhittable on every grunting pitch, and Max Effort is right there cheering them on, along with the American Orthopedists Association.

Major League Baseball knows this is a problem. It spent a year interviewing over 200 pitchers, biomechanics experts, pitching coaches, doctors, trainers and others who spend their time on the ground floor. It came out with a report last December that was refreshingly modest. It did not pretend to have out-of-the-box answers, and it acknowledged that the spread of pitching injuries did not appear overnight and will not be reduced in one seasonal cycle. But it identified the destructiveness, and how it is sown, in part, by those who have convinced young pitchers that Max Effort and 100 mph fastballs are their friends, and have given out that information for a fee.

Between 2010 and 2020, Tommy John elbow surgeries rose from 104 to 310, for major and minor leaguers. Pitchers were on the Injured List for a total of 12,185 days in 2024, as opposed to 3,940 in 2005, and shoulder injuries more than doubled. In the top 10 rounds of the amateur draft, thirty-five percent of the drafted pitchers had already had Tommy John surgery, some of them harboring the mistaken notion that such a surgery was a permanent cure.

Not coincidentally, the average MLB fastball now travels at 94.2 mph. In 2008 it was 91.3 percent. At the Perfect Game National Showcase for top prospects, three pitchers threw 95 mph or faster in 2018. This year the number was 36. But because there is such a demand for killer breaking balls and the relatively new “sweeper,” fastball usage has dropped from 60 percent to 48 percent.

Because Max Effort is so triumphant, the emphasis is on throwing as hard as you can as long as you can. Usually that’s not very long. No pitcher in MLB averaged more than 6.3 innings per start in 2024, and only four pitched 200 or more innings. In 2000, seven pitchers averaged seven innings per start. In 1974, when eight pitchers topped 300 innings, five averaged at least eight innings per start, and 62 of them pitched more than the 2024 high of 6.3.

Said a former MLB pitcher in the survey: “I used to pitch to chase outs. Now they chase velocity. I had to play a chess match to try to get 24 or 27 outs. I never went on the IL in 10 or more years, and I’m not superhuman. But I would throw 6 to 10 pitchers as fast as I could during a game. Nolan Ryan was superhuman, but the rest of us had to play cat-and-mouse to get through the lineup.”

Another former pitcher said, “In college it’s max effort all the time. It’s scary. What’s the one reason this stuff is happening? The max effort. But it gets you paid, it gets you scholarships and success.”

The report also points the finger at off-season velocity mills like Driveline that coax extra mph from an arm that’s already been stressed for at least six months. That’s one reason the rate of injuries in spring training and in April are so high. Fewer pitchers put their gloves in the closet and give their arms the proper rest, just as fewer high school athletes are playing other sports in the off-season to thwart the repetitive stress on their shoulders. Although it’s wholesome to be part of several different teams and be a point guard or a defensemen for a few months, pitchers are under pressure to dedicate every waking moment to the computer printouts and the radar gun.

“You’re chasing a number, chasing a metric,” said an MLB trainer. “They throw each pitch and they look at the data and that, unfortunately, leads to increased volume of throwing and increased intensity. That’s the most dangerous component of what’s happening here.”

Once upon a time the minor leagues served as boot camp. Orel Hershiser was a reliever in the Dodgers’ system and pitched 552 minor league innings over seven years. Today’s minor leaguers live on pitch counts and are unprepared to pitch deep into big-league games. But club executives say that’s fine. They want to line up all these hard throwers and, when one breaks down, get another one. In their minds it’s superior, economically at least, to giving eight-year contracts to 30-year-old free agents. Clubs used an average of 32.5 pitchers last year. In 2020 the number was 22.8.

“One of the prominent pitchers said guys are winning the Cy Young with 30 to 40 innings less than me,” said an ex-pitcher. “What incentive do I have to pitch 200 innings?”

Well, you might think about how it rests the bullpen, but apparently that’s not important either, as long as we’re squeezing every fastball out of them before we take them to the hospital.

But it starts long before that. The scouting showcases are kind of like the Keeneland yearling sales. Bring them out, have them walk around in a circle, and then tell them to pound fastballs while we get a reading. The MLB survey has the schedule for one drafted pitcher that includes 11 showcases in six different states from June 18 through Sept. 2. In three of them, between July 2 and July 10, the pitcher threw 70 pitches, presumably with the help of Max Effort.

MLB and USA Baseball came up with a list of guidelines called Pitch Smart for the youth. Then it checked back in 2021 with over a thousand pitchers, from age 8 to age 14, and found that over half of them had ignored at least one suggestion. In 2021, there was an Under-11 team that played 154 games. Until 1960, that was a major league schedule.

What will it take? At the very least, it will take a major league organization that is unafraid to be wrong. It will push its minor leaguers to build innings, even put in four-man rotations if necessary. It will let pitchers throw the pitches that are more comfortable to them. It will program them to get through a lineup three times and maybe even four, and then make sure its relievers are not overburdened.

Beyond that, it will tell its scouts to look extra hard for the Kyle Hendrickses and the Logan Webbs and the Derek Lowes and the Mark Buehrles, guys who know how to pitch with their brains and their memory banks. Grunting will no longer be a prerequisite. And Max Effort will be exiled to track and field.