Two conflicting ideas for combatting pitching-arm injuries and improving baseball

The baseball season opened last week with two games played in Japan. Today is Opening Day in America.

2025 will be my 70th season as a baseball fan, though I didn’t follow the sport closely until the 1957 season. Baseball has had its ups and downs over the years. Right now, I think it’s up slightly, thanks to a few rule changes, especially the pitch clock.

However, baseball has its critics among serious fans, and the main criticism has merit. Arnold Kling states it here:

The game of baseball today is dominated by pitchers who throw extremely hard for a few innings and then get removed. It is dominated by batters who try to raise the “launch angle” when they hit the ball, hoping for a homerun whenever they make contact. These tactics have two adverse results. One is to reduce baseball to The Three Outcomes—strikeout, walk, or homerun. The other is to make pitching a dangerous activity, sort of like pro football, in that the man must risk damaging his body in order to play.

I think this criticism had a little more force a few years ago. The first sentence is at least as true as it ever was, but these days I hear less talk about “launch angle” and more about hitting to the opposite field (“the back side”). (I’m amazed that this thinking didn’t take hold in the era of extreme fielding shifts, when the rewards of “going the other way” were at their peak.) And advancing runners without home runs has come back into vogue thanks in part to new rules that encourage stolen bases.

Nonetheless, the rash of injuries to pitchers’ arms constitutes a crisis and not enough balls are hit into the field of play.

Kling presents a fix that Max Scherzer, the great pitcher, has proposed. It’s one that’s supported by a number of smart people who care about baseball.

Scherzer wants to penalize teams for taking their starter out early. Under his plan, a starting pitcher would have to remain in the game until he achieved one of the following: six complete innings, 100 pitches thrown, or four runs given up. (There would be an exception for injuries.)

This rule is counterintuitive. How, Kling asks, would staying in the game longer and throwing more pitches reduce arm injuries?

His answer is that to stay in the game longer, the pitcher would have to go easier on his arm. Says Kling:

It reminds me of the argument that if we got rid of deposit insurance, bank customers would make sure that their banks operate more safely. Or the classic economist’s joke that you could induce safe driving if instead of installing air bags you could put a big, sharp spike on the steering wheel, aimed at the driver’s chest.

I’ve heard other, similar proposals to force managers to keep pitchers in the game longer. One, mentioned by Kling, is to limit staffs to, say, 11 pitchers. Currently teams carry 13, making it easier to lift starters and relievers early.

I give these ideas high marks for creativity, but I’m not sure they are the right answer.

First, it seems contrary to sporting principles to induce athletes to curtail their excellence — in this case to get pitchers to throw with less velocity and spin than they can. Of course, there are different definitions of pitching excellence. Becoming crafty enough to last six innings or 100 pitches is certainly a form of excellence.

Still, I enjoy seeing the raw excellence of a 100 mile-per-hour fastball or a wicked breaking ball. And I’m not alone. When Stephen Strasberg broke in, his outings were must-see due to the results of his all-out effort. (But Strasberg suffered major arm problems and his career was shortened by them.) Today, Paul Skenes’ super-natural stuff has created even more buzz than Strasburg’s did..

Second, I think it will be awfully difficult for pitchers to adjust to the new rule Scherzer and others want to impose. Obviously, they will have to use sub-optimal stuff during the early innings, but how much should they moderate? Enough to last for six innings or 100 pitches, but not so much as to be ineffective. But where is that balance — that sweet spot — to be found?

And can we say with confidence that, in the end, pitchers would, in fact, have fewer arm injuries pitching six innings with somewhat less “stuff” than they do now pitching four or five innings with max effort?

We don’t know.

To find out, baseball could try out the new rule in the minor leagues, as it does with other major rule changes. I think Scherzer’s rule, or any variation of it, would need to be tested that way.

But this raises another problem. Organizations like to limit the number of pitches their young prospects throw in the minors. Most minor league starters have a pitch limit of between 70-75 pitches. Some organizations, like the Orioles, like to have two young starters work four innings each.

There’s a good reason for this. Forcing young starters with no experience pitching in a 130-game season to work much longer than 70-75 pitches would risk arm injuries to the prize prospects in teams’ organizations. In effect, it would make them guinea pigs.

One way to minimize the problem would be to experiment with the new rule only in Triple A ball, the highest minor league classification. Triple A pitchers are older, more experienced, and typically more mature than those at lower levels. Many have some big league experience. They could adjust more easily to Scherzer’s experiment.

Meanwhile, organizations could develop their prize prospects at the Double A level. And they could agree informally among themselves to send enough decent older position players to Double A to provide young pitching prospects with suitable competition.

There’s an alternative change that might curb the arm injury epidemic — one that’s intuitive, rather than counter-intuitive. Enlarge pitching staff from 13 to 15 or even 16. I discussed this idea here.

This change would enable pitchers to work less, and thereby place less stress on their arms. The would rule be especially beneficial for relievers — closers in particular. Managers would be less tempted to make them seek five-out saves and pitch back-to-back days. (For example, Felix Bautista of the Orioles was the game’s best reliever in 2023. But because he was overused in the ways described above, he blew out his arm in September of that year, missed all of 2024, and is touch-and-go as the 2025 season opens.)

The load of starting pitchers could be dialed back, as well. Some teams are toying with six-pitcher rotations. With larger staffs, this option might become more attractive.

As with the Scherzer approach, we don’t really know whether or to what extent larger staffs would reduce injuries. But I think there’s more certainly about how this would play out than an approach that requires pitchers to adjust the way they pitch.

One downside of larger staffs is that it might reduce the glamor of being a starting pitcher. Four-to-five inning starts are less the stuff of legends than six-to-seven inning ones. (I suspect this factor enters into Scherzer’s thinking.)

But top starting pitchers will always be looked at as studs. They were when Walter Johnson was pitching 34 complete games a year; when Sandy Koufax was pitching 28 of them; when Roger Clemens was pitching 18; when Max Scherzer was completing only 4 and throwing 230 innings.

They were in 2023 when Gerrit Cole completed only two games and pitched just (a league leading) 209 innings. They will be, though probably to a slightly lesser degree, if no one pitches a complete game and 160 innings leads the league.

There’s a way, though, to get more innings from starters from the same number of pitches — put a limit on the number of foul balls the batter can hit before striking out. This wouldn’t just help pitchers stay in the game longer. It would also reduce the number of foul balls — the most boring play in baseball — and speed up games.

I offered this suggestion a while back. My suggestion has not played well with most of the people I’ve discussed it with, but it’s a serious idea. I’m told that at least two of the best minds associated with the sport favor a limit more strict than the one I suggested.

Yes, limiting the number of foul balls would cut back sharply on a skill batters have developed — one that helps them combat all the velocity and fierce stuff they have to face. But this is a skill fans don’t enjoy. If anything, it annoys them, except perhaps late in close games. (I would support an exception to the limit on foul balls in those situations.)

I concede, though, that enlarging pitching staffs is unlikely to result in more balls being hit into the field of play. Making starters throw more pitches might well accomplish this to some extent.

Enough! The Washington Nationals are about to open their season. Enjoy the games, flawed though they are.