Pitchers are buckling and breaking across baseball. What is to blame?

 

The 2023 American League Cy Young Award winner, Gerrit Cole, is on the injured list with elbow trouble. The 2022 AL Cy Young winner, Justin Verlander, is out with shoulder inflammation. The 2021 AL Cy Young winner, Robbie Ray, will miss the first half of the season as he makes his way back from Tommy John surgery. The 2020 AL Cy Young winner, Shane Bieber, just learned he will miss a year or more because his elbow needs surgery, too.

That list barely hints at the scale of what has become a full-fledged pitcher injury epidemic, one forcing Major League Baseball to confront the realities of a new era in which velocity, spin rate and swing-and-misses are chased with unprecedented myopia and rewarded with unprecedented payouts.

The full list of injured pitchers reads like a Cy Young ballot for an entire generation, packed with once-promising stars who never fully returned to form and established names who will have to bounce back to remain in pitching’s upper echelon.

...The reality of elite pitching in 2024 is that, even for the healthiest of aces, injury seems like only a matter of time...more