There are three local high schoolers who have had Tommy John surgery. It's like they're proud of it.
An it's terrifying. If the pitch clock comes into these leagues (and it will because why not treat 6 year olds like they're pro-players so the dads can live out some weird fantasy) we will see more and more youth with injuries.
Youth baseball is completely different than pros - kids throw way fewer pitches way less frequently. With the exception of extreme high school/college coaches, but those coaches will be extreme regardless.
I would like to push back on that a little. It is very common (again, anecdotally at least with the 16 K-12 districts I work with regularly) for kids to be on multiple teams. They'll do a summer league, fall/winter/spring weekend league and weeknight league. It is not uncommon for kids to be on 2 teams through the school year, and 3 in the summer. So, while there are rules around how many innings one kid can pitch, and how many pitches they can throw, there is no governing board to oversee that. It's all honor system; parents are in control of that. It tends to be more flexible than the rules actually intend.
The logic goes “we need to get these kids ready for college, so they’re used to it.”
It’s certainly plausible.
The article goes into it, but the more likely culprits are starting pitchers throwing harder, throwing more sliders, pitching without foreign substances (so they grip the ball harder), and obsessing over spin rate.
A quick search is just showing studies on sports participation and children's health while they are still children (which seems to be resoundingly positive).
Any kind of relevant metric, such as future injury of health, academic success in a non-sports-scolarship program, future propensity to crime etc etc. are strongly influenced if you simply are the kind of person that is likely to enroll into sports.
This is not how any of it works. At all.
Sounds very similar to the knees and other parts of cricket fast bowlers. They get up to top sprinting speed then come to an immediate halt at the crease to deliver the ball at 90+ mph while keeping their arm straight, like a human trebuchet.
Only one pace bowler in the history of the game seems to have cracked it, James Anderson, now 41yo and still playing, though he bowls closer to the 82-85mph mark.
Professional athletes are now undergoing rigorous training from a much earlier age and are subjected to greater demands compared to previous generations. This plausibly accounts for the rising incidence of injuries as they progress in their careers.
Conversely, older athletes are extending their careers beyond what would have been the norm in earlier generations, which allows injuries to accumulate over time.
If studying medicine it's easy enough in the USA that the tough part is getting admission (which I doubt) then I think your priority would be to fix your degree courses rather than fiddling with the admissions process. It's still weird to me that you can get into university by throwing the ball good, but if someone can balance what is basically a unpaid professional athletics career and get a decent degree too then more power to them.
Some sports ban certain techniques to protect athletes, just some examples: * Backflip in figure skating * Sommersault in longjump * Spinning javelin in javelin throw * Cartwheel in shot put
It's just that doping is only one way, so ignoring something like this which seems likely to cause lasting damage because 'destroying the body for sport is not unusual' is a bit weird when on the other hand athletes are subjected to incredibly invasive surveillance to avoid the temptation to use even the tiniest amount of substances.
I honestly believe that some forms of doping are less dangerous than professional sport per se. This isn't the fairest comparison but far fewer cyclists died of EPO than by trying to descend too quickly.
Men have lower testosterone levels than their grandfathers, there are many possible causes but the treatment I'm talking about only really brings you to a bit above where grandpa would've been.
Because you've never met an athlete, I guess. None of them would stop at "mild".
The goal isn't to get them to a superhuman level, just to level the best genetics produce.