Arthur: At least all these Tommy John surgeries aren’t rotator cuff surgeries
From SABR member Rob Arthur at FiveThirtyEight on March 27, 2015:
No pitcher’s elbow seems safe anymore. Earlier in spring training, Yu Darvish, the perennial Cy Young contender and ace of the Texas Rangers staff, had Tommy John surgery. A week later, promising Mets pitcher Zach Wheeler was under the knife. Those guys are part of a proud lineage of phenoms whose elbows couldn’t withstand the crazy forces of pitching a baseball every five days. In the past five years, 299 major and minor league pitchers have had Tommy John surgery. The epidemic — or whatever you want to call it — isn’t over yet.
But beneath the scary headlines and the relentless drumbeat of crisis, there’s a silver lining to this rash of pitcher injuries: Having a bum elbow sure beats having a bum shoulder. Despite all the Tommy John surgeries, we’re living in a golden era of pitcher health.
It’s hard not to be anxious about a crisis when you look at data about just how many ulnar collateral ligaments are being repaired through Tommy John surgery. The number of surgeries in the past 10 years is 115 percent higher than it was the 10 years prior.
That’s a huge spike, yes, but the intriguing thing is what’s happened as those elbows have flared up: Shoulders haven’t. Using data from Baseball Prospectus’s injury archive (maintained by Corey Dawkins), we can chart the escalating number of elbow surgeries over the past 35 years against the number of shoulder surgeries: Right around 1998, the two paths diverge, and in recent years, shoulder surgeries are down.
Read the full article here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/at-least-all-these-tommy-john-surgeries-arent-rotator-cuff-surgeries/
Originally published: March 27, 2015. Last Updated: March 27, 2015.