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Mar 12, 2012, 03:18pm EDT |
Kid Pitching Studies Throw Youth Sports a Curveball
Bob Cook
I write about youth sports under the title: Your Kid's Not Going Pro.
It's right there on the front page of the New York Times: studies say that, despite usual admonitions to the contrary, maybe it's not such a big deal if young kids throw curveballs.
For decades, it has been an article of faith for parents of young pitchers: Do not let them throw curveballs. The reason was simple. Contorting elbows — all in the service of ever more competitive baseball at ever younger ages — puts more strain on the joint than arms can handle.
But as the research into the biomechanics of pitching has evolved, the debate has grown more robust, and more perplexing. A recent major study shows curveballs pose no greater risk than that of other pitches. And many studies lately have shown that the greatest threat to young arms is not throwing curves but making too many pitches of any kind.
"Science is banging heads with intuition and gut instinct," said Glenn Fleisig, the research director of the American Sports Medicine Institute, who has conducted studies on breaking balls and young arms since 1996. "For years, we told people that curveballs were bad. Then we set out to prove it. We did not prove curveballs are safe, but we could not prove they were dangerous."
There hasn't been one single study proving curveballs are dangerous for developing arms. But as Fleisig told the Times, there haven't been studies proving they're safe, either. That's why his establishment's founder, James Andrews, orthopedic surgeon to the stars, is still advising youngsters against throwing curveballs. From the Times:
"What we found out in the lab is true," Andrews said. "For pitchers with proper mechanics, the force of throwing a curveball is no greater than for a fastball. But that's not what happens in reality on the baseball field. Many kids don't have proper mechanics or enough neuromuscular control, or they are fatigued when throwing curveballs. Things break down.
"Those are the kids I'm seeing every day in my operating room."
Little League Baseball imposed strict per-game pitch limits five years ago, but Andrews said he performed about seven times the number of arm operations on young pitchers that he did 15 years ago.
By the way, Little League Baseball has its own study, released in the January-February 2012 edition of the journal Athletic Training & Sports Health Care, in which University of North Carolina researchers also found no link between curveballs and young players' arm injuries. The Times noted this study (which was posted online March 31, 2011) in its article.
While the Times also talked about frequency of pitching (on top of lousy mechanics) as probably the bigger factor in young players' arm injuries, here are some numbers from the Little League- and USA Baseball-commissioned study that will give you pause about letting your kid ever pitch -- especially if your kid is good at it:
A sample of Little League pitchers and their parents (n = 409) and high school pitchers (n = 293) completed a survey about their pitching practices and injury history. Among Little League pitchers, pitching in travel ball and pitching in a showcase were associated with pitching with elbow pain. Travel ball pitching and a higher proportion of games were associated with pitching with shoulder pain. For high school pitchers, playing in multiple leagues concurrently was associated with elbow and shoulder pain. Showcase pitching was associated with pitching with shoulder pain. Showcase participation and pitching with elbow pain were associated with elbow injury. Pitching with shoulder pain and tiredness were associated with shoulder injury. ...
Upper extremity pain is a common complaint among adolescent baseball pitchers. In a longitudinal study ... 32% of the adolescent pitchers reported shoulder pain and 26% reported elbow pain during or after pitching. Another prospective study reported that 50% of the adolescent pitchers experienced shoulder or elbow pain during the season.
The conundrum in youth baseball (and softball) is that, as currently constructed, kids generally pitch all the time, or never. And even if Little League puts pitch limits on kids, travel leagues, which are far more important in determining who the elite prospects are, don't.
For you parents of pitchers, I'll save you a step: here a link to scheduling an appointment at Dr. Andrews' practice.