Despite best efforts, Yanks youngsters still have arm troubles

“Three areas that can cause injured arms are a poor delivery, poor conditioning and overuse.” – Rick Peterson

For Major League teams, Peterson’s words have been ones to live by. Over the years they’ve seen countless prospects fall victim to various arm maladies which have turned once promising careers into veritable busts. With the stakes so much higher these days, in the form of multimillion dollar bonuses, teams are looking for every conceivable way to protect their young arms — now termed assets because of the immense investments required just to obtain them.

This is the exact reason the Yankees have acted so strangely, by traditional standards, with Joba Chamberlain this season, and why they will likely act similarly with Phil Hughes next year. They want to avoid the overuse part of Peterson’s statement. Since it is something they can directly control, they’re certainly going to take every precaution possible. Hence, what might seem like ridiculous, kid-glove rules are, to the Yankees, a way to ensure that they don’t overwork their prized young arms.

Yet even the most stringent precautions can’t ensure an injury-free existence. As Joe Brescia chronicles in The New York Times, the Yankees have seen a large number of their best prospects miss significant time with arm injuries over the past few years. This year alone they had two prospects, George Kontos and Brett Marshall, undergo Tommy John Surgery, while another, Dellin Betances, had ligament reinforcement surgery, similar to the procedure Mariano Rivera underwent in 1992. What is it with the Yankees and injuries to young pitchers?

There are two question which need asking before this one. One is of whether the Yankees are doing anything to exacerbate the injury rate, but even before that is a more important one. How are other teams doing in this area? Is the Yankees situation anomalous? Or are other teams seeing their prospects go down at a similar rate? It’s tough to know that answer. We might follow all levels of the Yankees system, but it’s difficult to keep up with all levels of all systems.

Though it might seem like the Yankees system is riddled with injuries, the case is sometimes overstated, and Brescia’s account is guilty of that. He mentions a handful of names whose surgery ostensibly has little or nothing to do with the Yankees system.

Andrew Brackman: Underwent Tommy John surgery before throwing a pitch for the organization. It was a known issue when the Yankees selected him with the 27th pick in the 2007 draft.

Humberto Sanchez: Underwent Tommy John surgery after the Yankees acquired him from the Detroit Tigers in the Gary Sheffield trade. Sanchez’s injury history was one reason the Tigers were willing to part with him for the over-the-hill Sheffield. He hadn’t even started a game in the minors for the Yanks before the surgery.

J.B. Cox: His elbow surgery had nothing to do with on-field issues. It came as the result of a bar fight.

Zach McAllister: Yes, he did have an MRI, but his stint on the DL was mostly related to fatigue. He’s come back strong since the team reactivated him, and is showing no signs of injury.

Ian Kennedy: It’s tough to pin an aneurysm on something the Yanks did. You can’t rule it out, but there’s certainly no causation there.

Chien-Ming Wang: Again, it’s tough to make a causal connection, but there’s a pile of evidence which suggests that Wang’s shoulder injury was a cascade from his foot injury, which he suffered running the bases.

That still leaves a number of names, like Tim Norton, Alan Horne, Betances, Chris Garcia, Marshall, and others, who have been injured while in the Yankees system. But once you weed out the names that don’t appear to be related to work done in the Yankees system, the injury numbers seem to be at a more reasonable level.

Echoing Peterson’s three points, Yankees’ senior vice president for baseball operations Mark Newman notes what the Yankees can control. “We certainly don’t overwork guys. We can control three things: their workload, their mechanics and their conditioning.” Surely all teams do this, based on advice from numerous experts. Still, that might not be enough in some instances. “The DNA of the player, how strong the connective tissue is, is something we don’t have any control over,” adds Newman.

Even with these precautions in place, teams can’t be sure of an injury’s nature. As Peterson says, it could come from their past. “If you monitor pitch counts, the young pitcher might not be overused currently, but he might have been overused in the past,” says the former A’s and Mets pitching coach. Even if they’re not overworked, poor mechanics can be a killer. “A hundred pitches with poor mechanics is a lot more stressful on the arm than a hundred pitches with good mechanics,” says Dr. Glenn Fleisig, the chairman of research at the American Sports Medicine Institute.

Rest assured that the Yankees are using every bit of information they have on hand in evaluating their young pitchers. This includes not only general information like innings and pitch counts, but other factors like a pitcher’s mechanics and conditioning. Sometimes things just aren’t going to work out. But with an effective injury prevention system in place, perhaps we’ll see more prospects break through, rather than bust out.

That’s the idea behind the Joba Rules, and really the rules for any young pitcher. As Newman notes, the Yankees, and surely the other 29 teams, have been tracking injuries for the past 20 years. These rules don’t exist just to infuriate fans. They’re in place because data has shown that there are certain things that correlate strongly with injury. The hope is that by heeding these correlations that the overall number of injuries decreases. That’s the best scenario for everyone involved.