Saving the Pitcher

by Will Carroll

The most dangerous thing in baseball is a pitcher with potential. More than half of all starting pitchers will end up on the Disabled List and over the last three seasons, more than two hundred pitchers at all levels of professional baseball have undergone ligament replacement surgery that has cost them more than a year of an already finite resource, their baseball career. Teams are losing on the field because of an inability to keep their own pitchers healthy. Teams are losing on their ledgers as they pay out ever increasing salaries to pitchers that are unable to perform and overpaying those pitchers that do somehow remain healthy. In baseball, there is a new orthodoxy that "there is no such thing as a pitching prospect." Too many young flamethrowers simply burn out, then fade away, their potential never reached and their team never seeing any gain from their sizeable investments of time and money. Can young arms be saved from the torture and abuse subjected on them by the lords of baseball? The answer is yes. We are losing pitchers far too young, far too early, and it can be prevented. Saving the Pitcher addresses all aspects of pitcher injuries, pitcher abuse, pitcher workload, pitcher mechanics, and most importantly, injury prevention. Knowledge from doctors, trainers, coaches, pitchers, biomechanists, and researchers make this book the first complete look at pitcher health. These injuries don't have to happen. From major leaguers to little leaguers, this book is a must read for pitchers, parents, and baseball fans everywhere.

Genres: Baseball, Sports

204 pages, Paperback

First published April 20, 2004

Reviews

[Skip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any pitcher, anyone teaching a person person to pitch, who is interested in that pitcher being healthy and remaining healthy, must read this book, and must learn the lessons in this book, and use those lessons well.

[Rodger Payne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carroll's other book on steroids is a better read. The statistical sections here are basically reviews of well-known techniques (at least in SABR "stat-head" circles) and I was not grabbed by the technical chapters on pitching mechanics and training.