Saving a Player's Arm

A personal reflection on pitch counts, youth baseball culture, and the dangers of the win-at-all-costs mindset.

By Scott K. Wilder · Baseball and Softball

I was standing behind the backstop at a summer tournament as a parent and not as a coach. I no longer coach my son. Just a baseball dad in a folding chair, tracking my son's game the way you do — half in it, half checking texts.

Then I noticed the kid on the mound for the other team. Still throwing, even though it was the seventh inning.

Since I was also keeping score, I started to pay more attention to the number of pitches this kid was throwing.

He was approaching a hundred pitches.

Fourteen years old.

So my New York City DNA kicked in before I could stop it. I walked over to the other coach — a parent's job, technically, is to stay in the bleachers — and asked him if he knew his pitcher's count. He didn't love the question. A couple of the other parents near me didn't love it either.

“Mind your business,” one of them told me. Not rudely. Just — that's not your kid.

Fair enough. It wasn't.

But I couldn't stop picturing two things at once: that coach thinking about the scoreboard, and that kid's elbow five years from now, in a cold surgical room, getting a ligament replaced with a tendon from somewhere else in his own body. Tommy John surgery. A procedure invented for major leaguers in their thirties, now showing up in teenagers, sometimes after the pressure to win has pushed the limits of what a young arm can handle.

Welcome to the win-at-all-costs culture.

It doesn't announce itself. It shows up as a coach who's a good guy, who loves his players, who just… keeps his ace in one more inning.

Nobody's a villain in this story.

That's what makes it so hard to fix.

New research out of Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington (I like reading obscure research : ) puts a name and a shape to what I saw that day, at a much higher level. Wayne Aquila studied New Zealand's elite Olympic sport system and found the same pattern scaled up: organizations that talk about athlete well-being while quietly measuring everything by medals, rankings, and funding. He calls it what it is — well-being commodified. Turned into a KPI instead of a value. Something to optimize on the way to the real goal, not the goal itself.

The uncomfortable part is that this doesn't require anyone to stop caring about athletes. It only requires the incentives around them to become more important than the athletes themselves.

He didn't study youth baseball. He studied Olympic cyclists. But the mechanism is identical, just wearing a different jersey.

Whether it's a national federation or a coach chasing a tournament trophy, the incentive is the same: results are counted, the cost isn't.

I got a preview of what that cost looks like a few weeks ago, in a physical therapy waiting room with my son. I expected to see a couple of adults nursing old injuries.

Instead I counted — there's that counting again — six kids who look like they are in high school or college all doing rehab on their throwing elbows and shoulders.

Nobody in that room looked shocked to be there. That's the part that stayed with me.It's become nrew normal. Ordinary. Just what happens now if your kid plays baseball year around.

Here's what I keep coming back to. A pitch count isn't a rule some coach made up to slow down the game. It exists because a growing kid's elbow can only absorb so much stress before something gives — usually the ulnar collateral ligament, the same one that ends up on an operating table with Tommy John's name attached to it.

The rule is there because the body sends the bill later, quietly, long after the trophy's on a shelf somewhere.

My New York City upbringing taught me that I'd rather be the parent who asked the awkward question than the parent who watched a kid get hurt and said nothing because it wasn't my kid, not my business, not my problem.

That's really the whole argument, isn't it?

Athlete well-being can't be everybody's business and nobody's job at the same time.Not at the Olympic level, and not on a random field in July with two teams of fourteen-year-olds and a trophy nobody will remember in five years.

The scoreboard resets every game..........A joint doesn't.

About the Author

Scott K. Wilder is the founder of Game Ready Mindset (TM), a program and platform for teams and athletic programs — working with players, position groups, and teams in baseball, soccer, softball, and volleyball. He holds a Master's from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sofia University), a Master's in Business Administration from New York University, and a Master's in International Studies and Conflict Resolution from The Johns Hopkins University, with coaching credentials from Georgetown University, Brian Cain's MPM Program, the National Federation of High Schools, and FC Barcelona Football Club. He is the author of Millennial Leaders and the forthcoming book Compete in Any Weather.

Content ownership: This content is the property of Game Ready Mindset™. All rights reserved.