We brought up the notion that perhaps the faster game would negatively affect major league pitchers in terms of their health in this prior post. We will start by stating that we here at BP have no data currently either pro or con of how the pitch clock might have negatively affected MLB pitchers health so far this year. That will have to wait for another time. For now, we just want to look at one particular pitcher, Shohei Ohtani. As you are all probably, quite aware Ohtani’s pitching season ended on the news last week that he tore his ulnar collateral ligament (UCL). He has though continued in a DH role, since evidently the injury will not worsen or affect him in terms of hitting, since just throwing seems to be an issue now.
This marks the second time in Ohtani’s career that he had an issue with his UCL. The first was in his MLB rookie year of 2018 when an MRI towards the end of that season detected an issue. In October of that same year, Ohtani would undergo what is known as Tommy John surgery to repair the ligament in his elbow. That would curtail Ohtani’s pitching career for the entire 2019 season and due to the Covid pandemic he would not pitch again until July 2020.
Fast forward to August 2023, this latest injury for Ohtani might have not just interrupted his pitching career for the remainder of this year, but ended it permanently. We realize that pitchers and specifically their arms are some of the most valuable body parts in the game, as well as the most fragile. Look no further than a couple of ex-Met pitchers, Jacob DeGrom and Noah Syndergaard to see recent examples of how injuries can derail what might have been hall of fame careers. Another sad example of injury wiping out a promising career was the late Mark “The Bird” Fidrych who dazzled the fans back in 1976, but tore his rotator cuff the next season and was never the same pitcher. A tale of pitching brilliance sadly overshadowed by injury, which again speaks to the stress that MLB pitchers place on their bodies to perform at such a high level. Thus a player like Ohtani who already had surgery on his arm back in 2018, might have been just pitching on borrowed time.
The realization is that pitching is a stressful endeavor and one that owners pay a premium for those that have mastered their art. Why then would MLB and the owners not want to do everything that they could to protect this most valuable of assets, pitcher’s arms? We believe implementing the pitch clock could only imperil a pitchers arm by placing more stress on pitchers to throw more pitches in a shorter period of time. As noted in our prior post, there was scientific logic that raised the likelihood of injury due to arm fatigue, since there would be an increased number of pitches thrown in a shorter period.
We were curious to see what if any adjustment Ohtani had to make from the prior year before the pitch clock to the current year as compared to all other pitchers. We then found that Baseball Savant tracks how quickly a pitcher delivers their pitches for this year and prior years. Note the metric used by Baseball Savant is somewhat different from that used by MLB. The MLB pitch timer starts when the pitcher receives the return throw from the catcher and ends once the pitcher starts his delivery. The Baseball Savant pitch tempo metric measures the time between pitch releases: starting the clock as soon as the pitcher releases the previous pitch and ending when the pitcher releases the next pitch. Despite the difference in metrics, the ultimate result is the same as the pitcher has a shorter period between each pitch from 2022 to 2023 to release the next pitch.
With this information, we decided to compare pitchers who threw a minimum of 500 pitches in 2023 to the same criteria in 2022. We came up with a population of 102 pitchers who pitched in both years and have thrown that minimum (500 pitches) so far in 2023 (as of August 30th) as compared to 2022. For our analysis, we also only looked at the difference with no runners on base. There are separate metrics for analyzing pitchers with runners on base, but for our purposes, we did not analyze those at this time.
What we found was that Ohtani had the second greatest differential from 2022 to 2023 as compared to the other 102 pitchers in the population. That means that only one other pitcher out of the entire population had to speed up their delivery faster than Ohtani did from 2022 to 2023. In 2022, Ohtani took 21.727 seconds between pitches, but in 2023 that dropped to 16.577 seconds. Out of all those other pitchers, only Michael Kopech of the Chicago White Sox had a larger differential between the two years. Kopech’s difference from 2022 to 2023 was 6.252 seconds, going from 21.135 to 14.883 seconds, respectively. Only Kopech and Ohtani at this point in 2023 have pitch deliver times between the two years that exceeded the five-second mark.
As noted previously, it is impossible for us to state analytically at this point whether the pitch clock has increased injuries, since there is currently too little data to analyze. Reasonably though, it makes sense that placing even more strain on a pitcher in a shorter period of time likely cannot help in their quest to prevent injuries, based on the opinion of ergonomic experts. Teams who already go to great lengths by “babying” their pitchers by limiting their pitch counts evidently did not see any risk to these same athletes by speeding up their overall pitching routine. If the goal is to protect a players health and their productivity over time, then requiring pitch counts can be seen as a step to limit stress on a pitcher, but somehow asking them to pitch faster was somehow not seen as adding stress to these athletes? Hmmmmm.
The delivery figures noted above for Ohtani were 21.727 and 16.577 for 2022 and 2023, respectively. This represents a 23.7% increased change in delivery speed for Ohtani when runners were on base. With runners on base, Ohtani’s delivery figures were 26.6 and 19.3 in 2022 and 2023, respectively, which represented a 27.4% increase. Let’s take an example and assume that Ohtani like most pitchers throws on average of about 100 pitches per game. We will further assume that 60% of those pitches occur without a man on base and the other 40% occurred with a runner on. Based on those assumptions we can calculate that Ohtani would have had to throw those same 100 pitches roughly 10 minutes faster in 2023 than he did in 2022. That would mean that Ohtani had roughly 39.5 minutes to deliver 100 pitches in 2022, but only 29.5 minutes in 2023. Thus, he had to speed up his delivery by more than 25% to meet the time constraints placed in 2023 by the newly instituted pitch clock.
Ohtani could very well never pitch again, and although he can continue to thrive as an everyday position player, his marquis value was as this unique two-way player to the delight of most fans. MLB and the owners should have done everything they could to protect such an asset. Once again we cannot analytically conclude that the pitch clock led to his latest injury. On the other hand though, how can a rule to speed up the pace of play not negatively affect the health of athletes who already were placing their bodies, and specifically their shoulders and arms, under some of the most stress in all of professional sports.
Sadly, the baseball hierarchy never considered that logic before rushing to impose the pitch clock.
Baseball Purist 
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