Old-Time Sports

DAVIES: There's not a lot of hard data and hard science behind some rules like the 100-pitch limit, but you're saying it is clear that throwing too much when you're a kid makes you more susceptible to injury.

PASSAN: Unquestionably at this point, yes. There is hard data on that. The American Sports Medicine Institute has run multiple studies, you know, a 10-year long study on pitchers following them throughout their youth careers. And what this study showed is that pitching when you're young excessively is truly injurious. It's harmful, and the number of kids who end up pitching too much when they're younger and staying healthy is far outnumbered by the ones that just can't go anymore. And so the incentive is there for change. And Major League Baseball is helping in some respects.

Baseball turned a blind eye to this for a while, but within the past few years, they've really taken the right steps between establishing the Pitch Smart program which encourages pitch limits for certain ages - every age starting at 8 years old that says what is healthy for a kid to go out and do, how often he should pitch, how many pitches he should throw, how many days off, he should take. And beyond that for the major leaguers, they've been collecting injury data for about half a decade now that they're sending to epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins who are looking it over and trying to find some sort of correlation between injuries and something that we just don't know yet.