What was once a rare, eye-popping physical feat in baseball has become more of a requirement. Watching a four-seam fastball pop into the catcher’s mitt and see the radar gun light up with three digits struck fear into the batter’s box.
In some cases, it still does. As the norm for pitch velocity rises, so does the number of hit batters at the MLB level. Since 2018, MLB’s hit-by-pitch per game rate has been 0.4 or higher – seven consecutive seasons.
But is the velocity-first mindset damaging the future of the sport?
“What we’re doing now is we’re building drag strip racers, and then you want them to run the Indy 500,” Texas Rangers head team physician Dr. Keith Meister said. “It’s impossible. They’re constantly spiking their velocity; they’re constantly max effort on every pitch.”
Boston Red Sox reliever Aroldis Chapman still holds the record for the fastest MLB pitch ever recorded at 105.8 mph, which happened in 2010 when he was a rookie for the Cincinnati Reds. Chapman has built a reputation for the flamethrower on his left shoulder. In 2025, he earned his eighth All-Star selection, still throwing a sinker that averages around 99.9 mph.
Chapman has built a name for himself as one of the hardest throwing pitchers in the history of baseball. When his career began in 2010, he was a rare breed of pitcher who could consistently throw in hundreds out of the bullpen. Today, that club has expanded to the point where starting pitchers are lighting up the radar gun at 100 mph into the sixth inning and beyond. As a result, Tommy John has become a well-known name in circles beyond those of the average MLB fan.
Tommy John surgery, named after the former Dodgers pitcher who first received the procedure in 1974, replaces a torn ulnar collateral ligament with a tendon from elsewhere on the body, such as the hamstring or forearm. John pitched another 14 seasons in MLB after his ground-breaking surgery. In the decades that followed, the procedure has become more routine for doctors, teams and baseball players. When someone needs Tommy John surgery, the expectation is they won’t throw at the big league level for a year. But that’s not always the case.
For some, it’s earlier than that. For some, it could take a bit longer. The average time between surgery and starting a throwing program is 155 days, and 614 days before the pitcher returns to the same level of play, if they ever do, according to baseball and Tommy John surgery researcher Jon Roegele. It’s also not uncommon that some of those players never throw competitively again. In 2023, 35.3% of active pitchers in MLB had undergone Tommy John surgery at some point in their career, some of whom had undergone multiple procedures.
Meister, a renowned orthopedic surgeon in the baseball industry, has performed the surgery thousands of times throughout his more than three-decade-long career in medicine. Since 2004, Meister has served as the head team physician for the Rangers, who claimed their first World Series championship against the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2023.
So far in 2025, the Diamondbacks’ season has been derailed by such injuries. The crown jewel of general manager Mike Hazen’s offseason, starter Corbin Burnes, blew out his elbow on June 1 and is done for this season and possibly the next after having Tommy John surgery. The Diamondbacks have placed six pitchers on the injured list this season with elbow injuries that have required the procedure.
Meister has performed on over a hundred drafted or current MLB players, including stars such as former Cy Young winners Shane Bieber of the Cleveland Guardians and Jacob deGrom of the Rangers. Even the best the sport has to offer lose time in their career to the procedure. deGrom is back in Cy Young conversations this season after playing sparingly the past three seasons and having surgery in 2023. Meister believes younger players are pushed to their limits too often early in their careers.
“You’ve got a handful of guys that we’ve done a third procedure on that are successfully pitching at a major league level,” Meister said. “But it doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to last the remainder of their careers. The harder you push your automobile, the likelihood that it’s going to break down becomes higher in a shorter period of time.”
Setting the tone
Just before the 2025 MLB All-Star break, Milwaukee Brewers rookie Jacob Misiorowski and Pittsburgh Pirates phenom Paul Skenes faced off on the mound in the Brew City, and the matchup instantly became a midseason spectacle for baseball fans. Once the matchup was confirmed, the Brewers pre-sold more than 26,000 tickets. The stadium was pushed to a standing-room-only crowd, and the team reported an attendance of 42,774, the most-attended Brewers game of the season.
All to see a couple of rising stars in the game overpower batters with serious heat on the radar gun.
As exciting and intriguing as it could be for fans to watch, velocity and spin rate are the crux of the problem for pitchers at any level. It all starts at the top. Organizations set the tone for younger athletes in any sport by drafting, signing or promoting players for specific reasons. In MLB, scouts are told to look for velocity and spin rate that leads to sharp movement of the baseball. Players who achieve higher spin rates can be rewarded with accolades and future compensation.
Former major league pitcher Trevor Bauer is a perfect example.
When MLB decided to crack down on “sticky stuff,” which helped pitchers grip the ball and generate more spin, Bauer was at the center of it because he was so public with his pursuit of more velocity and more spin rate. But his process was common and legal.
Sort of.
Using foreign substances to manipulate a pitch is illegal, but that hasn’t stopped pitchers from trying to be sneaky. While other pitchers used substances like Spider-Tack or even pine tar or wax to glue their fingers to the ball to generate spin, Bauer’s method of picking up spin blurred the lines of the MLB rulebook.
He discovered mixing rosin and sunscreen, both legal substances in baseball, with his sweat to create a sticky substance that generated more spin.
“Both are legal substances. The combination of the two is technically illegal,” Bauer posted to Twitter, now known as X, in 2018. “(Gray) area for sure. It becomes super sticky, which counts as a ‘foreign substance’ which pitchers aren’t allowed to have on their person. But, both substances are legal on their own.”
Again, Bauer was one of many professional pitchers bending the rules. Players would use the rosin bag on the pitching mound and apply it to the sunscreen on their arm. That’s it. Pretty simple, and very effective.
Bauer’s four-seam fastball never reached 3,000 revolutions per minute in his first seven seasons in the big leagues with the Arizona Diamondbacks and then Cleveland Indians. Suddenly, in 2019, 12 of his pitches peaked over the 3,000 RPM threshold. The 2020 season was Bauer’s big year, when his pursuit of spin paid off. He tossed 21 pitches in the COVID-shortened season over 3,000 RPM and won the National League Cy Young award with the Cincinnati Reds. That led to a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the ensuing offseason worth $102 million over the next three years.
Bauer identified that spin rate meant better pitches, which meant a better chance to succeed and eventually cash in with a handsome pay day. He has not had Tommy John surgery, but after MLB’s suppression of foreign substances, the message was clear to pitchers: Spin rate is the key to success, not sticky stuff. That’s why these issues still prevail.
“Things are not going to change at the lower levels until you ask for something different at the upper level,” Meister said. “When your scouts are going out there with radar guns and Trackman data (a ball and player tracking technology) and that’s how you’re selecting individuals in the draft, what are all these programs going to cater to? They’re going to cater to what the professional rams are asking for. That’s more velocity and more spin. It’s that simple.”
Links to UCL surgery
A 2025 study by the Orthopedic Journal of Sports Medicine discovered pitchers who threw the ball harder but their fastball less, and had superior pitching abilities, were linked to UCL surgery. The study was done using players with matched controls and mechanics, meaning there was not a significant difference in spin, approach, release points and overall movement. That means the fastballs being thrown by these players, though not as frequently, were max effort, and the offspeed pitches (curveballs, sliders, changeups, etc.) were more heavily relied upon and led to strains and injuries.
“Some organizations will go ahead and draft guys with injury history knowing that they’re likely going to have Tommy John surgery because they max out,” USA Today MLB columnist Bob Nightengale said. “Teams like the Dodgers or Tampa Bay Rays kind of chew them up and spit them out. They’ve got guys with high velocity, and when they get hurt, they’ll go on to the next guy.”
The methods which the pros use are subsequently setting the standards for the next generation. At Arcadia High School in Phoenix, coach Jeffrey Fierro is training his pitchers to pitch, not just throw for velocity. Fierro helped to revive the Northern Arizona University club baseball team as club president before getting into coaching in 2012 at Kingman High School. He has since led and assisted with several different high school baseball programs in Arizona and Oregon before recently landing at Arcadia. For Fierro, locating pitches and managing the amount of effort on pitches throughout a game and a season is half the battle.
“Players have to feel comfortable talking to their coach about where they’re at, and I think that gets missed a lot,” Fierro said. “Whether it’s coaches wanting wins or programs wanting to be successful, sometimes the individual gets lost and left behind. I think the key point is making sure that there is that strong relationship.”
At the youth and high school levels, players have the option to play year-round. Starting in the spring with their local team, to summer travel ball, to fall and winter club teams, more stress is being placed on pitching elbows than ever before. That stress may not materialize into an injury immediately, but high school pitchers wind up having surgery by the average age of 23.
“There’s really no downtime,” Fierro said. “If there’s no communication between the club ball coach, school coaches, high school or collegiate, then you can see the breakdown in that overuse. … I think the specialization of one sport too early has added to the overuse. You have kids pitching year-round for multiple years, from the time they hit early middle school age all the way up through college. They’re throwing them around and their body does not have time to recuperate.”
A serious player with reasonable hopes to go pro, as soon as high school graduation, might explore training facilities such as Driveline, which currently operates in three locations. One of those locations is in Scottsdale, where high school athletes train and look over data to increase their velocity. Even players from the major leagues stop by during their offseason to pick up some speed on their fastball. It’s so effective, some organizations have even begun employing Driveline coaches to work with their talented group of prospects.
The Dodgers have hired several Driveline coaches since 2020 to work in their player development program. In 2020, the Dodgers pitching staff had just six injured list stints on their pitching staff in the COVID-shortened season, the fourth least in MLB. Fast forward to 2025, the team has led all of baseball in pitchers on the injured list for three years in a row.
Overall, many believe Driveline does have a positive impact on the game. It strengthens pitchers both physically and mentally. Not only are the players getting a boost to their velocity and spin while learning to throw more effective pitches, but the data tracking on both the ball and the pitcher’s body helps the athlete to understand why some mechanics work, and it could be a doorway into preventing injury. Hundreds of pro players, college and high school draft picks, and general MLB hopefuls have trained at Driveline to great success.
However, in a development program where they attempt to bring the top prospects in minor leagues to the big leagues as fast as possible, it’s possible that Driveline feeds into the mindset and philosophy that leads to more injuries.
So, how does baseball fix its biggest issue? Maybe the better question would be: Can this be resolved at all? A mindset and normalized baseball standard is not easily broken. For a game with such rooted history and foundations, any change won’t sit well with many fans, like the pitch clock. But this isn’t changing a rule; this is about changing a fundamental approach to the game of baseball. An approach that not only influences the people on the mound in a big league stadium, but those who dream of standing there a decade down the road.
“I hope we’re not too far gone,” Meister said. “It’s a bit disconcerting, and I don’t think it’s helping the game at all. I think that eyeballs on the game have to be affected by the fact that most of your stars are going down on a regular basis and out for a year, two years at a time. That can’t be good for the game. I’m hopeful at some point you’ll see this pendulum start to swing back.”
Procedures have evolved as the tears in elbows have become different and more unique over time. Advances like the InternalBrace technique, which was invented by Professor Gordon Mackay, evolved from ankle procedures to being used to repair ligaments and tendons in the elbow, like the UCL. Meister took this one step further by threading the tendon and using an InternalBrace to prevent tissue loss; a career-defining breakthrough for Meister in the field. His idea helped put 92-95 percent of his patients back on the diamond and reach their prior level of success.
Nightengale floated an idea about potentially dropping the 13-pitcher limit on a 26-man active roster, which was instituted as a rule in MLB before the 2020 season, to just 12 pitchers, thus forcing teams to focus on developing players and being more careful with young arms.
“We want to force starters to go deeper in games,” Nightengale said. “But guys are throwing 100 mph and 75 pitches before the end of three innings. You’re going to hurt yourself. You won’t have a (designated hitter), so we’re not going to let you manipulate the whole thing. You better develop your stars or you’re not going in the postseason.”
The bottom line: Tommy John surgery can be a reliable solution to an ever-growing problem in baseball, but does that mean players and coaches should lean on it as a safety net?
Although there is not a clear-cut solution to the problem, it’s still one of the most overlooked issues surrounding the future of the sport. Pitchers are always looking for ways to improve their stuff, whether they’re throwing every fifth day or are a regular out of the bullpen. Athletes will always push themselves further than their limits.
Maybe it’s time to rethink baseball’s philosophy of dominance on the mound to grow the game by keeping the biggest names on the field for longer.
the ‘pitch timer’ to short? would a few more seconds make a difference.. longer game – sell more beer
Whah, whah, whah, they’re throwing the ball too hard.
How about MLB goes to softball slow pitch?.
The writer can’t understand that in sports, challenging physical limitations IS the sport.