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Elementary steps in war against injury

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This past week, the civil war brewing within Japanese baseball over rules to protect pitchers’ arms heated up. On Thursday, the Japan Rubber Baseball Association adopted 70-pitch limits for the national elementary school baseball tournament this summer, and the rule did not pass without a fight.

Prefectural and regional federations will have a year to adopt the rule.

The national federation announced the following guidelines:

Guidelines

  1. All players will be limited to 70 throws at full strength per day in practice and 300 a week.
  2. Practice will be limited to six days a week, and not more than three hours in one day.
  3. Players should not appear in more than 100 games a year.

The chief executive of the national federation, Toyomi Munakata, said that over the past five years, national tournament games saw an average of 100 pitches thrown per team.

“I want to protect the rights of the children and their enjoyment of baseball,” Munakata said. “Through enactment of a pitch limit, I want coaches to change their policies.”

Same old song and dance

He said there was opposition from some on the federation’s board of councilors, who cited a phrase commonly heard the past two months “we can’t enforce such a rule because there aren’t enough pitchers.”

This was an objection heard frequently in December when Niigata Prefecture’s high school baseball federation announced it would introduce pitch limits at its spring tournament and moved ahead without seeking approval from the national federation.

The crux of the problem

On Saturday, Dr. Kozo Furushima, Japan’s most prominent Tommy John surgeon, told me that young pitchers are susceptible to suffering inner elbow fractures from placing too much stress on the elbow of the yet-immature bones in their elbows.

“Adults’ bones are hard and the ligaments are a big concern, but when children are in elementary school and junior high school, it is the other way around,” Furushima said. “The bones in children’s joints contain a lot of cartilage and are not rigid. The part of the bone where the ligament attaches can be pulled away from the rest of the bone, creating a fracture.

“Children will not feel pain or be hindered in ordinary activities but when they put a lot of stress on the damaged elbow, they will feel pain. And those that go untreated will often result in injuries later as the joints mature.

Furushima is the chief of the Sports Medical Center of Keiyu Orthopaedic Hospital in Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, north of Tokyo. He said that of the 301 youngsters treated at his facility for inner elbow disorders, 81.3 percent reported practicing an average of five or more hours every Saturday and Sunday. The group of patients practicing 3 to 5 hours made up another 12.6 percent of the group.

“It’s not just pitching in games, but how much and how hard kids are throwing in practice,” he said.

The next phase of the debate is poised for the coming week, when the national high school federation is expected to lower the boom on authorities in Niigata for acting on their own to enforce pitch limits.

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Former greats weigh in on high school pitch limits

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The outer limits

Since Japan’s Niigata Prefecture has announced its plan to restrict pitcher usage in its spring tournament this year, three former Chunichi Dragons pitchers, two Hall of Famers Hiroshi Gondo and Shigeru Sugishita and Masahiro Yamamoto have weighed in on the issue and expressed widely divergent views.

On Jan. 15, Gondo was announced as one of the three newest members of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. The right-hander’s playing career was defined by his first two seasons. As a 22-year-old out of corporate league ball in 1961, Gondo won 35 games in his 429-1/3-inning rookie season. The following year, he pitched 362-1/3 innings and won 30 games.

Niigata’s new limits will prohibit a pitcher from starting an inning after he’d thrown 100 pitches in a game but not prohibit pitchers from pitching on consecutive days.

Save the game

“I am absolutely opposed to that (sort of restriction),” Gondo said.

“Most of those kids aren’t going to be professionals, and this will be the end of their baseball careers. You don’t want to hold them back. Besides, if you can’t pitch that much in high school without ruining your arm, there’s no way you can make it in the pros anyway.”

On the question of whether high school baseball should be about competition or education, Gondo came down solidly on the side of competition.

“You don’t want to put obstacles in the way of people playing to win,” he said. “People are going to get hurt, and you can’t alter that fact.”

I don’t want to state that as his entire philosophy on the issue, since we only spoke for a few minutes, but he certainly seemed to think that high school ball is safe enough.

Save the kids

Sugishita, whose No. 20 Gondo inherited when he joined the Dragons, wasn’t certain if Niigata’s method was the right way to go, but said, “You’ve got to do something to protect these kids’ arms.”

Yamamoto, a lock to join them in the Hall of Fame after he enters the players division ballot for the Hall’s class of 2021, was even more emphatic when he spoke on Sunday in Yokohama.

At a seminar attended by nearly 600 people that included elementary and junior high school coaches, doctors and parents, Yamamoto spoke of last year’s high school superstar, pitcher Kosei Yoshida.

At the national high school summer championship, Yoshida threw 881 pitches over six games, with four of those games coming over the final five days of the tournament.

“It’s a good thing Yoshida didn’t break down,” Yamamoto said. “But I thought that continuing like he did put the player’s career at risk.”

When Niigata’s prefectural association imposed its rules without asking the national body, the Japan High School Baseball Federation lashed out, calling the new system arbitrary and unenforceable.

But Yamamoto praised the work of Japan’s national rubber ball federation, whose guidelines limit pitchers to 70 pitches in a single game and 300 within a week.

“They have done good work to protect children’s futures,” he said.

No magic number

In a recent interview, Dr. Tsutomu Jinji, a professor of biomechanics who has extensively studied how pitchers mechanics impart movement to baseballs, said there is no magic number of pitches that will prevent injuries.

“Some people possess thicker ligaments, that can withstand more stress and torque,” he said. “Other pitchers are more flexible than others, or possess better mechanics.”

“What that means is that some pitchers’ arms will break down even with very limited usage, while others will survive much heavier workloads without any damage at all. It is possible to prevent catastrophic damage with ultrasound examinations so that pitchers whose elbows are at risk get rest, but that is not being done.”