Something must be done about all these injuries

The Yankees recently lost their best starter and can’t seem to keep one of their prime home run bats on the field. The Braves are without one of their top pitchers and are still waiting for the return of a superstar who missed all of last season. The injury reports from across the game are littered with players, many of whom will not be ready to play opening day, and numerous others whose 2025 season is in jeopardy.

It’s easy as a Mets fan to opine that the Mets get a disproportionate amount of injuries versus other teams, but the truth is that thought comes from our hearts and not our heads, as the facts do not support such a contention. In fact, according to Spotrac.com, there were more than 20 teams that had more injured players than the Mets in 2024. I often read Neil’s Substack that is written by Neil Paine. According to his research, the world champion Dodgers were the most injured team in baseball in 2024 with a corresponding loss of 6.86 WAR (my apologies for not knowing which WAR this refers to). The Mets were ranked 22^nd in most injured but for what it’s worth, the corresponding loss of WAR was just 2.89.

Many players work out all year long, take good care of themselves, and arrive to spring in good shape physically. Look back at the players who played a lot of games last year and you will see players who were in good physical condition. Nine Mets players played in over 100 games, including three over 150 games that featured Pete Alonso who played in every single game. If you group some of the platoon players stats together, the combined games played was respectable.

But back to spring 2025 where the Mets seem to lose players who did not come into camp in playing shape and then experienced various injuries including sore knees (Starling Marte), repaired knees (Ronny Mauricio), oblique and lat strains (Sean Manaea, Jeff McNeil and Frankie Manas), hamstring pulls (Drew Gilbert), and various arm injuries often requiring surgery and/or extensive rest and rehab (Christian Scott, Dedniel Nunez, Bryce Montes de Oca, and Drew Smith).

One factor is dealing with players on the “other side of 30,” but there are enough fluke injuries like Francisco Alvarez’ broken hamate bone. It’s easy to be disappointed and again question whether Alvarez can stay healthy enough to reach his potential or will he simply turn into the often injured Travis d’Arnaud, who, even with a few productive years with the Mets, could never play enough games to be considered anything but a backup or a platoon player.

In a December 17, 2024 Tom Verducci wrote an article in Sports Illustrated entitled There’s a Clear Root to the Injury Issues Plaguing Pitchers (https://www.si.com/mlb/2024/04/08/pitcher-injury-epidemic-tommy-john-surgery-velocity). Verducci starts by saying that the “industry of baseball – Major League teams, colleges, amateur coaches and high-tech training facilities is an abject failure. The quest to increase velocity has come at too high a cost: health: It must change.” Glenn Fleisig, Biomechanics Research Director of the American Sports Medicine Institute, opines that “essentially the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) is being pushed beyond what it can take and teams are pushing the players body beyond what the ligament can handle. Studies showed that the faster you pitch the higher the torque on the elbow. The highest risk falls on pitchers with high velocity and poor mechanics.” The list of those needing surgery who routinely throw over 96 MPH is a who’s who of baseballs’ top pitchers. Aside from the speed of the pitch, “increased spin rate and break has caused more grip pressure and tension, which can strain the flexor tendon, which often is a precursor to a UCL injury.”

The article concludes with the advisement that the Commissioner’s Office is studying the epidemic of pitching injuries and has assembled about 100 top professionals in the field including biomechanics experts, doctors, trainers and coaches to try and figure out how to make things better. Well, it’s about time.

Back in June of 2021, James Wagner wrote an article in the New York Times, It’s Not Your Imagination: Baseball Players are Getting Hurt a Lot. Wagner cites hamstring strains, dislocated shoulders, oblique strains and knee discomfort that was keeping many players out of their respective lineups. The injured list again looked like a who’s who of all-stars. An article penned in March of 2023 on Outside Force Fitness, notes that according to data provided by the National Safety Council, baseball ranks behind football, basketball and soccer insofar as injury rates. That seems logical in that there is generally next to no contact in baseball and players are not in constant motion like the other sports. They cite soft tissue injuries, different degrees of contusions, ligament injuries and muscle pulls as baseball’s most common injuries.

Much has been written about investments in innovative pitching and hitting labs intended to increase player performance, but you can’t get any productivity our of player who you can’t keep on the field.

It seems that so much more should be invested in training facilities and the personal training staff to keep players as healthy as possible. The results of a search for the cost of a typical MLB training set up were either vague or not helpful, but some estimated the cost to be somewhere from several hundred thousand dollars to over a million. Not being smart enough to understand what those dollars would actually buy (I’m trapped between the look of an MLB clubhouse and scenes from the movie Major League) it just seems that teams are skimping in the wrong area.

In a perfect world management would say, “we pay you a lot of money doing this part-year job, so here’s your year-round training program.” The program would be accessible on-line and therefore portable to where a player would rather be when not playing. It would be a team rule and not something that needs to be negotiated between MLB and the players’ association. They would essentially be telling the players what training would be best for them.

You might remember Noah Syndergaard who refused to work with the Mets trainers and instead working out on his own. While he did build considerable muscle and strength, his private workouts resulted in various and frequent injuries that were contributing factors to his departure, something he later expressed regret about.

The human response was and probably always will be to resist such structure even if staying healthy and on the field is always in the best interests of the players, teams and us poor fans. As someone quite on the wrong side of 30, it takes hard work to not get injured doing the things that were easily done in the past.

Here's hoping that players will use the top notch facilities and staff at Citi Field and that the Mets will realize that they need to upgrade facilities and staff in Syracuse, Binghamton and Brooklyn because so many career hindering or ending injuries occur down in the minors.

With nine days to go until the season starts, here’s to hoping that the Mets can make strides to keep their players on the field so we don’t have to hear about hamstrings, lats and oblique injuries all season long.