SEATTLE (AP) — Justin Verlander was a gangly teenager. His parents jokingly called him a “brontosaurus.”
Long before he became a three-time Cy Young Award winner, he was a high schooler who couldn’t consistently muster the arm strength needed to be drafted. So he went to college, took the time he required to mature as a pitcher via traditional training methods, eventually developing an arm that pushed him from prospect into major leaguer and ultimately an ace.
With today’s sophisticated training methods creating opportunities — and pressure — for young pitchers to reach exceptional velocities as early as possible, Verlander may never have gotten that time to evolve into one of the top pitchers in his generation.
“I am not envious of parents of young pitchers in baseball right now,” he said. “If I had a kid in baseball, it’d be a very, very difficult decision to make. Where do I find the right help? How do I get them to the right place? How do I let them grow? Like, he’s obviously got talent. These are questions I would ask myself, and I don’t have the answers, and here I am at the highest level. I mean, my family didn’t have a baseball background at all, like, what the hell would they do? No idea. I know that they would try to make the best decision.”
The velocity age
Velocity training is the rage in baseball from the youth levels up through the majors. Players go through specialized programs – often using series of progressively weighted baseballs – in the hopes of speeding up their bodies and arms, pushing them to the limits of what might be possible for their age and ability.
Videos of teenagers trying to hit max velo inside training facilities populate social media. They get likes. They draw attention. Their arms can do incredible things. But frequently, their ligaments cannot. Dr. Gary Waslewski, who works with the Arizona Diamondbacks, told the AP in March that “velocity kills elbows.”
Tommy John surgery has become almost routine for professional pitchers, but teenagers are undergoing the same surgeries at an alarming rate. There’s no hard data, only anecdotal stories. But they’re getting louder and more common.
It’s the byproduct of the quest for more velocity, more spin, more of the pitching attributes that scouts and recruiters are seeking at a younger age where life-altering money – either through NIL deals in college or a pro baseball contract — is at stake.
“Now when you go into high school ballparks, it’s amazing how many kids are throwing 97, 98 (mph),” Seattle Mariners senior director of amateur scouting Scott Hunter said.
The idea of developing arm strength slowly and seeing those increases in pitch speed simply by playing long-toss and throwing bullpens is now antiquated in the context of today’s advances in information and training.
How much that velocity training is playing a role in what’s happening with injuries is one of the great unknowns in baseball right now. Verlander imagines the uncertainty is maddening for families.
“All of a sudden as a parent your kid goes and optimizes themselves and blows out, you feel like, ‘well, I (messed) that up.’ Did you? You make the best decision you possibly could. I don’t know man. This is what I mean, it’s just a bad cycle and if we don’t rewind it quickly it’s going to be even worse than it is now by tenfold,” Verlander said.
Throw first, worry later
Elite pitchers with professional aspirations have mostly embraced velocity training as the best path to fulfill their dreams. Many are undeterred by injury concerns.
The AP surveyed 25 top major league draft pitching prospects during the combine in June in Phoenix about their use of advanced training methods.
Seventeen of the 25 said they had done some type of weighted-ball training in the hopes of increasing their velocity. Three said they had started the training at 12 years old, while more than half said they started between the ages of 16 and 18.
Perhaps most notable in the survey was the overall lack of anxiety about arm injuries. Asked to rate their concern on a 1-10 scale, no one rated their worry higher than a five, with 14 rating it a zero or a one. With rising success rates on Tommy John surgery and other advances allowing players to continue their careers even after several major injuries, the incentives are clear, even for pitchers aware of the risks: throw hard first, and worry about potential injuries later.
‘Reverse the trickle down’
Of course, kids want to throw hard. It’s part of the fun, the aura of playing baseball. But the cost could be adding up even as videos of kids pitching in showcase events trying to max out their velocity flood social media.
Verlander reflected on his path. He started to show some flashes of talent around 10, but at that time the path toward success was traditional and straight forward for his family to navigate.
“I started showing some real talent. I was clearly better than most of the kids around me, or just had a natural ability,” Verlander said. “Nowadays, what do (my parents) do? They probably send me to one of those camps.”
Verlander knows the current direction of pitching isn’t going to change before his career ends. He believes if starting pitching is incentivized at the major league level — the idea of pitchers working through trouble and going through a batting order more than just twice — that there can be another trickle-down where pitching at max effort for max velocity becomes less emphasized.
“I’ve heard Rob Manfred say out of his mouth, we need to bring the starting pitcher back. How you put that genie back in the bottle is a tougher question,” Verlander said. “I think we need to put a lot of heads together and come up with a way. And it’s probably not going to be perfect at first, but you reverse the trickle down.”
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AP Baseball Writer David Brandt and AP Sports Writer John Marshall contributed.
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