This website features an extensive comments section. I report, you deride.

You’d think understanding of such words would be prerequisite for use in a news paper article.

He’s like the print version of eskin

I have empiric evidence. I have never pitched a game of regulation baseball and never frayed a labrum, in my arm or elsewhere. Despite this small sample, I would wager that there are billions of people all over the world in my category.

Conlin’s premise — that pitchers in the “olden days” were tougher because they threw more pitches early in their development — is really almost impossible to disprove because all of the counterexamples (i.e., guys who got hurt due to workload and never recovered) are not well-known to anyone. Because they weren’t big league ballplayers. They went back to school and became teachers, took over the family business, became coaches, opened barbershops, etc. etc. etc. No one knows who they are precisely because they never got a chance to display their talents.

Not to mention pitchers like Sandy Koufax, who was cooked at age 30. Which takes the conversation in a different direction: for Koufax, was it worth it? World Titles, Cy Youngs, etc.

It would be an interesting case if only because of the draft and the reserve clause, which all but lock you into a team’s development system that is somewhere on the spectrum of being good at player development.

On the one hand, it would be hard to prove any malicious intent—all/most of the incentives are to win, players are valuable properties/investments (increasingly so), and so the damage accrues to the organization bad at doing this, albeit not to the same proportionate risk as the pitcher.

On the other hand, there is precedent for not following the draft (hi, J.D. Drew), there are outlets for baseball in unaffiliated leagues and other countries.

This is a good point. But my thought was: okay, so let’s get off the “bourgeoise” pitch counts and standardize on mechanics like Linceceum’s and Ryan’s, etc. What else is missed? Knuckleballers, sidearmers, submarine pitchers, perhaps with non-standard deliveries. Yet in each category you will find examples of long careers, high effective ones too (Tekulve, Quisenberry, Niekro). At this point, we will have met the new boss, and found him same as the old boss.