MLB Pitchers’ Toughest 2021 Challenge: Keeping Their Arms Intact

As spring training camps open across Arizona and Florida this week, the big story in Major League Baseball heading into 2021 involves health—and not only because of the coronavirus.

Pitchers, the most vulnerable and fragile players on the field, suddenly find themselves in an unprecedented and potentially dangerous situation. They need to figure out how to prepare their bodies for the grind of a full season after last year’s pandemic-shortened campaign.

Because of the truncated 2020 schedule, nobody compiled more than 84 total innings last season. Only 16 threw more than 70 innings. On six teams—including the two World Series participants, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays—no pitcher even reached 60 innings before the playoffs.

Now MLB intends to return to a full slate, with rosters shrinking from 28 men to 26. The jump from 60 games back to 162 has left managers, coaches and executives scrambling to patch together a plan to record 27 outs every day for six months without leaving a graveyard of busted elbow ligaments and torn shoulder muscles in their wake. 

Nobody knows how to do it.