Was the Arizona St. player a senior? Was this player drafted? If the kid was a senior and not drafted then he likely is playing his very last days of organized baseball and if thats the case then I see no reason to worry if his arm is being abused.
Was the Arizona St. player a senior? Was this player drafted? If the kid was a senior and not drafted then he likely is playing his very last days of organized baseball and if thats the case then I see no reason to worry if his arm is being abused.
"Boys, I'm one of those umpires that misses 'em every once in a while so if it's close, you'd better hit it." Cal Hubbard
Sophomore Pac-10 pitcher of the year.
I'd argue that kids' arms got hurt just as much back then, but people didn't care. When there were half as many teams and it seemed like every kid in America played baseball and there was no draft and a team could sign as many pitchers as it wanted dirt cheap, they could afford to use Darwinism as a development strategy. It was primarily the rubber arms who survived to have real careers.Originally Posted by redsfanmia
Nowadays, teams can only control so many arms what with the limited number of farm teams and the draft, they cost more to acquire, and they can't readily replace the high-ceiling arms that flame out. They can't afford to take a batch of pitchers and weed out everyone who's not a rubber-armed freak. They need to deliver the maximum number of healthy pitchers to the majors, and if that comes at the expense of high-inning durability, so be it.
Having said that, the pendulum has perhaps swung too far the other way. I think it's Leo Mazzone that's said that pitchers today might not be pitching too much like they used to, but they don't throw enough to build up arm strength as they should.
Reading comprehension is not just an ability, it's a choice
That medical technology tells us that kids shouldn't be throwing as much as people did back in the 50s-90's. Due to that fact kids aren't building up the arm endurance they once did (at least the ones that survived it). Little Timmy's arm hurt back in the 70s? Deal with it kid. Little Timmy's arm hurts now days? Take him to the MRI machine and see that his elbow has a snapped tendon in it, he gets surgery and doesn't play baseball for a year.
Don't forget to consider that there were four times as many professional teams back then then there are now. There just weren't as many teams in the National League and American League. The Pacific Coast League in the 20's, 30's, 40's, and 50's and the Negro Leagues were every bit as good as half of the teams in the Majors right now. Players in those leagues would pitch regularly over a dozen complete games a year and do it for many years in a row, never reaching the Majors.
I do think it's more like what Doug says. I know when I was a kid, we played baseball all the time as a pickup game with the neighborhood kids or with my friends. We probably played it a hundred days a year unorganized, and that was the 60's, using my Dad's bats from the 30's. Those bats were as hard as a rock. If you didn't grip the bat with all your might, your hand would sting terribly from the contact with the ball.
Men were just tougher in the past then they are now because they were tougher as kids.
Kids for a long time have been wimps.
Mom's drive them to their practices. Are you kidding me? In the 60's (and we were wimps compared to the kids before me), there wasn't any parent driving their child to practice. The last thing you wanted was to have your mom be at a practice unless you wanted to be a mama's boy. You walked or you rode your bike.
It's my guess that kids from poorer neighborhoods around the world would have a better chance of being able to throw for longer innings as they probably grew up in neighborhoods where the kids are a lot tougher.
The 50's to 90's? You're talking about pretty modern times there. There wasn't any stamina from baseball pitchers past the 60's, except for a few.
And the reason they shouldn't throw is because kids have been wimps for many a decade now. As a whole they're a shadow of the toughness that kids were from the 60's, and the kids from the 60's are a shadow of the toughness of what kids were in the 20's and 30's. Medical technology has nothing to do with it.
In the 50's and 60's as kids (ages 8-15) we got our butts out of bed at 4:00 a.m. 5 or 6 days every week during the summer and were at the busstop at 4:20 to go pick strawberries in June, Loganberries and raspberries in July, and Beans in August. Then we played baseball in the afternoon mostly every day after we got home about 2:30 from picking. Then, if we played baseball, we went to our practices after that around 5:00, and depending on our ages played for different amounts outside after dinner. Ask a kid to do that today and he'd be crying. In the wintertime everyone learned how to box at the local boxing gym. And my generation were wimps compared to my father's.
Last edited by Kingspoint; 06-11-2008 at 05:48 AM.
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