I have played baseball all my life. From travel baseball at the age of 8, to my senior year of high school, baseball was always the sport I loved to play. Though it is a non-contact sport, it does not mean there aren’t your fair shares of injuries. From spraining my ankle for the first time at age 10, to breaking my foot my junior year, injuries were just part of the game. Though those were less common of injuries, there was one that I would deal with every year, arm soreness. According to UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) this was the result of over stressing the rotator cuff and elbow. From the hundreds of throws you would make a day, this does not seem that unreasonable of an injury.
Though I never was a pitcher my whole career, this is where most of the injuries would occur. From throwing fastballs as fast as you can, and as accurate as you can, mixing it up with off-speed pitches, the stress on the rotator cuff is absurd. According to an ESPN article by Sam Miller, “When we throw overhand, it puts what’s called valgus stress on the arm, which is a fancy way of saying the elbow is trying to bend in an unnatural direction. And when somebody throws 95 mph, it creates so much valgus stress that the forearm essentially wants to detach from the body; if it could, it would simply fly into space.” And According to Sports Illustrated, this stress will cause pitchers to not be able to throw a ball past their high school days for many, as the frequency of Tommy John surgery grows as the years go on.
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 24: Starting pitcher Stephen Strasburg #37 of the Washington Nationals throws a pitch during a game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Nationals Park on April 24, 2013 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Patrick McDermott/Getty Images)
What has always been interesting to me though is how you never hear about softball players, or pitchers in particular, come down with the soreness and injuries that baseball players do. Why is this? According to Midwest Orthopedics at Rush, the pressure from pitching a softball is not on a ligament like a baseball pitcher’s is. This does not mean that there is no pain for softball players though. Yes they are able to throw more pitches, and for a longer duration with their windmill style of pitching, they too experience shoulder pain. Also, Dr. Nikhil Verma observed that the pitchers he has come across have complained of anterior shoulder pain, after a weekend’s worth of tournaments. Nikhil was able to prove how this soreness was connected to the bicep tendon. In conclusion, Nikhil proved that softball pitchers, though they do not feel the same soreness a baseball pitcher does, do experience pain throughout their bicep.
As a baseball player, this is not the best news to come across. When we throw, as Sam Miller stated, the ligaments in our arms take the brunt of the damage. In softball, it is your bicep. This makes a big difference as softball players can work their biceps out to get them stronger and prevent future injuries, while you can’t do much for your ligaments except rest and ice.
In conclusion, yes pitching a baseball is a lot more harmful on your body then pitching a softball. Though it may seem like softball players can pitch for days on end, they too experience soreness, just not to the same extent, and same location. So next time you’re playing wiffle-ball in the backyard and you have shoulder soreness, you now know which technique is best suited to protect your arm.
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Thank you for your great post. I really enjoyed it. I’m a big fan of baseball, but I never thought about this seriously. I think protecting players’ health is the most important thing in every sport because you cannot perform with injuries and pains. Things are changing really fast and I know that now most of Major League Baseball teams have pitching inning restrictions for their top prospects. Moreover, professional baseball teams for leagues in Japan and Korea are also doing similar things to protect their youngsters’ arm. I think baseball will keep changing about how to protect players’ health. I think your blog is helpful for players and maybe also helpful for better solutions to keep players’ health in the future.
This is a great post, I never thought about comparing how pitching in baseball and pitching in softball strain your arm differently. I too was a baseball player, and I often wondered about how much stress I was putting on my arm. But, I never wondered which sport strained arms more. Some of my friends who played with me tore ligaments or their rotator cuff, but I don’t recall any one getting similar injuries from softball. The question that I really wondered about during my baseball years was if a curveball put more strain on your arm than a fastball. I found an article that talks about the argument over little league pitchers throwing curve balls:
Curveball
Interesting post. My sister played softball, and I always wondered that. Something interesting to note would be the trends in amounts of pitches thrown and how often they pitch. For example, do softball players throw as many pitches as baseball players on average? Rotation speed compared to the weight of the ball would also be useful in your argument.
I found this extremely interesting because I suffered from the same issue when I was playing baseball. It is true that this is a serious issue. However, I felt like you missed something by only addressing one arm slot at which pitchers throw. I personally was a side arm pitcher and that put much more stress on my shoulder and lower body than in my elbow region. I started doing that when I was a freshman because I was experiencing that pain and doctors told me that it would only continuously get worse. Do you think there is any better way in which it could be managed other than surgery? Weighted ball programs?