It's the velocity, stupid.

There's indeed no better explanation for the sudden onslaught of pitching injuries rocking Major League Baseball. Which, for anyone who hasn't heard, is pretty bad.

Just in the last week, Eury Pérez, Shane Bieber and Jonathan Loáisiga have bowed out from 2024 by way of season-ending elbow injuries. And Spencer Strider may be next. He's only 25, but he's potentially looking at his second Tommy John surgery in five years.

Gerrit Cole, Framber Valdez, Nick Pivetta and Josiah Gray can also be folded into this conversation, of course, but the gist is clear: MLB has a crisis on its hands.

Nobody should be under any delusions that the crisis is going to disappear overnight. Nor is it going to be undone by magic bullets in the form of rule changes.

What's needed is something more along the lines of a culture change. Because if MLB wants to stop seeing pitchers ruined, it must stop incentivizing them to ruin themselves.

It's Not Those Other Things. It's Velocity.

The blame-throwers are out in full force right now, and the heat is falling on such things as the pitch timer and the ban on sticky stuff.

Pay none of that any mind.

It's fair to suspect that the pitch timer is putting undue wear and tear on pitchers, but Cole is right that "maybe five" more years' worth of data is needed. As it is, the timer's debut in 2023 coincided with a drop in injured-list stints for pitchers relative to 2022. Which, by the way, saw a drop of its own relative to 2021, when the sticky stuff ban was first enacted.

There is, on the other hand, a mountain of damning evidence about velocity.

The anecdotal stuff is compelling enough, and I'm not just talking about testimony from Alex Wood and Justin Verlander. Despite the drops in '22 and '23, the last three seasons have been a bloodbath compared to the mid-2010s. There were no more than 300 IL stints for pitchers in 2015, 2016 or 2017. There were over 400 annually between 2021 and 2023.

This maps onto the rise in average fastball velocity between 2015, when it was 92.1 mph, and 2023, when it was 93.8 mph. Of the names listed back in the introduction, only Gray and Bieber fell below the latter mark. The latter sought to do something about it over the winter, not knowing he was digging his elbow's grave.

Yet none of this would mean much if there wasn't scientific evidence of a link between velocity and injury risk. And unfortunately, there's loads.

Eno Sarris of The Athletic pointed to no fewer than five studies that establish such a link, and it isn't exactly a secret in the sports medicine community.

Here's Glenn Fleisig, biomechanics research director of the American Sports Medicine Institute, speaking to Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated:

"How hard you throw has emerged as the biggest issue, overwhelming the other two factors. We have done studies in the biomechanics lab that shows the faster you pitch the higher the torque on the elbow. Science shows a strong correlation between velocity and higher torque in the elbow. Across pitchers, the faster pitchers have more stress. The highest risk is a guy with high velocity and poor mechanics."

If there's an ultimate cautionary tale here, it's Jacob deGrom.

Ever-improving velocity was the central feature for him as he was putting himself on a Hall of Fame track in the late 2010s and early 2020s, but it was also him flying too close to the sun.

It's hard not to wonder: If he had scaled back even a little bit, would he have avoided a second Tommy John surgery and still be on that Hall of Fame track?

Think of the Children. Seriously.

What adds to the scariness of this picture is that this goes beyond just the major leagues.

One gets a surreal feeling in pulling up Strider's Perfect Game page and seeing he added 12 mph to his average fastball during his high school years. That this data even exists is frankly alarming, yet it's certainly emblematic of a youth baseball scene that also worships at the altar of velocity.

This post on X from Eric Cressey, the president of Cressey Sports Performance and the director of player health and performance for the New York Yankees, says it all:

Jon Roegele's Tommy John surgery database bears this out. Whereas the surgery used to be performed on major leaguers more often than not, minor league, high schooler and college athletes have accounted for more than half the surgeries on pitchers annually since 2001.

Velocity? Psh. Who Needs It?

If there's any dissonance at play here, it concerns how velocity isn't that important.

This, of course, doesn't square with the general wisdom that more velocity allows for a larger margin for error. And, as such, more of an advantage microseconds-long interactions with hitters.

I was nonetheless curious if there's a strong correlation between velocity and value. And as it turns out, there isn't. For both individual pitchers and teams, the correlation between average fastball velocity and wins above replacement has been on the weak side for most or all of the pitch-tracking era.

As counterintuitive as this is, it's that much more convincing when you zoom in. To wit, six of the top 10 hurlers of 2023 didn't crack the league average with their average fastball velocity:

1. Blake Snell: 7.4 WAR, 95.6 mph
2. Gerrit Cole: 7.0 WAR, 96.7 mph
3. Sonny Gray: 6.1 WAR, 92.9 mph
4. Kyle Bradish: 5.5 WAR, 94.8 mph
5. Logan Webb: 5.3 WAR, 92.4 mph
6. Zac Gallen: 5.3 WAR, 93.6 mph
7. Jordan Montgomery: 4.9 WAR, 93.3 mph
8. Corbin Burnes: 4.8 WAR, 95.4 mph
9. Clayton Kershaw: 4.8, 90.8 mph
10. Merrill Kelly: 4.8 WAR, 92.3 mph

Among that bunch are a legendary three-time Cy Young Award winner, two Cy Young Award finalists and three guys who eventually played starring roles in the World Series.

What Needs to Happen

Despite the theoretical possibility to the contrary, the pitch timer obviously hasn't stopped pitchers from redlining on every fastball. And disincentivizing pitchers from throwing hard isn't likely to work.

I mean, what is MLB going to do? Fine a guy every time he throws over 95 mph? Nah.

So instead of stick, how about carrot?

I don't dare set this as an actual expectation, but my hope is that MLB teams will stop investing so heavily—both monetarily and philosophically, that is—in velocity and shift to more of a holistic approach to pitching. One that emphasizes movement, command, tunneling, sequencing and, above all, durability.

These things aren't completely neglected, to be sure, but velocity rules. It's the youngsters with big fastballs who get drafted high and signed to big bonuses, and the list of the highest-paid pitchers in MLB mostly reads like a who's who of fastball maestros.

And yet, certain winds are blowing in certain directions.

Front offices and MLB at large ought to be scared stiff at the rising tide of pitching injuries. And even the endless pursuit of velocity isn't stopping the fastball from becoming an endangered species. From 2008 to this year, fastballs have gone from accounting for 60.7 percent of all pitches to just 47.2 percent. It's nice to see the Boston Red Sox barely bothering with fastballs and having it work to the tune of a sub-2.00 ERA in the early goings.

If these winds eventually do shift the culture at the MLB level, there would inevitably be a trickle-down effect. The day when major league pitchers are no longer getting paid by the mile per hour will also be the day when the radar gun will loosen its grip on youth baseball.

What's for sure in the meantime is that the status quo is unsustainable. Because as much as everyone seems intent on testing the hypothesis, the supply of functional major league pitchers is, in fact, finite.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.