Keith Meister draws a line of six power plants in the elbow of a baseball jug in the operating room of his private practice. The elbow looks at the mixture of open slices and bonds, tendons and bone mixture – any of them may be seriously injured or broken. It pulls the player’s skin tense with a two -way retractor, then releases a modified arthroscopy camera and begins to document the damage.
First, the Meister evaluates the severity of a suspicious tearing in the Ligament of Ulnar, which is one of the most important parts of the musculoskeletal system of a jug. He takes a photo for the database. Then he uses a tendon collected from the player’s wrist or thigh to cover the UCL and takes more photos on his way. The Meister uses a synthetic braided fiber to strengthen more. It looks like a fiber shoe bond. The Meister positions it on the bond and sews it along the length like a embroidery seam. This technique is known as a combination of traditional Tommy John surgery-a procedure led by Frank Jobe in nineteen seventies-and new technology, a hybrid surgery.
Orum I take photos of fifteen to twenty photos of every case I do, Me said Meister. “It helped me to go back and look at the tear models and associate them with MRI scans. It certainly helped my ability to see, evaluate and treat these things more logically.”
Meister in Texas, until the opening day of the large league baseball and immediately after the weeks “intense season ün on a day he calls seven jug elbows. At this time of the year, the jugs are likely to need statistically elbow surgery. The theories about this phenomenon revolve around the way of training out of the season, but experts have not yet come into an agreement. What they know is that the elbow injuries occur at a concern and the elbow surgery is now an expected result of high -intensity shots.
Last year, the two -way Megastar Shohei Ohtani, who played as a striker and jug, was limited to hitting the second elbow surgery. Spencer Star, a twenty -six -year -old star for Atlanta Braves, is expected to talk in a normal season match shortly after exploding UCL at the beginning of the 2024 season. (Meister did Strider’s surgery, decided to use only the internal brace procedure instead of full hybrid method.) This year Yankees Acees Gerrit Cole underwent elbow surgery during spring education. “We should be grateful for the Orthopedic-Sörf community as baseball fans, C said Cole. “From D. Jobe, who pioneered the surgery, is doing a service for players who want to compete today, from world -class surgeons that make these surgeries very often.”
Historically, the shooting has been an art where the player trusted a definite ability to a deceptive winding and the strike area. For the past decade, the jug has turned its focus into educational techniques that increase the average speed and the whole movement of the ball-even at the expense of strikes. The purpose of this philosophy is to take a striker to shake and escape and go out in this way. (If a dough can make any contact with the ball, there is a chance to get a stroke, so this modern throwing method is “safer için for the firing team. Maddux threw more than five thousand normal season landing and hundred nine full games. He was a sensitive master, and he usually threw the fields that caused the dough to hit the ball weakly, but did not throw hard enough or hit enough dough according to today’s standards.
Like Max Scherzer, a veteran of eighteen -season, and multiple Cy Young award -winning Maddux, Max Scherzer told me so far, “The game is at most ninety -eight miles long you’ve ever seen.” Not sustainable. “
Although the elbow injuries have increased for the last twenty years, Meister has been increasingly worried with his tears recently. The trauma it finds under the skin is clearly different from the injuries it treated only five or ten years ago. It connects this to dramatic fields based on horizontal movement, which has become a regular part of the game. Meister can immediately determine that a jug has thrown a broom – a jug, a hard slide to get about fifteen inches of the wholesale. “He puts an enormous burden on the extremity,” Meister said. “As a result, we get very well -known tear patterns.”
As the injuries worsened, medical interventions became better. Part of the problem, New Yorker Last year, Zach Helfand reported that in a profile of Neal Elatrach, one of Meister’s contemporaries, that the surgeons became more effective in the treatment of surgeons – players have created a situation in which they were not worried about the last kind of career. Teams do not want to give up all kinds of advantages. As Tony Clark, General Manager of Professional Baseball Union, said to me, “Our men are doing what they are only told to them”. “If the value proposal does not change and the jug health progresses towards the foreground of speech or until it is dragged, we will have difficulties. We see that you are currently playing in real time.”
Many general administrators are focused on creating a deep bench for their teams, rather than focusing on protecting the health of their jugs, so that star players inevitably get a backup to get hurt. When a jug is injured and requires surgery, a long rehabilitation program starts and another jug is placed. In 2010, six hundred and thirty -five different jugs were used during the season. There were eight hundred and fifty-five in 2024-an average increase of more than seven jugs per team.
Nevertheless, it is not always fun to take root for a constantly changing team. The fans want to see their favorite players and hope for productive seasons for their subtleties. Onus is in Major League Baseball to find a way to regulate the outbreak that damages the entertainment product. Currently, the league is only in the brainstorming stage what to do with the problem.
Previously, the MLB had tried to reduce the effects of high speed on the game by making a change that did not make a significant difference – with initiatives in an independent league, such as moving the mound back. Now MLB is discussing potential rule changes to prevent future injuries. League, the ways to keep the jugs healthy to give advice about the biomechanical expert Glenn Fleisig called the help. An idea proposed by Fleisig is to make the baseball itself heavier or greater. “Today’s athletes are larger and more powerful and faster than ever, Fle said Fleisig said,“ But they throw the same size and weight baseball. We have done some front biomechanical studies – and he says he produces less stress with a baseball ball to move a baseball ball from five points to UNCES.
It will probably take years to implement such a change, which is annoying for people like Meister who calls MLB to move as soon as possible. In January, professional baseball made a presentation to the society of athletic trainers. “I showed a portion of MLB’s report on injuries, and then I showed a picture of a man in the sand,” he said.
Meister and Elattrache are the potential competitors that act as collaborators nowadays and work together to convince MLB that they need to accelerate their efforts. “My conversations with Neal are great, Me Assister said to me. “No ego. Just, ‘Hey friend, we must understand these things.’ “Elatrach,“ We talk a few times a week.
Elatrach first works with professional athletes. In addition, although football and basketball players behave, each year an average of seventy -five ligament reconstructed elbow surgery reported. Meister, which focuses on almost completely baseball injuries, operates on about three hundred vineyards in 2024. He estimates that slightly less than half of his surgery is on élite college players and amateurs.
Elbow injury epidemic spread to each baseball level. Surgeons, who are accustomed to operating in superstars, repair the elbows of children who try to imitate their favorite jug. Meister told me that there was a difference to a child with a physically mature adult. He said that the children healed faster and that the increase in youth surgeries was bad for the future of sports. The biggest indicator of future elbow injury is undergoing elbow injury in the past. This is perhaps the real threat of the outbreak of elbow injury-young generation players will enter the already broken big leagues.
On a last Saturday, a fourteen -year -old child in the Gulf Region appeared on the mound to practice throwing a coach. The child was often used to throwing fastball, cutters and curved balls. However, this trip can be a turning point in the baseball career. The young person who wanted his father not to be named, threw the ninety -two fields that day. Roughly, seventy percent of them were slides, one of the most tiring sites they could produce with the human body. He shot eleven strikes and his eyes were illuminated with results.
I have forwarded these statistics with the won of three world series. Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander flew. (“God,” Verlander, the owner of the CY Young Award three times that just started the twentieth MLB season.) “The child is taking it”. “Not a flexor tendon.”
The youth went home and spent the rescue time watching Tiktox and Big-Leaguers’ videos hit by the shots. He frequently examined videos from field training centers and explained how to obtain the most speed and movement.
The children realized that this firing approach was the way to influence the scouts and go to big leagues. On the other side of the relationship, there are also professionals who feel the upward effects of young players who aim to take their jobs. “Why do these injuries crawl intensively?” DJ Wabick, who worked in the professional baseball association on the issues in amateur baseball, asked. “There are very good people and many good parents in the field of youth-base ball, Wab said Wabick. “But collectively, who really is looking for these kids?”
