CLINICS & EDUCATION |
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Updated: 4/8/10 Greece Little League Inc. Page Links Managers/coaches
Parents Guide
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How to throw a baseball Drink before your thirsty Choosing the Right Bat Suggestions for Warm-up Drills
Pete, a local Little League volunteer in Fort Deposit, Ala., asks: I have a 5 year old son who shows a lot of promise as a pitcher. I want him to start throwing splitters and any other similar pitches, so he can be dominant as he gets older. What is the maximum number of those pitches can he throw per day and not injure himself? Dr. Fleisig:Pete, the objectives of fostering a young child’s development are general physical skills, knowledge about the game, and a love or enjoyment of the game. I personally know dozens or perhaps hundreds of professional baseball players, and the story that I hear from them about how they got there is the same. The common theme is, as kids, they played a wide range of athletic activities (baseball, football, basketball, etc.), and surprisingly, did not specialize in baseball pitching until typically the teenage years. In the current generation of teenagers we are seeing an alarming trend. For example, from 1995 to 1999, Dr. Jim Andrews performed “Tommy John surgery” for 21 high school baseball pitchers. However, in contrast, from 2000 to 2004, he operated on 124 high school pitcher’s elbows. We are very concerned about this increase in serious injuries at such a young age, and conducted a research study comparing our surgery group to healthy teenage pitchers. (In press at the American Journal of Sports Medicine.) The results were staggering. Pitchers who pitched more than eight months per year were 500 percent more likely to have elbow injury. Pitchers who regularly pitched when their arm was fatigued were 36 times more likely to end up with surgery as an adolescent. Your son is only 5 years old, but I don’t want to see him at our center having surgery 10 years from now. We also don’t want to see him burned out and disinterested in baseball before his 10th birthday. There’s no benefit for a 5-year-old to learn breaking pitches. Learn general physical skills (running, throwing, hitting, and other fundamentals) and a love for the game. Pitchers before the age of puberty should master a fastball, with good mechanics, followed by a change-up. Any young pitcher with a good fastball, a good off-speed change-up, and good control, will thrive.
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