re: Here’s the deal with LSU Baseball and Injuries

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Still wouldnt necessarily consider Henry to be “injured”

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Meh we’re talking semantics at this point although I’m pretty optimistic about him based on what has come out.

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Still wouldnt necessarily consider Henry to be “injured”

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I also wouldn't exactly call players missing small portions of the seasons as a "problem." Those are going to happen from time to time in any sport. It is just very unfortunate that many of these "day-to-day" injuries on our team have happened all at once this year for both our pitchers and position players.

Things I would call an actual "problem", would be injuries that require long absences and/or season-ending surgeries. I mean hell, go look at a typical MLB injury report and find me a team that doesn't have at least half or more of the team, at some point in the season, miss a few games with a minor "injury." There were only 7 players in all of major league baseball last year that played in all 162 games and only 58 players out of 750 on the 25-man rosters that played in 150 or more games last year.

Bottom line, injuries happen in sports and pitchers probably suffer injuries at a higher rate than maybe any other position in any other sport due to the inherent nature of what their position physically requires them to do (pitching a baseball is an unnatural motion and basically invites injury). BigEd likes to think that you can quantify how and when an injury is expected to happen, which is just laughable. Injuries in all sports are largely random occurrences and unpredictable as to when and how they happen. So for all our injuries to seemingly happen all at once is very unusual and unlucky. But I have rarely seen people go out of their way to blame the coaching staff for players getting hurt, especially with how overly cautious Mainieri has been throughout his time here. He quite literally put a national title on the line in 2017 by not allowing Lange to pitch on short rest in the title series.

And therein lies the problem. I can completely understand being frustrated with having players injured because it's frustrating to me as well, but it's just intellectually idiotic to be determined to cast blame on someone for an injury occurring, especially given the circumstances of many of these players being damaged goods before they stepped on campus. I just don't know what some people expect. If medical professionals don't have all the answers, how in the hell does anyone expect a college baseball coach to have those answers? It's just insanity.

Many people in here have also made the very good and relevant point that college baseball doesn't have injury reports nation-wide like we do at LSU. College baseball just doesn't get the coverage and teams aren't required to provide injury reports. So it would be basically impossible to even quantify how many of the 300+ D1 baseball teams have injuries at any specific times unless you called each team, before each game to ask who was available and who wasn't, and then logged that information on a spreadsheet. So when BigEd asks for proof others have these issues, he is doing so because he knows he can't carry his burden, so he puts it on you to prove his opinion wrong, however misguided it is.

According to this article, 87% of MLB games played last year had at least one pitcher who had Tommy John surgery. Most injuries occurred during high school and college. Interesting read about the epidemic of arm injuries.

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“But the sheer amount of surgeries in recent years and overuse concerns in young baseball players suggest a systemic problem within the sport’s competitive ranks. From MLB all the way down to youth baseball, injuries — especially those sustained by pitchers — are becoming more commonplace.

In 2017, an astounding 86.7 percent of regular season MLB games played featured at least one pitcher who had previously undergone Tommy John surgery, according to a Hardball Times piece by Jon Roegele, a member of the Society for American Baseball Research.

And kids aged 15 to 19 accounted for 57 percent of Tommy John surgeries performed in the United States between 2007 and 2011, according to the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine. The advent of year-round baseball and the pressure put on young players to reach the highest level are leading to more injuries than in years past.”