Safety-Pitchers

If your child is a pitcher, he/she has about a fifty-fifty chance of experiencing pain in his/her elbow or shoulder during his/her baseball career.

One of the best ways to reduce the risk of overuse injuries for youth pitchers is to strictly observe per game,week, season, and yearly pitch limits.

To reduce the risk of injury, youth baseball pitchers need a period of "active rest" after the baseball season ends and before the next season begins during which they should stay physically active to maintain conditioning but refrain from overhand throwing of any kind

If your child is a pitcher, he/she has about a fifty-fifty chance of experiencing pain in his/her elbow or shoulder during his/her baseball career. Not surprisingly, baseball has been the most widely studied youth sport in the United States, so that the risk factors for overuse injuries are well-established.

The extra time high school pitchers living in warm-weather climates spend in baseball activities puts them at greater risk of injuries to their pitching shoulders than their cold-weather peers, finds a first-of-its-kind study published in the February 2011 edition of the American Journal of Sports Medicine.  "What we can say pretty definitively at this point is that playing baseball year-round as a young athlete is not a key to long-term success," says Wendy Hurd, PT, PhD, SCS, one of the study's co-authors. "Even though there might be opportunities to play ball year round when you live in a warm-weather climate, it is advantageous to the health of the pitcher's arm to take extended periods of rest from throwing."

 

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More than 8 out of 10 of high school and collegiate pitchers undergoing so-called Tommy John elbow reconstructive surgery are able to return to their pre-injury level of performance after 9 months to a year of rehabilitation, a new study finds.

An indefinite moratorium on the use of composite bats (a bat with a metal shell, but a woven composite of fibers on the inside of the barrel portion). in the Junior, Senior, and Big League Baseball Divisions of Little League has been passed by the Little League International Board of Directors, effective immediately.  Not covered under the Little League moratorium are wood bats, metal bats, or bats that have composite materials in the handle only.