MLB and players union exchange barbs over pitch clock after brutal run of pitcher injuries

Saturday was a brutal day if you appreciate elite MLB pitching, and the league and union are now arguing over if the pitch clock was to blame.

The Cleveland Guardians opened the day by announcing former Cy Young Award winner Shane Bieber will undergo Tommy John surgery, ending his season. Hours later, Atlanta Braves ace Spencer Strider was announced to also have damage in his UCL, though the team is pursuing a second opinion on a surgery.

Those are only the latest pitcher injuries to hit baseball this year, as Gerrit Cole, Eury Perez, Lucas Giolito and more have all been sidelined by varying degrees. The pitching landscape is so bad that only two former Cy Young Award winners — Corbin Burnes and Blake Snell — were on an active MLB roster as of Saturday.

MLB Players Association executive director Tony Clark believes MLB's new pitch clock and the modifications it made for this season are to blame, per a statement released Saturday evening:

Despite unanimous Player opposition and significant concerns regarding health and safety, the Commissioner's Office reduced the length of the Pitch Clock last December, just one season removed from imposing the most significant rule change in decades.

Since then, our concerns about the health impacts of reduced recovery time have only intensified.

The league's unwillingness thus far to acknowledge or study the effects of these profound changes is an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset — the Players.

MLB instituted its pitch clock last season after years of experimentation in the minor leagues, with pitchers only allowed to wait 15 seconds between pitches with the bases empty and 20 seconds with men on base. The clock resulted in an enormous decrease in average game time, with only a few complaints from players.

The league doubled down last winter by unilaterally changing the men-on-base time frame to 18 seconds, a change that Clark wasn't happy about.

MLB, however, responded later by claiming "empirical evidence" showed the pitch clock wasn't to blame and that the spate of pitcher injuries could be blamed on broader trends:

"This statement ignores the empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trend, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries. Nobody wants to see pitchers get hurt in this game, which is why MLB is currently undergoing a significant comprehensive research study into the causes of this long-term increase, interviewing prominent medical experts across baseball which to date has been consistent with an independent analysis by Johns Hopkins University that found no evidence to support that the introduction of the pitch clock has increased injuries.

In fact, JHU found no evidence that pitchers who worked quickly in 2023 were more likely to sustain an injury than those who worked less quickly on average.JHU also found no evidence that pitchers who sped up their pace were more likely to sustain an injury than those who did not."

Whatever is to blame, it's hard to argue that MLB doesn't have a problem with pitcher health, though that was pretty clear even before the pitch clock.