Save your Slugger’s Arm

In the Seattle Times this week, columnist Jerry Brewer writes about the fragility of baseball pitchers’ arms. He was referring to the Seattle Mariners’ pitching squad, but survival is a concept youth pitchers need to embrace too as their bodies are growing and more vulnerable.

This is a snippet of what I wrote a “From The Sidelines” column for Parentmap, click here for the full article:

For boys on the diamond — an estimated 16 million of them in the U.S. each year — being pitcher is being king, at least for that inning. Every boy wants to be the hero leading his team to victory. However, one of the top orthopedic surgeons in the nation, James Andrews, M.D. cautions that the pitcher is “the most vulnerable when it comes to potentially career-ending injuries.”

In this article, I only talk about boys baseball, but I’m working on a From the Sidelines piece on girls’ softball to be published this spring.  A baseball mom and friend also says parents reminds us that practice pitches should be accounted for. After all, a kid’s arm doesn’t know if it’s practice or a game, injuries can and do happen in both.