Scott Bullock knows how to nurture young pitchers. He has coached Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins to five Class 5A state championships in the past eight years. One of his former players, 22-year-old left-hander Marco Gonzales, won two postseason games for the St. Louis Cardinals last month.
Bullock’s outlook, though, isn’t all optimistic when the topic is the future of baseball’s youngest arms.
“We should all be worried — on every level,” he said.
Retiring baseball commissioner Bud Selig is scared too. Nervous about the trickle-up trend of blown-out elbows, Major League Baseball recently took the first step in a long-term project to try to protect pitchers. It starts by targeting kids.
MLB introduced its Pitch Smart initiative with the help of USA Baseball, the governing body of the amateur arm of the sport. Their aim: Teach kids how to throw without ruining their arms.
Baseball appears headed toward a “Tommy John” epidemic. Since 2012, MLB is losing nearly 30 pitchers every season to elbow reconstruction surgery, topping out at 36 in 2012. That’s up from an average of 16 to 17 per season in the 11 years prior, according to MLB.
The Rockies have three pitchers at or near the big-league level who are recovering from Tommy John surgery — Tyler Chatwood, Rafael Betancourt and prized prospect Daniel Winkler.
The problem with all of the elbow injuries, MLB asserts, starts when pitchers are young.
“Young pitchers are having to do what I call ‘red line,’ at a lot earlier than they used to,” said Rockies manager Walt Weiss, referring to teenage pitchers asked to throw too hard too often.
The Rockies lost Winkler — who was fast-tracking through Double-A with the Tulsa Drillers last summer — when he suffered a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.
Weiss assigns part of the blame to the culture of pressure that pitchers face while playing for youth traveling teams.
“Now they are traveling nationally, against national-level teams, and having to max out all the time,” he said.
Bullock said the year-round schedule young pitchers are asked to play is too much.
“Baseball is a spring and summer sport. But nowadays kids are running out for another 100-pitch start once a week in the fall,” he said, adding that with winter lessons, some young pitchers now never have a downtime.
“It’s just mind-boggling to me we’re throwing kids this much.”
The problem also is that Tommy John surgery — named for the former major-league pitcher who had revolutionary elbow reconstruction in 1974 — has become so effective, some parents are now asking doctors to perform the surgery as an elective step before their child even has a serious injury. A common myth is that the reconstruction helps a pitcher throw harder.
“You’re not going to come back throwing harder,” Rockies trainer Keith Dugger said in a video appeal to parents. “That’s a misnomer. You come back throwing harder down the road, when you’ve put the work into rehabilitation and all the strengthening exercises. If you would have done that prior to your injury, you probably would have thrown the ball harder.”
MLB, meanwhile, having watched some of its biggest stars miss more than a year while recovering from reconstruction surgery — the Mets lost their ace, Matt Harvey, and the Marlins lost their rookie of the year, Jose Fernandez, to Tommy John surgery this past season — became concerned.
So Selig, in one of his last major decisions before retiring in January, collected a panel of experts this year, including Dugger, MLB medical director Dr. Gary Green and Dr. James Andrews, an orthopedic surgeon who has operated on several pitchers.
The first result of that effort was a set of guidelines for pitchers younger than 8 years old through age 18. MLB, citing “decades of research,” is telling parents and coaches to limit the pitches thrown by kids and teenagers. They hope the guidelines will help force little leagues to adopt a set of uniform rules.
MLB’s guidelines aim to stop kids from pitching in leagues without pitch limits, pitching on consecutive days, pitching in multiple games in one day and pitching regularly over too many months in a year.
The Colorado High School Activities Association, Bullock said, is considering a pitch-count limit rule similar to the little leagues, to protect pitchers.
“I think coaches are ready for it,” Bullock said. “High school coaches see how much kids are being pitched. The lesson piece of it is just blowing up.”
Bullock is encouraged by what MLB has done.
“I’m really glad about it. I’m excited,” Bullock said. “It’s definitely something that’s needed. I’m not sure if it’ll be a difference-maker, but as a high school coach, I look to see the things (MLB is) doing and try to learn from there.”
Nick Groke: ngroke@denverpost.com or twitter.com/nickgroke
