By Robert Whiting (2014)
Americans have been giving advice to Japanese pitchers about how to treat their arms for decades. When I first arrived in the 1960s, a Kintetsu Buffaloes pitcher named Glen Mickens, a former major leaguer from Los Angeles, made news when he wrote a letter published in both English and Japanese language dailies in Japan warning that the way Japanese pitchers were used guaranteed an early retirement from the game. He cited the case of two of Japan’s top pitchers, Kazuhisa Inao, who won 42 games in 1961, and Hiroshi Gondo, who pitched a record 429 innings that same year. Inao, who had also pitched in 6 of 7 the 1958 Japan Series games after appearing in 18 of 25 contests down the stretch, inspired a saying, “Kamisama, Hotokesama and Inao-sama” (there is God, Buddha and Inao), while Gondo’s heroics gave rise to a mantra of his own: “Gondo, Gondo, ame. Gondo, ame ame. Gondo ame Gondo” (ame means rain). In fact, both pitchers developed sore arms and were washed up by their late 20s.
In the 1980s it was famed LA surgeon Dr. Frank Jobe who repaired Choji Murata’s overworked arm and, in a subsequent series of interviews with the Japanese media, lectured Japanese pitchers and pitching coaches on overthrowing in games and practice. “The human arm is not a piece of rubber,” he said. “It was not designed to throw a baseball and must have 3 to 4 days rest after pitching a nine-inning game of 100 pitches or more.” By the end of the 20th century it was Los Angeles-based Don Nomura who convinced Hideo Nomo and Hideki Irabu they were ruining their arms and their futures by staying in Japan.
The Japanese have paid attention to this advice. As a result, these days it is normal for Japanese starting pitchers to throw once a week and often go light on practice in between during the season (although nagekomi is still popular in spring camp, and pitch counts during the season are not nearly as restrictive as they are in MLB).
Says Itaru Kobayashi, general manager of the SoftBank Hawks, “Our starters now only throw 40-50 pitches in practice between starts. Sadaharu Oh, our honorary chairman, thinks our pitchers should throw a lot more in training than they do.”
Now, ironically, the shoe is on the other foot. It is Americans who are having arm problems, and the Japanese who are now giving advice.
In the past five years MLB teams have lost more than $1 billion due to highly paid pitchers being on the DL. Last year, according to one end-of-season survey, one out of every three current MLB pitchers had undergone Tommy John surgery. This season, there has been a record number of such operations, necessitated by ligament damage. Overall, during the past three years, MLB has experienced nearly twice as many such surgeries as NPB.
When Masahiro Tanaka went on the DL in July with a partially torn UCL, American media focused on Pitcher Abuse Points from the 160-pitch games Tanaka pitched in Japan, and on Tanaka’s overuse of the split-fingered fastball in MLB—a pitch notoriously hard on the elbow, which he threw twice as often as he had in Japan. However, Yu Darvish stepped forward to argue that, in this case, it was the American system that was the cause of the problem. In an interview with reporters at the All-Star Game in Minneapolis that occupied the entire front page of the popular Nikkan Sports and was prominently featured in other Japanese sports dailies, he said that the root of Tanaka’s arm troubles was not throwing the splitter or throwing too much in Japan, but having to switch from throwing once a week to pitching once every five days. He wasn’t getting proper rest, said Darvish—that was the main cause.
Shortly after that, a Japanese orthopedic surgeon told the Wall Street Journal that Americans have bad mechanics. “Americans count on upper body strength to propel the ball,” he said in a video interview, “whereas Japanese, who sometimes aren’t as strong, use their entire bodies, including their legs, reducing strain on the arms.”
Shigetoshi Hasegawa, the former Angels and Mariners pitcher, concurred in an accompanying WSJ article. “Honestly, Japanese guys have better mechanics,” he said. “You know why? Because they throw so many balls. If you don’t have good mechanics, you’re done.”
Combined with this is a growing number of people in the US with knowledge of or experience in Japan who are willing to argue the value of the Japanese approach. Case in point: an article appearing this spring on the popular website Sports on Earth, entitled “The Joys of the Six-Man Rotation,” suggested MLB consider the Japanese system of once-a-week starts for pitchers. The piece included an interview with former MLB pitcher Brian Bannister, who played briefly in Japan (before 3/11 struck), and who praised the “extended recovery cycle” for pitchers in Japanese ball and its accompanying massages and practice of soaking in alternating hot and cold water. Bannister also lauded the pre-game warm-up system in NPB as better than that of the Americans, saying, “The standard practice session and pregame dynamic warmup in Japan is extremely thorough in both duration and number of unique motions… this makes sure the body is warm and stretched out prior to throwing.” He further praised the weight training approach of the Japanese, which avoids “beach muscle” bodies by focusing on a balance of muscle development.
This is an interesting turn of events. For many years now, the American system of using starting pitchers—roughly 100-pitch limits followed by four days of rest—was thought to be the last word. (As Yukan Fuji reporter Osamu Nagatani put it, “If Darvish had made this remark several years ago, he would have been roundly condemned.”) But the recent outbreak of damaged elbow ligaments and Tommy John surgeries, despite all of MLB’s well-documented efforts to strictly limit pitch counts and soften practice routines between starts to protect players’ arms, has prompted Americans to take another look at their system.
U.S. baseball experts are not sure what is driving this latest run of injuries. Some say it is because more youth are playing year-round. Others say it is because pitchers are throwing harder than ever before. There have been subsequent calls for new measures to cope, like a 10-man rotation and the use of advanced medical technology to monitor health, such as hand-held ultrasound imagers and portable MRIs to measure physical wear and tear on a pitcher’s arm between innings.
Of course, there are veteran Hall of Fame pitchers like Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan and Greg Maddux who eschewed pitch counts and maintain that modern-day MLB pitchers are babied and should be pushed to throw more so as to strengthen their arms. Seaver threw on three days rest his entire career and completed approximately half of his starts during his prime, while Ryan once threw 259 pitches in a game, 242 in another and 235 on yet another occasion, and liked to throw batting practice between starts. Maddux had a habit of throwing complete simulated games on the sidelines between starts. All three pitched into their 40s, hardly ever went on the DL, and won 300 career games. “If you set limits,” Ryan was quoted as saying, “you lower people’s ceilings.” Equally important, all three had superb body mechanics, unlike, say, Stephen Strasburg, Max Scherzer and Chris Sale. Others argue that the Seavers and the Madduxes and the Ryans are special individuals, the exceptions to the rule—survivors in an era of limited sports medicine know-how—and that most pitchers who attempt to copy them will only wind up hurting their arms.
The interesting thing about this debate to me is how attitudes in Japan are changing. It had long been a fundamental tenet of the Japanese game that baseball players should practice longer and harder than their counterparts in the U.S. But as Japan began to produce more and more MLB stars, there has been pressure to re-examine the traditional system of throwing hundreds of pitches a day and pushing players to the point of physical collapse.
On the youth level, many Japanese coaches, players and doctors have come out in support of placing limits on pitching. The Japanese Society for Clinical Sports and Medicine, for example, has, since 1995, recommended limits of 50 pitches a day for Japanese 11-12 year-olds and 200 pitches a week (although it is not clear how many Little League coaches actually follow them). This compares to rules in the U.S. limiting 11-12 year-olds to 75 pitches per game and 100 per week.
Japan’s High School Baseball Federation, which oversees the annual summer Koshien high-school baseball championship, says it is now considering whether to introduce such measures as pitch counts, and perhaps take steps to limit long extra-inning games. Officials have been worried about the health of young players, who may be required to throw 100-200 pitches every day in tournament play, especially since U.S. media gave extensive exposure to high schooler Tomohiro Anraku, who threw 772 pitches in nine days at the spring version of Koshien a year ago. (By contrast, the rules of the California Interscholastic Federation limit game pitches to 130 per week, with recommendations that a pitcher who throws 76 pitches be required to rest for a minimum of four days.) Articles on the subject highlighted the advice of Glenn S. Fleisig, research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Alabama, who, among other things, said, “100-200 pitches a day is far too much for adolescent and adult pitchers. Compare it to smoking. You don’t get lung cancer from your first cigarette. But the cumulative toll can be devastating.”
Masumi Kuwata, the former Giants pitcher who played briefly for the Pittsburgh Pirates at the end of his career, is among those in Japan who support introducing pitch limits as soon as possible, suggesting schools adopt a system whereby a sophomore can only pitch up to five innings a game, a junior six and a senior seven. In an interesting sign of progress, a few high schools have already instituted pitch counts both in games and in practice. Says SoftBank’s Kobayashi, “We drafted a pitcher in 2012—he was our second round pick—who had never thrown over 100 pitches in his life, either in a game or in practice. The coaches had to push him to do it.”
The problem, however, is that the media and the public in Japan glorify Koshien-style demonstrations of fighting spirit as heroic, so few high school teams have limits on pitching. Many complain that cutting back on training and instituting strict American-style pitch counts would take away what is special and unique about the Japanese game, which centers on discipline, self-sacrifice, perseverance and team spirit. Consider Daisuke Matsuzaka’s performance in the 1998 Koshien summer tournament: he pitched 250 pitches in 17 innings, following a 148-pitch performance the previous day, then two days later pitched a complete-game no-hitter to lead his team to victory. Or Yuki Saito, who threw 948 pitches in 69 innings to bring his school a championship. Without such displays of endurance and suffering, you will hear, the Koshien tourney would simply not be the same.
In fact, Matsuzaka was recently quoted as saying that he personally enjoyed throwing as many as 200 pitches a day in high school and that it didn’t hurt him at all—although he does now say that he thinks it is important for coaches and managers to take control and educate players on how much the body can withstand. Matsuzaka’s high school pitching coach still makes his pitchers throw more than 100 pitches a day in practice, every day of the year.
Rakuten pitching coach Yoshinori Sato says that the American obsession with pitch counts is a bad thing, while Bobby Valentine, who initially opposed the Japanese system, came to allow high pitch counts and nagekomi if a pitcher’s core mechanics and conditioning were in top form, in subsequent years coaching in Japan. This year a number of NPB pitchers threw marathon sessions of nagekomi that would make American coaches wince. Among them were Daisuke Miura of Yokohama, who threw a session of 311 pitches on February 16 in camp, and Takuma Achira of Chunichi, who threw 341 on February 25.
What’s going to happen is unclear—nobody knows for sure how to solve the problem of the recent rash of pitching injuries. The Japanese may indeed have something of value to offer on the subject. But one thing is certain: the lines dividing the US and Japan on this subject are not as clearly drawn as they once were.
Tokyo Junkie 