Baseball

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.

There are a number of steps baseball parents, coaches and athletes can take before practices and games to reduce the risk of injury.

There are some steps parents can take even before the season begins to reduce the risk that their child will be injured playing youth baseball.

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

Whether young pitchers should delay throwing curve balls to protect against arm injuries has long been the subject of debate.  Despite the fact that baseball is the most widely studied youth sport in the United States, the jury is still out on the role of breaking pitches in overuse injuries.

One important way for youth baseball coaches to prevent overuse injuries is to look for signs that the pitcher is tired.  While fatigue, like pain (another early warning sign of overuse injury), is generally difficult to quantify because it is a subjective, a coach can use pitch counts, ball velocity, ball location, pitching mechanics, and strength as guides in determining fatigue.

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. 

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 2011 study finds.