She’s throwing 70 or 100 or 125 pitches in a game. On a fast-pitch softball team, the pitcher is the player doing most of the throwing. Why are pitchers more vulnerable to injury than players at other positions? Most don’t realize they’re putting the pitcher at risk, but it turns out that the windmill style of pitching that girls use isn’t as safe as some might think. Because there aren’t as many pitchers on most softball teams as there are on baseball teams, coaches tend to “ride” the ones who are successful. The idea that we should protect these softball pitchers hasn’t really caught on. The dogma involving throwing athletes is that the underhand pitch is thought to be safer, but there have been biomechanical studies in recent years indicating that the stresses on the shoulder are very similar, regardless of whether one is pitching overhand or underhand. Why doesn’t fast-pitch softball have pitching limits? Smith’s team recently evaluated pitchers before and during two- and three-day tournaments and found progressive increases in shoulder pain, fatigue and weakness. And when the researchers looked more closely, they found that part of the reason may be that softball pitchers frequently pitch several games in succession, particularly during tournaments.
Studying pitchers in highly competitive softball leagues, Smith, an associate professor of orthopedics, and his colleagues found that 40 percent had some type of shoulder or arm injury during the season. They reported their findings in The American Journal of Sports Medicine. Smith, MD, and his colleagues evaluated more than 100 athletes, ages 14 to 18, to understand the risks faced by softball pitchers. In a pair of recent studies, sports medicine specialist Matthew V. Louis have found that although fast-pitch softball may be less risky, the potential for injury still exists. One reason is that softball pitchers throw underhand, a motion thought to stress the arm less than the overhand throws seen in baseball.īut researchers in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. But for girls playing fast-pitch softball, such guidelines are rare. Youth baseball leagues often have fairly strict limits on how many innings pitchers can pitch, or how many pitches a player can throw.
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