Women Don’t Need Pitching Limits?

Women pitchers don’t need pitching limits to avoid arm injuries?

Baseball leagues and baseball coaches have set strict limits on the number of balls a male pitcher may pitch within a set period of time.

But not girls?

One reason is that girls play softball and softball pitchers, unlike the male players, throw underhand. Underhanded pitches, say some coaches, are less stressful to the arm than overhanded pitching.

Now researchers in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have studied the problem and have answers.

Bottom line, although fast-pitch softball may appear to be less risky for pitchers than is baseball, the potential for injury remains.

In a pair of recent studies, sports medicine specialist Matthew V. Smith, M.D., and his colleagues evaluated more than 100 athletes, ages 14 to 18, to understand the risks faced by softball pitchers. They reported their findings in The American Journal of Sports Medicine. The study is titled “Effect of Pitching Consecutive Days in Youth Fast-Pitch Softball Tournaments on Objective Shoulder Strength and Subjective Shoulder Symptoms.”

Smith found that 40% of pitchers in highly competitive softball leagues had some type of shoulder or arm injury during the season.

And, say the researchers, those injuries may well be due to excessive pitching, particularly during tournaments where pitchers often pitch several games in succession.

When they tracked pitchers before and during two- and three-day tournaments they found progressive increases in shoulder pain, fatigue and weakness.

Furthermore, 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.

Smith said that the idea that we should protect these softball pitchers hasn’t really caught on. 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. Most don’t realize they’re putting the pitcher at risk, but it turns out that the windmill style of pitching that girls use is not as safe as some might think.

On a fast-pitch softball team, the pitcher is throwing 100 or 125 pitches in a game. The center fielder may only throw four or five times in a game. The study focused on pitchers because they are the ones who most commonly come to the doctor’s office with injuries. Smith said there is some data suggesting that fatigue is a precursor to injury. “If we limit pitches, get them more rest and give them more time to recover, it’s logical to think the injury risk will decline,” he said.