Baseball’s dilemma is throw hard or – and? – go home – Orange County Register

The world according to Jim:

• Greg Maddux won 355 games and four Cy Young Awards in 23 seasons, along with a World Series ring, en route to the Hall of Fame. Yet if Maddux were coming up today, he likely wouldn’t be drafted or signed.

Nor would Jamie Moyer, or Randy Jones, or even Tommy John (the pitcher, as differentiated from Tommy John the surgery). None of them would have had enough velocity or spin rate to catch scouts’ eyes today – the dwindling number of scouts who rely on their eyes and their wits, anyway. And if you wonder why pitchers throughout baseball are getting hurt in epidemic proportions, start there. …

• As of Friday morning, ESPN’s daily injury tracker listed 184 pitchers on big-league injury lists, 125 of them on the 60-day IL. The vast majority are elbow or shoulder injuries, and of those, 21 pitchers have either recently had or will have Tommy John surgeries.

And while you can say there’s no cause and effect, consider that the Angels’ Ben Joyce threw a 105.5 mph fastball to the Dodgers’ Tommy Edman on Sept. 3 in Anaheim, fastest in the majors this year. A few days later, he felt something in his shoulder, and this week he went on the injured list. …

• Which brings us back to pitchers of the past, who used command and cunning to succeed in lieu of raw power. In the recent MLB Network documentary, “Greg Maddux: One Of A Kind,” this may have been the money quote from Maddux himself: “We all know pitching is about deceiving the hitter.” In other words, if you throw a fastball in the 80s but can make two or three or four different pitches look similar, you can succeed. He proved it. …

• Maddux finished his career in 2008 as a teammate, in his second late-career stint with the Dodgers, to rookie Clayton Kershaw. I suggested the current front office try to bring him back as a part-time pitching coach or consultant, at least to be a sounding board for Kershaw in the late stages of his career. But maybe his value would go deeper than that. …

• The act of pitching a baseball is unnatural anyway, and you can blame the pitch clock, or the crackdown on tacky substances, or as many other factors as you’d like, but maximum effort on every pitch translates to maximum stress. Can we at least agree that the injury toll is evidence that current methods, both on the professional level and going way back to before kid pitchers reach draft age, aren’t working? …

• I’m guessing people raised on today’s game have trouble visualizing a time that location and command –efficiency, in other words – worked. For instance, Jones won 20 and 22 games in 1975 and ’76 with Padres teams that won 71 and 73 games, respectively. He could reach 87 mph with his fastball but told former ball writer Kevin Kernan in a 2021 interview that he never threw his hardest, because the slower he threw it the more it would move. “If I struck you out,” he quipped, “it wasn’t my fault, it was yours, you just missed it.’’ …

• Elsewhere, now we can quit referring to the “Pac-2.” Does the addition of four Mountain West Conference teams in 2026 to Washington State and Oregon State mean we can call it the Pac-Half 12 instead? Seriously, it is a welcome development for what was once the “Conference of Champions,” although even getting to eight teams won’t assure that this remains a power conference.

San Diego State, Boise State, Colorado State and Fresno State are a geographic fit and, particularly, a football fit. UNLV would seem to be the other Mountain West school best positioned to join a revitalized Pac-12, and from the vantage point of This Space it makes perfect sense to bring in Nevada as well and keep those schools together (and avoid a fight in the Nevada Legislature) than to recruit Memphis or someone else from the Eastern half of the country. …

• As for Cal and Stanford? Even if the coming court fight involving Florida State and Clemson blows up the Atlantic Coast Conference, as it well might, don’t expect the Bay Area schools to throw in with the likes of SDSU and Fresno. If you detect a whiff of elitism, you’re right. …

• Meanwhile, the House v. NCAA settlement appears to be teetering. Ramogi Huma’s Norco-based National College Players Association issued a statement in opposition, arguing that, instead of increasing athletes’ compensation, the settlement could allow conferences, colleges and the NCAA to prohibit revenue sharing should athletes win the right to collectively bargain, shut down the money flow from outside NIL collectives, allow programs to reduce full athletic scholarships to partial ones and remove any guardrails that would prevent schools from mass cuts of sports.