You’re at this point probably curious to see the results, so here they are. This can be due to a couple of factors: A) We can definitely attribute some of this to a small sample size, especially since in the BIS table (where the sample is bigger) it shows a drop in percentage. B) The pitchers who are throwing in that group are probably older and therefore are more prone to the injury. A 113 or 196 sample is definitely not as accurate as a 500 sample, but I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to suggest, based on this data, that throwing 95+ increases one’s likelihood of getting the surgery.Īlso you might have noticed that in the PITCHfx table the 86 to 89 buckets are actually more likely to have Tommy John than the 89 to 92 group. This doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t come to any conclusions. There is also a pretty big increase when looking at the 95+ bucket, in both tables, although I would argue that the sample size there is somewhat small. The biggest increase happens from the 89-92 bucket to the 92-95 bucket. I did not include position players as I felt they would skew the data.įrom this data it’s pretty clear that velocity does increase one’s likelihood of getting Tommy John surgery. Again did not set an innings limit and this gave me a sample size of 2097 pitchers. I basically did the same thing for the BIS data, which was gathered at FanGraphs. I then looked up, which pitchers had Tommy John surgery.

I looked at all the years available and did not set an innings limit, in order to get as large of a sample size as possible. I gathered the PITCHfx data in Baseball Prospectus’ leaderboard. This is why when I did my study I looked at PITCHfx and BIS data separately to see if I would get different results.īefore we get into my results, however, I’ll explain my methodology. There are also discrepancies in the data. Below is the yearly velocity data.Īs you can see velocity is on the rise. There are essentially two sources where velocity data can be found, PITCHfx, which dates back to 2007 and Baseball Info Solution (BIS), which dates back to 2002. Fleisig’s results then throwing harder does increase your chances of having Tommy John. If we are to believe Will Carroll’s findings then really there isn’t any significant risk of throwing harder. So how does this relate to velocity? Well in my previous article I found that 32% of pitchers who threw 95+ MPH on average had the surgery. Glenn Fleisig found that 16% of all pitchers had Tommy John, 15% of Minor Leaguers had Tommy John, and 25% of Major Leaguers fell under the knife. And finally at this year’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Dr. In March of 2014, Jeff looked at players who threw a pitch 100MPH or harder and found that 25% of them had the surgery.

Wild Pitch by Sloan Johnson