The Arm

Every year, Major League Baseball spends upward of $2 billion on pitchers—five times the salary of all NFL quarterbacks combined. Pitchers are the lifeblood of the sport, the ones who win championships, but today they face an epidemic unlike any baseball has seen.

One tiny ligament in the elbow keeps snapping and sending teenagers and major leaguers alike to undergo surgery, an issue the baseball establishment ignored for decades. For three years, Jeff Passan traveled the world to better understand the pitching arm and its past, present, and future. He exposed the broken youth system that spits out more injured pitchers than ever. He got the inside story of how the Chicago Cubs decided to spend $155 million on one arm—an arm that helped them win their first World Series in 108 years. He sat down for a rare interview with Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, whose career ended at thirty because of an arm injury. Passan went to Japan to understand how another baseball-obsessed nation deals with this crisis. And he followed two major league pitchers as they returned from Tommy John surgery, the revolutionary procedure named for the former All-Star who first underwent it more than forty years ago.

Passan discovered a culture that struggles to prevent arm injuries and lacks the support for the changes necessary to do so. He explains that without a drastic shift in how baseball thinks about its talent, another generation of pitchers will fall prey to the same problem that vexes the current one.