Players, parents, coaches face balancing act in nurturing young baseball arms

Tom Mlodzinski felt panicky.

He’d tried to get his son’s attention before the boy walked to the mound. He knew his son already had thrown 82 pitches — three more and he’d reach his limit.

The pitch limit was Mlodzinski’s idea. He’d reminded Hilton Head Island High School baseball coach Blair Carson of it a couple weeks earlier. But now, in the final inning of a March 31 game between the Seahawks and rival Hilton Head Prep, he watched his son wind up and reach back for a 90-plus mph fastball — a pitch that had helped secure a scholarship offer from the University of South Carolina.

Carmen Mlodzinski struck out the first Prep batter, then the second. His father relaxed — the kid’s arm looked fine. But the next batter was a tougher out. Three balls and two strikes — a full count.

Carmen Mlodzinski walked him. Then, as his father said, “All the wheels fell off.”

As high school playoffs start around South Carolina, players, parents and coaches will keep a close eye on their pitchers’ throwing arms. As teams advance, pitcher might be asked to throw more innings in a condensed time frame. Many kids play year-round club baseball, too.

Injury is a concern. Which means players, parents and coaches have to try to work together — a balancing act complicated by differing coaching methods, a desire to win and the still-developing teen body.

Whale Branch baseball coach Emanuel Wheeler remembers playing first base for Chicago State and crouching near the bag as his college teammate threw a curveball.

“I felt something pop,” Wheeler remembers his pitcher saying.

“I remember him looking down at his elbow,” Wheeler said. “He was a (breaking ball) guy. He tried to spot a fastball, and it must have went 20 feet over the catcher’s head into the backstop. And then he came off the mound. His arm swelled up instantly.”

It’s a memory that sticks with Wheeler as he coaches Whale Branch’s pitchers. And that’s why he preaches the power of the changeup.

“I have a junior, Ryan Murray-Green, and he throws (a curveball),” Wheeler said, “but I haven’t had him throw it much this year.”

Wheeler, like many coaches, worries curveballs can damage young arms. He likes the changeup because it confuses hitters as an off-speed pitch delivered with an arm motion similar to that of a fastball.

“I typically keep kids under 100 pitches,” he said. “And if it’s anything over 75 (pitches) and it’s a stressful situation, I try to get them out of there.”

A stressful situation involves a young hurler who has hit the 75-pitch threshold by the third inning.

“I’m not going to hurt someone’s son just to win a game,” Wheeler said. “You still have impressionable minds playing this game.”

The dilemma is highlighted in a Jeff Passan new book, “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports.”

Passan, Yahoo! Sports’ lead baseball writer, argues that baseball has to reconsider the way it thinks about developing talent, or the injuries befalling today’s pitchers could plague the next generation. Most troubling, though, is a development culture he found resistant to change.

“With year-round baseball as big of a pox as it is,” Passan told the New York Times, “the willful ignorance of parents, coaches, tournament administrators and others who help foster a youth baseball-industrial complex surprised and saddened me.”

Major League Baseball annually spends $1.5 billion on pitchers, Passan writes. But pitchers keep snapping ligaments in their elbows. A question he asks: Are young pitchers throwing too hard, too soon?

By the end of his freshmen year of high school, Carmen Mlodzinski was throwing close to 90 mph. That’s when he really got the Gamecocks’ attention, his father said.

Mlodzinski committed to USC as a freshman. He and his dad met with the coaching staff in an office overlooking the Gamecocks’ home park. Mlodzinski is also a shortstop, so they talked about hitting.

“Then the conversation shifted over to the pitching coach,” his father said, “and I asked him if he wanted Carmen on any kind of pitching plan or program ... and he just kind laughed and said, ‘Don’t pitch, or pitch as little as possible.’ ”

The coach, the elder Mlodzinski said, talked about all the pitchers he’d seen who couldn’t sustain their velocity through college “because their arms were simply worn out from too much pitching.”

Battery Creek coach Les Goude stressed the playoffs “are different than regular season games. You’re pitching to win. You lose and you’re out.”

Goude has his pitchers prepare all year to “work up to five, six, seven innings.” During games an assistant coach keeps track of the pitch count with a hand clicker. And Goude watches for pitchers’ velocity to drop, or their control to diminish.

“The first thing I look at, really, is their body language,” he said. “You can tell if a kid is tired. They get tired in their legs first — the way they go to the mound, the way they look after they throw a pitch.”

Battery Creek players aren’t allowed to play on club teams during the high-school season, he said. He worries a club coach might pitch one of his kids a lot in a short amount of time — and without his knowledge.

“That truly is where parents have to step in,” he said, “and understand that they’re not helping their kids if they’re doing it all during the same season.”

Overuse injuries are not exclusive to baseball, as youth clubs operate year-round in basketball, soccer, volleyball, lacrosse and other sports. Perhaps no body part, though, generates more worry than the pitching arm.

Elbow concerns prompted Hilton Head Island’s Chuck Workman to keep his son from pitching during his sophomore year at Hilton Head Christian.

Caleb Workman, now a lefty freshman at Flagler College, had had some fluid in his elbow the previous year and his father worried about his future. If there was chance for him to pitch at the next level, he needed rest.

“You’ve got to do what’s best for next year, for the next 40 years,” the elder Workman said. “Not what’s best right now.”

His son had pitched since he was 10 years old, and Workman had kept him on a pitch count. Despite the various precautions, Caleb Workman had an MRI exam on his shoulder last week in Florida.

On March 31, Tom Mlodzinski watched his son issue a two-out walk to Hilton Head Prep. Then another walk, followed by an infield single.

He watched his son’s pitch count rise past 100. He glanced over to the bench and saw Seahawks lefty Mat Clark, a Clemson signee, whose own season has been severely limited by injury. (Reached by phone Friday afternoon, Clark’s parents declined to comment.)

Mlodzinski looked at the scoreboard — a 5-0 Seahawks lead.

“(Carmen) was throwing them high, bouncing them in,” he said. “It was over.”

Getting Carson’s attention in the dugout, Mlodzinski asked the coach to take his son out. He remembers Carson responded: “Just one more batter.”

“It was extremely frustrating,” Mlodzinski recalled.

He was worried about his kid “hurting himself long term” and disappointed that, after the pitch-count conversation two weeks earlier, he’d have to revisit the issue. (Carson did not respond to texts sent Wednesday and Friday from the Island Packet seeking comment.)

After the walks and the infield single, Carmen Mlodzinski faced the next batter. His 110th pitch was a third strike. The game ended.

This story was originally published April 30, 2016 at 5:26 PM with the headline "Players, parents, coaches face balancing act in nurturing young baseball arms."