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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

I care less about pro players who hurt themselves, and more about the 16-21 year olds. Anecdotally, our area has a ton of travel baseball teams, which start at kindergarten. Highly competitive leagues. These kids tend to have daily practice starting in kindergarten.

There are three local high schoolers who have had Tommy John surgery. It's like they're proud of it.

An it's terrifying. If the pitch clock comes into these leagues (and it will because why not treat 6 year olds like they're pro-players so the dads can live out some weird fantasy) we will see more and more youth with injuries.

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Pitch clock and similar rules are not coming to little league, that’s absurd. The pitch clock was implemented because pro games take 3+ hours. Children’s games don’t have time/clock issues, and kids don’t even start pitching their own games until they are 11ish.

Youth baseball is completely different than pros - kids throw way fewer pitches way less frequently. With the exception of extreme high school/college coaches, but those coaches will be extreme regardless.

>kids throw way fewer pitches way less frequently.

I would like to push back on that a little. It is very common (again, anecdotally at least with the 16 K-12 districts I work with regularly) for kids to be on multiple teams. They'll do a summer league, fall/winter/spring weekend league and weeknight league. It is not uncommon for kids to be on 2 teams through the school year, and 3 in the summer. So, while there are rules around how many innings one kid can pitch, and how many pitches they can throw, there is no governing board to oversee that. It's all honor system; parents are in control of that. It tends to be more flexible than the rules actually intend.

It’s not insane for high school at all.

The logic goes “we need to get these kids ready for college, so they’re used to it.”

It’s certainly plausible.

There's no evidence that the pitch clock has anything to do with these injuries.

The article goes into it, but the more likely culprits are starting pitchers throwing harder, throwing more sliders, pitching without foreign substances (so they grip the ball harder), and obsessing over spin rate.

Does anyone know of any studies on the long term health of children who go through programs like this? I see this sentiment a lot, and can even think of annecdotes of people this describes in my own life, but haven't seen much attempt at quantifying it.

A quick search is just showing studies on sports participation and children's health while they are still children (which seems to be resoundingly positive).

I don't know how you would even approach that due to the huge selection bias.

Any kind of relevant metric, such as future injury of health, academic success in a non-sports-scolarship program, future propensity to crime etc etc. are strongly influenced if you simply are the kind of person that is likely to enroll into sports.

We have this weird system where if you aren't good enough to become a doctor purely on academics we will also consider how good you are at baseball. It's quite insane on its face but it's how lots of midwits end up with "advanced" degrees. Those dad's are probably trying to make that happen.

I'm very confused by your statements. Maybe it's too early but I legitimately don't understand what you said. Can you please explain a little?

They're saying the schools accept (measure) applicants on both their academic and sporting prowess. I believe they are suggesting that, if a child is not very academic, a parent may try to get their child into a prestigious school by "encouraging" them in sports.

You surely also have to pass the required classes and attend medical school, though right?

You know what you call a doctor who got C's? A doctor.

OK, but it's not like there's a section on the USMLE that says "by the way, how fast is your fastball? how many 3s can you make in a minute? what's your mile time?". The argument that being an athlete makes it significantly easier to become a doctor is weird, because getting into a good undergraduate institution is not the main hurdle to becoming a doctor.

I don't know about elsewhere but in the UK and Czech Republic, Medicine is a particularly challenging field of study that aggressively weeds out underperformers. You're not making it through unless you actually know what you're doing.

If studying medicine it's easy enough in the USA that the tough part is getting admission (which I doubt) then I think your priority would be to fix your degree courses rather than fiddling with the admissions process. It's still weird to me that you can get into university by throwing the ball good, but if someone can balance what is basically a unpaid professional athletics career and get a decent degree too then more power to them.

Do advanced programs give athletic scholarships? I've never heard of a master's program offering that nor have I ever seen Yale Medical School's baseball team.

> we have this weird system where if you aren’t good enough to become a doctor purely on academics we will also consider how good you are at baseball

This is not how any of it works. At all.

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