A new study shows that the way you get to Yankee Stadium might also take you to the orthopedic surgeon's office.
The study included more than 2,000 teenagers and young adults who had an MRI done for shoulder pain. Most were baseball pitchers. The researchers then looked more closely at those who only had swelling at a certain point close to where the collarbone and the shoulder blade meet. The intersection is a little hard to announce. In many of these people, the bones that should fuse together in adolescence to create the bump at the top of the shoulder hadn’t done so properly. Throwing more than 100 pitches per week raised the risk of this problem more than six-fold. So the lead researcher in this study recommends that young pitchers stay below this number per week. Surgery is available is fix this bone and to the best of my knowledge, it’s not yet named after a pitcher. So somewhere out there, some youngster working on his curve ball might be the next Tommy John. That was the number 100 and I’m Eric Metcalf.