In light of the recent post on baseball hotbeds and the benefits of year-round play, I saw this article a couple of months back. I don't think it has been posted here. Wonder if any colleges might take this into account when looking at the injury risk for some recruits?
A new study published in The Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine compiled the locations of the high schools for all of the pitchers who underwent Tommy John surgery between 1974 (when legendary hurler Tommy John had the surgery) to June 1, 2014. The researchers found biographical information and classified the players as those growing up in either warm-weather states or cold-weather states. If a state was located south of the 33rd parallel, it was considered a warm-weather state. This latitude was chosen because areas below it had average temperatures above freezing in January.
• Among all players in MLB history, 64.5% grew up in cold-weather locations.
• Among all MLB pitchers who underwent Tommy John surgery, a significantly higher percentage (56.3%) were from warm-weather areas, compared to 43.7% from cold-weather areas.
• Also, pitchers from warmer areas had surgery at a younger average age and earlier in their MLB careers than pitchers from cold-weather locations.
The study is here: http://ojs.sagepub.com/content...325967114553916.full
This sounds like a major flaw in the logic of the study: "In MLB history, 64.5% of all players (11,538) were from cold weather areas, while 35.5% (6359) of all players were from warm weather areas." Tommy John surgery has only been common in the last few decades. The percentage of major league players from warm weather states over the last two decades far exceeds the percentage in all of MLB history (population shift to SunBelt over the last 50 years, for one reason). What percentage of major-league pitchers, today (or, say, over the last 20 years), not all-time, are from warm-weather states? I would bet it is close to the percentage (56.3%) of TJ surgeries from warm-weather states.