UTK Special 12/1/25

Billionaires, Roles, and other notes and rants

It finally happened.

After a decade of creeping toward the edge, baseball stepped over the line: more than one billion dollars lost to injury in a single season. That’s not hyperbole or creative accounting. That’s the real cost of players unavailable, production erased, and competitive windows slammed shut. A billion dollars. One season. The actual number: $1,070,000 and no cents.

When I started tracking this in the early 2000s, the total injury cost in baseball hovered around the $300 to $400 million range. That felt enormous then. Teams would talk about how injuries derailed their year, how they’d spent tens of millions on players who never got to take the field. But there was always the assumption that this was just the natural tax of pitching, of playing 162 games, of bodies pushed against the edge. Back then, the graph moved but it didn’t accelerate.

Then came the last ten years.

Baseball didn’t just spend more money: the sport lost more players, for longer stretches, in greater clusters. IL placements doubled. UCL surgeries rose in lockstep with rising velocity. Hamstrings became multi-week fixtures. Shoulder injuries erased seasons. Even the teams with cutting-edge biomechanics labs and seven-figure sports science budgets found themselves bleeding days and dollars.

Now, after years of warning signs, the bill came due: $1.07 billion and that’s without losing many of the biggest earners. Ohtani, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge barely missed time despite some issues. Zack Wheeler missed almost half the season and Gerrit Cole missed all of it, as did Anthony Rendon, who might finally come off the books soon for the Angels. This wasn’t just dollars, the sheer number of IL stints was, I believe, a record.

To put that in perspective, baseball could have bought an entire franchise out of the losses. The sport effectively spent a year’s worth of the Miami Marlins roster on injuries alone. If you prefer a different metaphor, think 15,000 Corvettes. A Manhattan skyscraper. The GDP of a small island nation. Poof. Gone. All because we keep losing the same battle in the same way.

This isn’t the moment to shrug and say “pitching is unnatural.” That line was tired twenty years ago. Now it’s less of an excuse. The truth is more uncomfortable: Baseball has built a development and performance system that produces velocity extremely well, but durability almost not at all. The force we ask pitchers to generate is rising, but the capacity to handle that force is not.

The problem isn’t the pitch clock, or analytics, or any of the easy scapegoats. The problem is systemic. Inputs are fragmented. Recovery is misunderstood. Youth development is a disaster zone. Communication between levels is inconsistent. Everyone sees part of the problem, but no one owns the whole.

But here’s the part that matters: this can be fixed. Not with slogans or rule changes or a magic workload number. The solutions require something deeper — clarity, honesty, and a willingness to rebuild what baseball thinks it already knows about health, workload, recovery, and development.

In late January, I’ll be presenting to a conference full of baseball’s medical staffers and walking through the data, the trends, and the opportunities in detail. There are answers here. There are models that work. There are innovations already making a difference in other sports. Baseball isn’t helpless. It’s just overdue for a reckoning.

A billion dollars is a line in the sand. Crossing it isn’t the end of the story. It’s the moment baseball finally has to start writing a new one.

More soon.

***

Baseball still holds on to its labels. Starter, reliever, closer, high-leverage guy. These categories were made for a game that doesn’t really exist anymore, but teams stick with them because it keeps things organized. It makes lineup cards look tidy. It makes postgame interviews simpler. It makes roles seem important, like each pitcher was given their identity by some baseball higher power. And honestly, players like it this way, which makes changing things tough.

The talk about Ryan Helsley as a starter went straight against this old way of thinking. But the moment he signed with Baltimore, that talk died down. That’s too bad, because the idea never had to do with where he lives. It was simpler than that: put your best pitchers on the mound for more outs. End of story.

We’re now in an era focused on designing pitches. The old myth that relievers don’t have a third pitch disappeared long ago, around the same time BlackBerry phones stopped being a thing. If a pitcher doesn’t have a third pitch, teams have the tools to help develop one. There are coaches, cameras, and high-tech gadgets all set up for that. Helsley didn’t come into baseball without the stuff a starter needs. He’s a super-efficient, powerful arm who can keep throwing top-notch pitches for about 20 pitches. Nothing about him suggests he couldn’t maintain that for 50 pitches. The only thing stopping teams from trying this out is fear.

Let’s be honest, relief pitchers have one of the toughest and most unpredictable roles in baseball. They face risks like sudden jumps in workload, short breaks, and the frustrating cycle of warming up, sitting, then warming up again, all of which can ruin their elbows. Starting pitchers don’t go through this. They have a steady rhythm, clear goals, and a plan. Giving a reliever like Helsley a job where he pitches four or five innings is actually a big jump in terms of protecting his arm. A steady, manageable workload keeps arms healthy. A random, inconsistent schedule breaks them down.

Baseball already shows us how to do this. Take Jacob Misiorowski, who plays by strict limits on how much he throws, or Ohtani’s odd and slow build this year that admittedly had him ready for the playoffs. These weren’t wild experiments. They were carefully planned, based on what we think we know about how much pitching arms can handle. Nothing fell apart, pitchers stayed strong, and teams didn’t panic when their “starter” left after the fourth inning. This works because it adds structure around a player’s skills, not the other way around.

Here’s the simple truth: starters don’t have to pitch seven innings anymore. It’s nice if they do and the system has to make it possible for Yoshinobu Yamamoto to do that, then come back and relieve the next day. While many try to figure out how to bring back the starter, they should remember Sandy Koufax and the consequences they had then. If the job is only 12–15 batters, a lot more pitchers can do it. Helsley fits right in. So does much of the top bullpen. The gap between throwing 20 pitches and 50 isn’t huge. It’s more like a gentle slope. If teams keep the overall workload steady and the weekly pitch counts reasonable, that slope is easy to climb.

I’ve theorized in the past about a 12-man staff that is functionally three groups of pitchers that function as an old school starter, with three actual relievers to come in when necessary. The “trio” would ideally go 3 innings each, but one might go four. One might get hot. They’d rotate, so always at least two days between outings for them. Piecing it together was tougher, with things like meltdowns and double-headers throwing things off. Now, the AI can plan it and when things go really wrong, you call someone up and adjust.

Teams already accept this idea, even if they don’t say it openly. They use openers, piggyback starters, and bulk pitchers. That’s just a modern way of saying “starter we’re careful about calling a starter.” They swap pitchers early on to get good matchups, then let a less experienced middle reliever finish a tough middle inning. This constant focus on defined pitching roles, dressed up as clever strategy, actually hurts teams and costs wins over the course of a full season. The job title should be “pitcher”, period.

It should be simple. You want your best pitchers facing the toughest parts of the lineup. That means earlier, not later. The fifth inning matters just as much as the ninth. Sending Helsley in the seventh inning because “that’s his inning” is a mistake if the most important moments happened in the fourth.

If you take away the labels and look at the facts—outs, pressure, run prevention—the answer is clear. You use your best arms the most and in the highest leverage situations, when possible and adjust for game state and fatigue. You don’t hold them back for situations that might never happen. You don’t waste 80 innings of elite pitching just because it looks unusual on the lineup card. Use the pitchers who give you the best chance to prevent runs, and give them roles that help that happen.

Pitchers don’t need labels. They need structure. They need workloads they can count on. They should pitch when the situation calls for it, not because the stats say so. Helsley starting was never about fantasy baseball or filling time in the offseason. It showed the next natural move in a sport that’s finally stopped pretending a guy has to throw 200 innings to be a starter.

You can protect arms without holding back your best pitchers. You can manage workloads in a smart way. Short outings of four or five innings can be part of the normal plan. And you can get more value—more outs and more wins—by treating pitchers like pitchers, not like characters stuck in set roles.

The job is simple: get outs and win. Everything else is just the wrong kind of role-play.

***

With all the GMs and Managers now in place, if still juggling staff and support, the Winter Meetings will convene in Orlando with some big names and some big dollars. Disney is an easy place to spend more than you expected, but I’m not sure this is going to be as big a market. I think Kyle Tucker might find himself in the Pete Alonso role from last year - well liked, but teams have a defined amount they’re willing to spend on him and that’s not what Scott Boras is asking for. Tucker might have to give in on years or AAV, maybe both, before this is over.

The Japanese players are all top tier, so adding in the posting and figuring out how to get more Yamamoto and less Roki Sasaki (2025 regular season version) remains tough, but not impossible. However, figuring out those calculations has to come early with the deadline for negotiations already defined.

We also have owners positioning themselves. Hal Steinbrenner is far stingier than his father ever was and doesn’t seem to care nearly as much about winning. Other owners are doing the same or standing pat, while some are signalling they’ll spend. The Pirates are in this latter group, but don’t be too fooled. The Nuttings are going to hold for a salary cap and they’re at least being smart about getting over the lowest possible salary floor level by doing it as a plan rather than a “throw money at someone, Ben” thing. I’d start by signing Paul Skenes and some other of the young players to lock it in. A Ronald Acuna type deal is possible and I can’t think of many of these early deals that didn’t really pay off for a team. Signing Kyle Schwarber is unlikely, but the rumors that they made a credible offer on Josh Naylor gives some hope, if less roster flexibility.

I’m expecting it to be quiet between now and the Meetings, but maybe we see a few moves. The pitching seems to be going the fastest with Dylan Cease already off the table. Do I love a seven year deal for any age-30 pitcher? No, but I get it. I think Ranger Suarez could look at that deal, ask Sam Fuld for something similar, and get done pretty quickly. One agent I spoke with thought that the Diamondbacks, A’s, and Angels would surprise people and get aggressive for what they think are fits. With the A’s still in Sacramento and the Ball(ys)Park in a bit of flux, that seems odd to me, unless current ownership is really bringing in someone - perhaps Patrick Dumont? - to start the build towards that and save the build.