Baseball: Young arms

By Ed Piper

The National Federation of State High School Associations' ruling that pitchers must now have a pitch limit starting in 2017 caps off a couple of weeks in which I have been reliving the arm injury I suffered as a 12-year-old.

I think it has come back more vividly this spring and summer because, instead of just taking photos of La Jolla High baseball, as I did my first nine years covering LJHS, for the past three years I have also been writing up games and player features (first for the La Jolla Light, then for the La Jolla Village News as well as this blog).

The other night I went to bed with the image I have in my memory--I realize that what we remember is our experience, not the actual events that took place--of that fateful lunchtime softball game as an eighth-grader in middle school in which I hadn't warmed up before the game.

Why I would have fielded five straight grounders playing third base, without a break in innings, doesn't fit together. Maybe I went back out there in the second inning and took the fourth and fifth groundballs hit to me, with my arm still not properly warmed up.

In any case, the alone feeling--my arm is hurt, I know something happened--is what really comes home. At 12 years old, I didn't have the ability to go tell someone that my arm had gone numb. I was too embarrassed, I suppose. I didn't tell Coach Cornelius, the P.E. coach overseeing the game who had told us to start the game without warm-ups so that we could get more innings in. I didn't tell my parents when I went home.

I continued to pitch in little league (in Camarillo, CA, we didn't have official Little League). I don't think I ever told my manager, Buck Pena, who was a good man. This was my third year playing under him. Looking back, I know that he was a caring man. He just didn't know what had happened, and I didn't open my mouth to let him know.

After winning four complete games (six innings a game) in our team's first seven games (round one), I won one game in the last 14. I struck out 17 batters in 18 outs in one game, 14 in another, before hurting my arm. I could throw hard enough to break poor Joey Erickson's ribs with an errant pitch. I'm not proud of injuring another player. It just reminds me how lively an arm I had. I was big and tall, and I could throw hard. I didn't really know the ins-and-outs of pitching. I was just a young kid enjoying playing a kid's game.

One of the loneliest times for me was when an older boy--17 or 18, maybe?--came to practice, unannounced. I didn't know who he was. He asked me after practice, "You're the big thrower. I want you to throw me some batting practice." Embarrassed and too young and immature to say, "No, my arm is hurting," I followed him to another backstop at Las Posas Elementary School. I threw pitch-after-pitch. Agonizing. He said, "Throw me more curves." Well, curves didn't originally hurt my arm--throwing hard after not warming up did--but I can remember across the decades the pain and discomfort I felt in spinning off curve after curve to this anonymous older kid.

At least as much was the psychic pain. Trapped. Alone. I was just a boy.

Any athlete who gets injured goes through this: the sitting idly on the sidelines, unable to play. Missing the time with teammates, who are our friends. It's just not the same. The downcast look. These are physical games, whether baseball, basketball, football, or whatever, and you have to be well physically to be able to participate.

I think of Nick Hammel, on La Jolla's varsity, and the arm pain he had this past season. I don't even know the nature of it. Tom House, a renowned former pitching coach for the Texas Rangers, came to La Jolla and directed a clinic recently for Coach Gary Frank's pitchers. Hammel was there. Apparently his arm is well now. I think being at that clinic really brought back to me these vivid memories of hurting my arm.

Way back when, what I should have done was stop playing in the lunchtime softball game and tell Coach Cornelius what happened. I should have told my manager, Buck Pena, that I had hurt my arm. I should have stopped throwing at practice and in games as if nothing had happened. I should have told my parents about my arm pain. When my dad knew something was up, he acted on it, arranging a personal visit to UCLA's legendary athletic trainer, Ducky Drake. But by then the injury had taken hold, and I don't know if my arm could have been healed.

The best thing I can do at this point is to be an advocate for young pitchers today. Hearing the NFSHSA's new directive, I can help bring awareness through my journalistic reports and my conversations with parents and their sons when I have opportunities.

No one should have to go through the misery and discouragement, the aloneness and feeling of powerlessness that I went through back in 1966 as a 12-year-old. Sometimes we need to pry and ask our young people, How are you really doing? Is everything OK?