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Shoulder surgery in baseball has come great lengths thanks to improved surgical techniques, and rehabilitation models; however, overshadowing the progress made in rotator cuff and elbow surgery is a new injury emerging in the shoulders of athletes, the torn labrum. Will Carroll’s May 2004 article written for Slate online does not make light of this injury. Carroll is well versed in Baseball, he is the author of the Baseball Prospectus, an online guide to everything dedicated to news in the sport. His article (link posted below) explains the threat of labrum tears in baseball pitchers using the following analogy, “if pitchers with torn labrums were horses, they’d be destroyed.”
The labrum is the collagen connection between the head of the humerus (upper arm bone) and the glenoid fossa (where the humerus connects). It works to absorb shock and as connective tissue in the shoulder. As the article points out, a major-league baseball player’s arm moves at the speed of 23 rotations per second! Now think about the role the labrum plays in the mechanics of every pitch, it acts as a decelerator for all of that force. Prevention of this injury is very hard. The labrum cannot be strengthened, and the best way to prevent it is to stop a player from pitching when tired – a very subjective and difficult measure to gauge.
It seems technology may have fallen short so far in treating this injury. The labrum is in a difficult spot (between two bones) in the body to visualize, even with MRI technology. Carroll reports that one major league team shows an MRI scan to five doctors to determine a diagnosis, and that furthermore the only way to know for sure that a tear is present is to perform exploratory surgery. In April 2004, Carroll wrote a humorous article for the April Fool’s Day issue of the Baseball Prospectus discussing a fictional emerging technology, the “soy-lentil matrix,” that could be used to successfully replace the collagen connection of the labrum in the shoulder. It seems that so far all science can offer Baseball players with a torn labrum is an unsure diagnosis, and the hope of a future discovery.
While many Baseball fans may not recognize the names of many of the injured players that Carroll speaks of, Roger Clemens is a name synonymous with the sport. Clemens had rotator cuff surgery and then went on to win the coveted Cy Young Award six times. Hopefully, technology will soon advance to the point where a torn labrum will be a treatable injury, and there will be many successful recoveries for fans to look forward to in the future.
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