Learning Through Sport
Baseball may be going through an epidemic right now. Does the trouble in America's pastime tell us anything about our nation as a whole?
Jose Fernandez is a young man in his early 20s who is a phenom pitcher for the Florida Marlins, a team that has had a hard time in recent years winning games or having a real impact in the National League. Fernandez has been a hope for the organization, bringing an exciting personality and real top-notch pitching prowess. He now find himself facing a decision - does he simply rehab or does he go in for surgery.
Fernandez has a torn UCL, a ligament in the elbow that attaches the two major bones in the arm. When it tears you get a lot of discomfort and pain. In theory you can simply rehab - manage the pain and learn to pitch despite the discomfort. However, that won't heal your injury, only help you get through what you need to do until it tears completely and you can't do what you need to do at all. The surgery goes in and replaces the ligament in the arm with one from the foot. This is the Tommy John surgery, named for the pitcher who first underwent the ligament replacement surgery decades ago.
This year Fernandez became one more name on a very long list of young pitchers just this year (the season only started in April) who have gone down with this torn ligament and needing the Tommy John surgery. It has led to some fans, players, reporters, and analysts to declare it an epidemic.
The cause is seen as diverse. Kids pitching too much from too young an age. Kids throwing too hard, trying to pump fastballs at 95-100 MPH or faster. Kids brought up too soon, pushed to be that next phenom and not simply have time to develop. Even the fact that the technology to find and diagnose these types of injuries early is much better may be a part of the reason so many seem to be getting this surgery now.
My point however is not to fully dissect the Tommy John phenomenon in MLB but to ask if it does not reflect something about the nation that made the game famous. Specifically what I am getting at are two points; do we need to take a look at the counter-intuitive path, are we too eager to take the fast track?
The counter-intuitive question comes about with the note of how kids looking into the MLB come up having pitched year-round nowadays, constantly throwing max effort trying to pop that mitt at 100 plus on the radar gun. Intuitively that's how people have seen it as how a kid makes it into the big leagues - start young, pitch often, always give total max effort. But, as we're seeing now, perhaps that just wears down the player to the point they not only need surgery at a young age for a problem few sued to need treatment for, but now go through this surgery multiple times in just their brief career.
I look at our education system. I look at the way it has been handled over the last couple decades or more. The answer to every problem in education has often been to increase academic classes, increases classroom hours, add to the number of assignments and tests. Intuitively, that is the answer. But it hasn't been working as well as everyone expects. The brain is also a muscle. It does need training and to be worked out. But like a muscle or a ligament, it can be stressed. While it doesn't show the signs of wear that you can see in an MRI, the brain does get tired, and that makes it less effective at retaining and absorbing information. perhaps we need to re-examine the way we handle education in this nation, not trying to stress and pack more information into what is actually an arbitrary delineation for when and how long kids go to school. Even recess, a brief 30-minute period in the middle of the day for kids to relax a little, has disappeared to increase classroom time, with little to no positive effect. I believe that loss of recess alone accounts for a number of issues not only in educational attainment, but in health as well.
When talking about fast-track I look more broadly at the way in which the nation as a whole seems to want everything to do everything faster. We want our kids to learn faster, get into the world of adults faster, make money faster, consume information, consume food, everything faster and faster. We have become an impatient society that doesn't want to wait for anything. If immediate results don't manifest we want to drop it and run to the next thing. We no longer have the wherewithal or the focus to stick with a plan and work through it, realizing things are not automatic. More often than not sticking with a plan is seen as weakness or stubbornness rather than anything positive. But history tells us that our nation's greatest accomplishments have come when determined people came up with a plan, and though willing to change aspects of that plan, stuck to it.
Baseball is America's pastime. The way the game has changed over the years, the way fans have changed in the way they receive the game, can reflect a bit about the nation as a whole. The problems may not translate precisely, but the symptoms tend to match up. If we pay enough attention we may be able to diagnose and fix the underlying cause of the issues and help solve the problem on both ends.
Jose Fernandez is a young man in his early 20s who is a phenom pitcher for the Florida Marlins, a team that has had a hard time in recent years winning games or having a real impact in the National League. Fernandez has been a hope for the organization, bringing an exciting personality and real top-notch pitching prowess. He now find himself facing a decision - does he simply rehab or does he go in for surgery.
Fernandez has a torn UCL, a ligament in the elbow that attaches the two major bones in the arm. When it tears you get a lot of discomfort and pain. In theory you can simply rehab - manage the pain and learn to pitch despite the discomfort. However, that won't heal your injury, only help you get through what you need to do until it tears completely and you can't do what you need to do at all. The surgery goes in and replaces the ligament in the arm with one from the foot. This is the Tommy John surgery, named for the pitcher who first underwent the ligament replacement surgery decades ago.
This year Fernandez became one more name on a very long list of young pitchers just this year (the season only started in April) who have gone down with this torn ligament and needing the Tommy John surgery. It has led to some fans, players, reporters, and analysts to declare it an epidemic.
The cause is seen as diverse. Kids pitching too much from too young an age. Kids throwing too hard, trying to pump fastballs at 95-100 MPH or faster. Kids brought up too soon, pushed to be that next phenom and not simply have time to develop. Even the fact that the technology to find and diagnose these types of injuries early is much better may be a part of the reason so many seem to be getting this surgery now.
My point however is not to fully dissect the Tommy John phenomenon in MLB but to ask if it does not reflect something about the nation that made the game famous. Specifically what I am getting at are two points; do we need to take a look at the counter-intuitive path, are we too eager to take the fast track?
The counter-intuitive question comes about with the note of how kids looking into the MLB come up having pitched year-round nowadays, constantly throwing max effort trying to pop that mitt at 100 plus on the radar gun. Intuitively that's how people have seen it as how a kid makes it into the big leagues - start young, pitch often, always give total max effort. But, as we're seeing now, perhaps that just wears down the player to the point they not only need surgery at a young age for a problem few sued to need treatment for, but now go through this surgery multiple times in just their brief career.
I look at our education system. I look at the way it has been handled over the last couple decades or more. The answer to every problem in education has often been to increase academic classes, increases classroom hours, add to the number of assignments and tests. Intuitively, that is the answer. But it hasn't been working as well as everyone expects. The brain is also a muscle. It does need training and to be worked out. But like a muscle or a ligament, it can be stressed. While it doesn't show the signs of wear that you can see in an MRI, the brain does get tired, and that makes it less effective at retaining and absorbing information. perhaps we need to re-examine the way we handle education in this nation, not trying to stress and pack more information into what is actually an arbitrary delineation for when and how long kids go to school. Even recess, a brief 30-minute period in the middle of the day for kids to relax a little, has disappeared to increase classroom time, with little to no positive effect. I believe that loss of recess alone accounts for a number of issues not only in educational attainment, but in health as well.
When talking about fast-track I look more broadly at the way in which the nation as a whole seems to want everything to do everything faster. We want our kids to learn faster, get into the world of adults faster, make money faster, consume information, consume food, everything faster and faster. We have become an impatient society that doesn't want to wait for anything. If immediate results don't manifest we want to drop it and run to the next thing. We no longer have the wherewithal or the focus to stick with a plan and work through it, realizing things are not automatic. More often than not sticking with a plan is seen as weakness or stubbornness rather than anything positive. But history tells us that our nation's greatest accomplishments have come when determined people came up with a plan, and though willing to change aspects of that plan, stuck to it.
Baseball is America's pastime. The way the game has changed over the years, the way fans have changed in the way they receive the game, can reflect a bit about the nation as a whole. The problems may not translate precisely, but the symptoms tend to match up. If we pay enough attention we may be able to diagnose and fix the underlying cause of the issues and help solve the problem on both ends.
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