If it feels like every time you flip on a game another team has added a pitcher to the injured list, you’re not imagining things. It has been documented over the last few years that there is a sharp rise in pitcher IL stints. This spike is due to increasing velocity, sharper pitch design, and a max-effort mindset on almost every throw.
Elbow injuries and Tommy John surgeries have become central to the conversation. They’ve fueled debates about how pitchers are trained and used from the minors to the majors.
What’s interesting is that the pitch clock appears to be the main culprit, even though many players and agents have not directly blamed it. MLB commissioned outside analysis which did not find any evidence that enforcing the pitch clock rules has directly increased overall pitcher injury risk.
Even with elbow injuries being high, the data keeps pointing back to higher fastball velocity, nastier breaking balls, and pitchers operating near their physical limits from February through October.
From a fan’s perspective, the result is obvious every night. Contenders are patching together rotations with swingmen and Triple-A call-ups while would-be aces rehab from surgeries that can erase more than a year of a career.
Injury reports have become scrolling walls of pitchers on the 60-day IL. Total IL days for pitchers have more than doubled compared with a couple of decades ago. Teams aren’t just losing players — they’re losing the exact players they expected to build around.
Now layer on top of that a looming labor fight. The current collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Players Association expires on December 1, 2026. Multiple reports have already described a lockout or work stoppage as a very real, even almost guaranteed, possibility if the sides can’t bridge major gaps over issues like a salary cap and revenue distribution.
We’ve seen this movie before. The 2021 expiration led to an owners’ lockout that froze transactions and threatened the 2022 season before a deal was reached that March. Front offices remember how hard it was to build rosters after that uncertainty.
Put the two threads together — the pitching injury crisis and the ticking CBA clock — and I don’t think we’re going to see the kind of blockbuster trades this summer which fans are used to. In a normal year, a contender might ship out two premium prospects and a recent first-rounder for an ace with multiple playoff runs of control left.
But when elbow ligaments are popping at historic rates and the next labor agreement could reshape spending rules and service time, that same team will think a lot harder about gutting its farm system.
The risk calculus has changed. Pitchers are more fragile assets than ever, which means the sure thing you think you’re acquiring is far less certain than it used to be.
Even established stars such as Los Angeles Dodgers closers Edwin Diaz have landed on the operating table for UCL reconstructions or revision surgeries, sometimes months after teams paid full freight in prospects to get them. If you’re a GM staring at that reality, then looking at a possible lockout after 2026, it makes sense to hold your best young arms and bats.
We can’t forget players like Chicago Cubs starter Cade Horton is out for the season following Tommy John surgery in the last few weeks and was expected to hold the rotation down as an up-and-coming ace until Justin Steele retuned mid-season. And now Justin Steele has suffered a setback on the return-path too.
There’s also the question of timing. A major trade is never just about the rest of this season — it’s about the next two or three years of competitive runway.
But with a decent chance that 2027 gets shortened, delayed, or otherwise disrupted by a work stoppage, the future value of that incoming star pitcher becomes much murkier. Paying a premium in prospects for seasons that may not fully materialize is the opposite of how modern front offices operate.
On top of that, teams have already been trending toward hoarding young, controllable pitching because it’s nearly impossible to buy reliability on the open market. Free-agent arms arrive with heavy mileage and hidden medical red flags.
We’ve seen multiple organizations burned by long-term deals for starters who broke down midway through those contracts. The more IL stints pile up, the more executives will cling to their own depth — especially pre-arbitration pitchers who can eat innings cheaply under an uncertain future CBA.
So while fans — and many national writers—will spend the next couple months dreaming up mega-deals, the more realistic outcome is a deadline dominated by mid-tier rentals and smaller swaps. You’ll see relievers on expiring deals move, back-end starters shuffled, and maybe a position player with one year of control.
But I’d be shocked if we see multiple top-10 prospects changing hands for pitchers the way we occasionally did in past years. The combination of a brittle pitching population and an uncertain labor calendar is a massive brake on aggression.
Is that good for the sport? From a pure entertainment standpoint, probably not. Trades are one of the easiest ways to inject drama into a six-month grind, and blockbuster trades give fans something to argue about all winter.
But if you zoom out and look at how front offices are trained to think now — in probabilities, injury risk models, and long-term organizational value — the incentives all point the same way. Protecting the farm and wait to see what the next CBA looks like before shoving in the remaining chips.
Here’s the thing, folks: The rise in pitching injuries isn’t just changing who we see on the mound every night. It’s changing how aggressively teams are willing to gamble their future to win right now.
With that… It’s very hard to imagine many front offices paying a historic price for another fragile arm with the CBA is set to expire in December causing a widely expected labor showdown . The arms race, at least at this summer, may be more about who keeps their pitching prospects than who lands the biggest headline name.
If you cannot play with them, then root for them!