Boston Herald speaks with HSS sports medicine surgeon Joshua S. Dines, MD, who shared his thoughts about baseball-related health risks as a result of a shortened season.

“A big concern for me is that kind of acute vs. chronic workload ratio, where even if you’ve been doing a little, if you ramp up too quickly over a short period of time, that’s where you become at the highest risk for injury,” cited Dr. Dines. “If you haven’t been pitching much over the last three months, and now there’s a big spike in your activity, that’s where you really set yourself up for injury. Teams are aware of that, which is good, but really monitoring the acute vs. chronic workload ratio is going to be very important,” he said.

A short season also holds the potential to test the patience of managers. “Are managers going to be smarter and kind of almost institute sort of lower pitch counts for a longer period of time, even at the potential expense of winning games to protect the players’ health? That’s where I’ve got concerns as well. When you start really high-loading it, you start pushing with adrenaline, pushing it a little, that’s maybe where injuries get exposed. And that is a concern,” added Dr. Dines.

“The hamstring injuries, the oblique injuries that we happen to see a lot of at the beginning of spring training, those are issues as well, but for me, it’s really the shoulder and elbow injuries in pitchers that are the biggest concern,” noted Dr. Dines.

Read the full article at Bostonherald.com. This article also appeared in print on June 19, 2020.