The big debate amongst coaches, doctors, and parents of youth baseball is that curveballs with overuse of pitching is leading to the arm injury epidemic in youth baseball. Every year in the United States, approximately 5.7 million children play organized baseball and although the rate of elbow injuries is relatively low, the total number of such injuries is significant due to the high number of participants (Fleisig, & Andrews, 2012). According to Maffulli et al. (2010), participation in baseball may cause long term disability among pitchers in the elbow joint. This debate has even lead to little league baseball considering a ban on curveballs during games. The many who believe curveballs should not be thrown by youth baseball players think that the torque and load on the elbow and shoulder is too much for a youth baseball arm to handle. Studies in the past have blamed …show more content…
(2011) curveballs are not necessarily more harmful to the youth arm than the fastball. According to a similar study by Shouchen, Loftice, Fleisig, Kingsiey, & Andrews (2008) the same finding was found that there was no increased injury risk for youth pitchers when comparing curveballs to fastballs. Both studies had limitations that may have contributed to these findings and one of the studies did not test pitchers in a game and when pitchers were fatigued (Shouchen et al., 2008). To counter these finding, there was a recent a study by Yang et al. (2014) that found an increased risk of pain of throwing curveballs when comparing curveballs to fastballs in youth pitchers and an even higher risk of injury when the youth pitcher was pitching with a tired arm. This was due to the pitchers altering their mechanics to pitch the curveball. When youth pitchers had good mechanics for the fastball and curveball there was no difference. Studies have also found that the biomechanics of the throwing curveball motion can lead to more stress on the elbow for youth