MLB Opening Day

Today on Krush Performance, Opening Day is behind us and the MLB season is underway – we’re talking baseball.

We are going to look at the Annual Krush list of teams & players to follow this season – we’ll look at why they are worthy of your interest and we’ll use them as a reference point for performance in the sport

Krush Favorite Donovan Santas, the Head of Strength and Conditioning for the Blue Jays, joins me about their new player performance program

We’ll also be joined by Jeff Passan MLB columnist for Yahoo Sports & Author & of his new Book “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports” that hit the shelves early April.

Pitching is the most valuable commodity in all of sport – the 30 Major League teams will spend more than $1.5 billion dollars on pitching this year – Believe me, injury prevention is KING!!!

In one recent study that looked at injury trends in Major League Baseball from 1998-2015, it was found that an average teams spent over $423 million & a total of $7. 618 billion over these 18 years. Surprisingly, nearly 39% of all surgeries occurred in the last 5 years – that’s $2.9 billion spent on injuries in the last 5 years!!!!

When you consider that 25% of major league pitchers and 15% of minor league pitchers have had a surgery, you get the idea that injury prevention is not just important, it is CRITICAL to winning & losing! In fact, if you look back on recent history, there were more Tommy John surgeries in 2014 than the entire decade of the 1990’s!

As we learn more, become smarter and understand more about athlete development and performance along with the amount of money being spent on players, you would think we would be doing much better at keeping players healthy but the injury rates continue to sky rocket as do the salaries & pay rolls.

This season, the average salary in Major League baseball hits $4.4 million. There is a record 127 major league players earning $10 million or more this year – with The Dodger’s lefty Clayton Kershaw earning the league’s highest salary at $33 million. According to the USA Today’s, MLB will have 36 players earning more than $20 millon this season.

The Dodgers and Yankees are the only two teams that have pay rolls over $200 million this season but here is an interesting thing. According to one report, the Dodgers will spend $113 million on players on the DL, former players now playing with other teams, and key players in the minor leagues. Keep in mind, that leaves only $146 million spent on the active roster – so the payroll numbers can be deceiving.

Regardless – the Dodgers will spend more on players who are not playing for them than 14 other teams will spend on their entire payrolls!

So if you have a young athlete in the family – you may want to start encouraging an interest in baseball & to be more precise Pitching.

It’s great work if you can get it.

If you have any questions or comments, ideas for future shows get to us at KrushPerformance.com.

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