With severe pitching injuries piling up at an alarming rate within the first two weeks of the 2024 Major League Baseball season, the Players Association is getting louder.

Executive director Tony Clark issued the following statement in English and Spanish Saturday evening:

“Despite unanimous Player opposition and significant concerns regarding health and safety, the Commissioner’s Office reduced the length of the Pitch Clock last December, just one season removed from imposing the most significant rule change in decades. Since then, our concerns about the health impacts of reduced recovery time have only intensified.

“The league’s unwillingness thus far to acknowledge or study the effects of these profound changes is an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset – the Players.”

The statement comes hours after the news that Cleveland ace Shane Bieber needs Tommy John surgery, Atlanta Braves star Spencer Strider also has UCL damage and will see a specialist to determine if he requires Tommy John for the second time, and Yankees reliever Jonathan Loaisiga will undergo season-ending UCL surgery.

They’re far from the only ones. On Thursday, the Marlins announced that 20-year-old righty Eury Perez is headed for Tommy John with an internal brace; their ace, Sandy Alcantara had Tommy John in October. Before the season began, the Red Sox lost Lucas Giolito to UCL surgery, and an elbow injury will keep reigning American League Cy Young Gerrit Cole on the sidelines until at least early June.

After years of Commissioner Rob Manfred bemoaning the pace of play, MLB implemented the pitch clock at the start of the ’23 season. The rule change, which had been tested in the minor leagues, originally stipulated 30 seconds between batters, a 15-second window when pitching with the bases empty, and 20 seconds if there’s one or more runners on base.

From a pace-of-play standpoint, the pitch clock was a resounding success. In its inaugural season, the average game took two hours and 40 minutes, a 24-minute decrease and the fastest mark since 1984.

Thus, MLB was emboldened to continue making tweaks, and last December the Competition Committee voted to reduce the runners-on time from 20 to 18 seconds. However, the 11-person panel is comprised of six owners, four players and one umpire, and the players were outvoted on this matter, just as they’d been on implementing the clock in the first place.

Following the vote, Clark stated that the changes had been approved against the wishes of the very people they would impact: the players.

“This afternoon, Player Representatives voted against the 2024 rule changes proposed by the Commissioner’s Office,” the statement read. “As they made clear in the Competition Committee, Players strongly feel that, following last season’s profound changes to the fundamental rules of the game, immediate additional changes are unnecessary and offer no meaningful benefits to fans, Players, or the competition on the field. This season should be used to gather additional data and fully examine the health, safety, and injury impacts of the reduced recovery time; that is where the focus should be.”

Clark also voiced concerns that the two-second decrease was coming too soon during spring training.

The possible correlation between the pitch clock and this avalanche of injuries is concerning, but the rule change isn’t solely to blame; elbow injuries and the number of Tommy John surgeries have skyrocketed over the last two decades, long before Manfred was able to push his pet project through. Last month, a league spokesperson told The Athletic that there had been 552 injury list stints for pitchers in 2021, up from 241 in 2010, and that the amount of time spent on the IL “more than doubled over a slightly longer span.”

Tommy John carries a recovery timetable of 12-18 months. But in 2018, Texas Rangers head team physician Dr. Keith Meister revolutionized the 50-year-old surgery when he began combining it with a synthetic internal brace suture, thereby giving the elbow reconstruction an additional layer of reinforcement. He revealed to The Athletic that he’d performed approximately 230 elbow ligament repairs in 2023 – including on now-Red Sox reliever Liam Hendriks and Sox minor leaguer Wyatt Mills – and was already “way ahead of that pace” this year. (He’s performing Pérez’s surgery on Monday.)

While Meister pointed to sweepers and power changeups as two pitches driving the increase in injuries, he also criticized teams for focusing on “pitchers’ performance over their availability.”

“These front offices, unfortunately, are living more in the moment than taking a longer, broader-term view,” Meister told The Athletic. “There is a way to manage this. What if a guy doesn’t have a WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) of 0.8. What if he has a WHIP of 1.1 but he’s able to play 162?”

It doesn’t matter how good a pitcher’s “stuff” is or how hard he throws it if he can’t throw at all.