Dr. ElAttrache opines those big-name athletes “not making it back” from reconstructive surgery is the bigger news than if they didn’t.
Published January 27, 2025
Article Link: Why surgeon Neal ElAttrache is hopeful amid rash of baseball injuries – Los Angeles Times
As one of baseball’s most renowned surgeons, Neal ElAttrache feels the angst surrounding the sport.
That injuries are rising at concerning levels. That pitchers, even young ones, are breaking down more often than ever before. That baseball, like other sports where the threat of injuries has grown as players unlock more of their physical potential, is facing an almost existential epidemic from which even big stars haven’t been spared.
“So many guys are getting injured, and the best players in these sports are getting injured too,” said ElAttrache, an orthopedic surgeon for sports medicine at the Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute and head team physician for the Dodgers and Rams. “It’s making news.”
Amid all that discussion, however, ElAttrache noted a flip side of the narrative that almost gets taken for granted now. For all the injuries plaguing baseball’s modern era, players are also recovering from them better, and more consistently, than ever.
And on Saturday night, at the Baseball Writers Assn. of America’s annual awards dinner in New York, he watched from afar as the sport celebrated some of the best recent examples.
This year, all of the BBWAA’s major four award winners — the MVP and Cy Young in each league — shared a common backstory. Each had once undergone a major surgery performed by ElAttrache earlier in their career. And each, aided by advancements in sports medicine and physical recovery, made it back to the pinnacle of the game.
Aaron Judge, the American League MVP, had shoulder surgery following his Rookie of the Year campaign in 2017. The procedure included loose-body removal and cartilage cleanup, costing him much of that offseason. But it didn’t derail his rise as one of the game’s top sluggers, with Judge hitting an MLB-most 58 home runs last season to earn his second AL MVP in the last three years.
Cy Young award winners Chris Sale and Tarik Skubal had their elbows operated on by ElAttrache more recently.
Sale, a perennial All-Star early in his career, missed all of 2020 because of Tommy John surgery — but has since returned to his pre-procedure heights, culminating in an 18-win season and NL-leading 2.38 ERA with the Atlanta Braves this past year.
“All four of those were major surgeries,” ElAttrache said last weekend in an interview with The Times. “And what they go through to have this, the psychological and physical toll that they go through, it’s almost a year of recovery until they feel like themselves again. It’s really amazing that these guys are able to do it.”
Equally amazing to ElAttrache, however, is how routine such stories have become in baseball’s current era.
Where Tommy John procedures and major shoulder operations once threatened entire careers, they are now akin to a rite of passage for many big leaguers. And, thanks to medical advancements that have accompanied the sport’s growing injury numbers, many return to action as good — and in some cases, even better — than before.
“It’s become an expected thing that they come back from it,” ElAttrache said. “I think it would be a bigger story now if one of these guys, a big-time athlete, has an operation and doesn’t make it back. That would be big news.”
Like many medical experts around the sport, ElAttrache first began noticing changes in injury trends for pitchers about a decade ago.
Back then, the early integration of advanced data and analytics highlighted the importance of higher velocities and spin rates for pitchers. And before long, cutting-edge training programs (like heavy-ball throwing routines) and more physically taxing pitch shapes (like looping curveballs and Frisbee-esque sweepers) became widely popularized around the sport — especially among youth players who were not yet fully developed physically.
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