Professional baseball has a pitching crisis, as its starters throw harder and faster—and get injured more often. In search of what’s gone wrong with a pillar of this beautiful game, I drove along Lake Hartwell, in South Carolina, and pulled into a dirt driveway, where a baseball wizard by the name of Leo Mazzone greeted me. From 1990 to 2005, he oversaw the Atlanta Braves’ pitching staff, one of the greatest in history. He’s long been dismayed by Major League Baseball’s relentless focus on analytics and what it has done to pitchers, and I figured I would give him a chance to say I told you so.
An Old-School Pitching Coach Says I Told You So
