Hunter Greene should pass GO and collect a MLB contract
There is no question that Hunter Greene needs to go pro. College is no place for a kid with his kind of talent. Here’s why.
Hunter Greene is the definition of a baseball phenom. By every account, this kid has been working his entire life to arrive at this spot: the Major League Baseball draft. Sure, he’s still a kid about to graduate high school, but not going in the draft now is too risky for someone of his skill.
Sports Illustrated did a great piece about Greene, who has been through the proverbial ringer, including watching his sister battle and beat leukemia, dealing with racism, and balancing school with his sport.
In the SI piece, a MLB scouting director commented that “you’re never totally comfortable drafting a high-schooler first. But you’re more comfortable with this one because of how long and how carefully he tracked toward it.”
Greene is the next big thing, and short of covering him in bubble wrap, he needs to be protected. “Protection” includes skipping college.
Greene Does Not Belong In College
My work as an assistant athletic director at the college level gives me a different look at Greene. Even with the sweetest schedule possible, there isn’t a lot of room in there for the kind of daily preparation that Greene has grown accustomed to.
In Greene’s case, his body has become adapted to Alan Jaeger’s strict regimen of band work and long toss sessions along with the yoga and other stretching exercises in his arsenal. You can’t expect that Greene give these things up, but in college athletics you can’t guarantee that his schedule will allow him to stick to his regimen with the regularity he knows.
When you have talent like Greene, you can’t risk getting hurt in college. The unfortunate reality is that despite the best efforts of the training room staff, injuries happen in college sports.
If Greene skips college, he can spend a few seasons in the minors while figuring out how to balance pitching and playing another position. By 20 years old he’ll be ready for his Major League Baseball debut, and his arm will be in peak condition.
If Greene goes to college, he wouldn’t be eligible for the MLB Draft until his junior year, which means he’d probably be moving to the minor leagues for a season or two before making his debut. By then he’d be 21 or 22, and there’s no guarantee that the talent we’re seeing now will still be there.
Tommy John
As a youth, I remember that whenever I heard the words “Tommy John” in a baseball conversation, it wasn’t a good thing. It was catastrophic. Devastating. Career-ending.
It usually meant a pitcher was done. You rarely heard about it with guys under 30. These days, however, Tommy John surgery is a few steps away from being a rite of passage for MLB pitchers, many of them in their early to mid-twenties.
Tommy John surgery is the popular name for ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction. The UCL is replaced with a tendon from another part of the body or from a cadaver. The surgery itself isn’t the problem, it’s the 12-month recovery time that poses the challenge. Whether or not guys come back to the point they were prior to the injury is the big issue.
The UCL wears down over time, and it usually comes from issues with ball delivery, such as adjusting a pitch to accommodate soreness, which tweaks another area of the arm or shoulder. More and more guys are having Tommy John surgery these days, with over 25 percent of MLB players undergoing the procedure as of 2015. One alarming statistic: More pitchers had Tommy John surgery in a single year – 2014 – than they did in all of the 1990s.
Along with issues in delivery technique, the other issue causing the rise in Tommy John surgery is that kids are becoming pitchers earlier. They specialize early on, they play travel ball in addition to Little League or with their high school team, and then they go on to college and keep putting pressure on their arms with little to no rest.
Over time, the continued stress on the arm will cause the UCL to break down, and that’s when arms go dead.
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Greene’s Heater Is Worth Protecting
Greene is throwing 102 mph in high school. He was clocked at 93 mph at the tender age of 14. He’s 17, and he has worked very hard to make sure his pitching mechanics are flawless. “Flawless” was the word a Dodgers scout used when he saw a 9-year-old Greene pitch.
Thankfully, Greene has taken very good care of his body and he has developed it into a finely-tuned machine. College is not the place for him. He needs to move directly into the MLB program, get working with the MiLB system, and make his debut in the big league. Guys like Greene don’t come every day, and with the rise in elbow injuries on the rise, you don’t want to jeopardize his arm in college.