---
title: What are the Pitch Counts in Baseball?
description: Throwing too much leads to bad things. Pitchers who throw more than 100 pitches in a game are more likely to sustain shoulder and elbow injuries.
image: https://www.proathletept.com/hubfs/Fill%20my%20bucket%20by-1.jpg
---
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# What are the Pitch Counts in Baseball?
# Managing Workloads
You only get one workload “bucket”. *Everything* that you do on a daily basis from walking to the car to high intensity sprints that day goes into your bucket. That’s why *just* working hard is *not* the recipe to prevent arm injuries in baseball. You’ll burn yourself out and eventually get injured. That’s the reality.
---
*Pitch counts are one of three numbers every Denver baseball parent should track. If you want the full framework, [see our baseball arm injury guide for Denver families](https://www.proathletept.com/baseball-arm-injury-guide-denver), which covers workload, mechanics, and recovery in one place.*
---
What else goes into that bucket?
You guessed it. Pitch counts.
Welp, the digital friendship was good while it lasted. Hope to see ya around!
### Pitch Counts
[The science isn’t new](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21098816/). Throwing too much - especially as a young baseball player - leads to bad things. Pitchers who throw more than 100 pitches in a game are more likely to sustain shoulder and elbow injuries.
[That’s why 25% of 12 to 16 year old baseball players](https://www.jshoulderelbow.org/article/S1058-2746(23)00116-7/fulltext) sustain some sort of arm injury. You don’t want to end up in a physical therapist’s office, right?
Here at PRO Athlete Physical Therapy, we support pitch counts in 98% of cases. Why? Because in most instances not only are pitchers blowing past pitch counts, they’re also spending the rest of the weekend playing catcher throwing *even more. *
Here’s what MLB recommends. Keep in mind they know the most common baseball injuries and are trying to help:
Here’s a list of things [the research has told us](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6390229/)about what causes arm injuries in baseball other than violating pitch counts. As a physical therapist, these are things I want to manage right away when athletes come into my office:
- History of injury
- Training \> 16 hours per week (in youth athletes)
- High pitch velocity
- Bad shoulder range of motion
- Bad shoulder strength
- Bad throwing mechanics
Tags:
**[Edwin Porras](https://www.proathletept.com/blog/author/edwin-porras)**
Mar 14, 2024, 3:52:26 PM
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