With each passing year, professional baseball pitchers are throwing harder and harder, and with each passing year, seemingly more of those arms are breaking down. Why is this happening? And more importantly, can anything be done to fix or prevent the problem?
These are the big questions tackled in Jeff Passan's The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports, set for an April 5 release from Harper Collins with a $26.99 price tag. I received a free copy from the publisher in advance in exchange for this review.
Passan, the lead baseball columnist at Yahoo Sports, set out to write this book because, in his own words, "the culture of baseball seemed backwards" - and Tommy John, a great unknown for most fans, needed "demystifying.