This article was originally published in the May 23, 2012, issue of Sportsnet magazine.
Chris Perez was two pitches into his first bullpen session of spring training when he felt what he thought was a cramp clawing at his left rib cage. The tweak turned out to be a strained oblique muscle that sidelined the Cleveland Indians’ all-star closer for five weeks, limiting Perez to three pre-season appearances and adding him to the growing list of baseball players felled by the injury.
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A new study has found that 393 major leaguers landed on the disabled list with abdominal strains—most of them oblique injuries—between 1991 and 2010, and the injury rate was 22 percent higher in the 2000s than in the ’90s. The study also found that oblique injuries are especially common during spring training and the first month of the season. “Spring training is the time to get the body ready, but maybe we’re just not giving them enough time,” says one of the study’s authors, Dr. Joshua Dines, an orthopaedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York and a consultant for the L.A. Dodgers.
Illustration: Bryan Christie
TWIST AND SHOUT
The oblique muscles run (1) along the sides of the abdomen, one internal and one external on each side, connecting the rib cage to the pelvis (2). They’re responsible for any twisting motion in the torso (3) and for transferring force generated by the legs into the upper body, providing the torque that enables pitchers to hurl a fastball and sluggers to knock one out of the park. “The oblique is the hardest-working muscle in the abdominal group,” says study co-author Stan Conte, senior director of medical services for the Dodgers. An oblique injury is virtually impossible to play through, he adds. In fact, pitchers take an average of 35 days and position players take 27 days to recover.
CORE OF THE MATTER
The recent rash of injuries is especially puzzling given that core strength has become a big focus for pro athletes and weekend warriors alike over the past decade. Conte believes baseball players simply aren’t building their core muscles in the right way, and Dines hypothesizes that they might be focusing too much on strength and not enough on flexibility. A decline in doping may also be a factor, Dines says. Steroids are clearly bad news—not to mention banned for big leaguers—but they do speed healing.
Injections of cortisone or the player’s own platelet-rich plasma (PRP) have shown promise in speeding healing, says Conte. But at this point, the only surefire cure is a week or two of rest to reduce inflammation and then gradually ramping up training—which means an oblique injury still requires a long wait for players and fans.