How Fast Should Your 12-Year-Old Throw?

New York Times

17 hours ago

Sixteen-year-old Danny Morgan was pitching in an intrasquad scrimmage for his high school baseball team in a suburb of Seattle. It was March of this year and the season had not started yet. Danny was focused on finesse and accuracy, not on his numbers, until a teammate offered some light heckling: I thought you threw 89 miles per hour!
The other teen had seen Danny hit upper 80s in clips posted to social media. The goading got to him.
So Danny reached back and hurled a pitch as hard as he could. The radar gun lit up: 90 m.p.h., not far from the average major league fastball velocity, which sits just over 94 m.p.h. this season.
His teammates went wild.
Danny said he told his father, Deven Morgan, about hitting 90 as soon as he got home from practice that day.
'Did you text me?' Mr. Morgan asked his son, trying to remember.
'No, I don't think so. Because I wanted to tell you in person,' Danny said quietly, acknowledging how much the milestone had meant.
Asked about the day his son hit 90 m.p.h., Mr. Morgan teared up.
'I'm infinitely proud all the time,' he said. 'There's a fundamental beauty in the human expression of trying to do something the best' you can, he added, using an expletive for emphasis.
Mr. Morgan hated pitching — too much of a spotlight — when he played baseball as a child in the 1980s and '90s. That was a different era in youth sports. There was less specialization and less quantification. There was no social media by which to compare yourself to every other youth player in the country. Now there is.
From highlight reels of big league at-bats to clips of 12-year-olds throwing 82 m.p.h. at the Little League World Series, velocity turns talent into an objective, rankable metric. Tips on how to throw harder, faster, in more eye-catching ways, are everywhere online, unvetted by safety experts and aimed at ambitious young players.
The incentives are the same across all levels of baseball: throw harder to be noticed. For kids, though, the pursuit of eye-popping velocity is risky if not undertaken carefully. And often even if it is.
'We're still trying to figure it out here at the big league level, how to keep guys healthy,' said Jeremy Hefner, the pitching coach for the New York Mets.
Those efforts, though, are largely failing. Big leaguers break all the time. Specifically, pitchers are prone to elbow injuries. Maximizing velocity means throwing a ball really hard — unnaturally hard. So hard, sometimes, that the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow cannot withstand the repeated abuse. That can lead to U.C.L. reconstruction in a procedure named after the first Major League pitcher to receive it: Tommy John surgery. More and more pitchers are going under the knife to pay the price that comes from chasing triple-digit speed.
But the chase, beginning at younger and younger ages, continues.
When Danny was 8, Mr. Morgan and his wife, Michelle, pulled their son out of school early to commute an hour and a half to Driveline — a renowned baseball laboratory patronized by major leaguers — for an offseason training camp. A few weeks later, shortly after Danny's ninth birthday, his pitching velocity was clocked for the first time at 44 m.p.h. Six months later, Mr. Morgan, who had been selling camera accessories online while prioritizing coaching his kids, took a job at Driveline. Now, Mr. Morgan is Driveline's director of youth baseball and Danny does not eat any added sugar. ('I had half a cookie a week ago, after a game,' he said of his last indulgence.)
Danny's goal is simple, and the same as many other sports-obsessed children. 'I want to play pro,' he said. 'I guess it's kind of all or nothing for me, because I've been kind of selling out my whole life for it.'
Mr. Morgan's goal is more complicated, reflecting the paradox that parents of talented children face. It's not just baseball or even sports. If your child has a particular passion, and shows promise, should you put them in a position to become as good as he or she possibly can? Should you spend as much money as you possibly can? What if there are inherent risks?
It can be easy to criticize parents who participate — or even just let their children participate — in the increasing professionalization and optimization of youth pitching. But the incentive would exist even if any one individual chose not to engage. In some ways, the most dangerous part about programs designed to help youth pitchers throw harder is that they work.
In conversations with more than a dozen parents around the country who are confronting these questions on behalf of their would-be phenoms, they say they know that the odds are long and the injuries are always looming. But also, their sons want it so badly.
'I would love to see him be cautious and wait so he doesn't get hurt. But Noah, I don't know, he's just gonna do it,' said Sarah Coury, whose 17-year-old son, Noah, also trains at Driveline. 'You can put guardrails in, but he's just going to continue to try to throw hard. That's what he wants to do.'
13 and Throwing 77 M.P.H.
Even without seeing the results on a radar gun, the 12-year-old David King Flores, who goes by his middle name, stands out on the mound. It's a cool, drizzly spring day.
At a youth tournament on Staten Island, a patchwork of no-frills baseball diamonds separated by dirt and gravel host teams of 10-, 11-, 12- and 13-year olds. At that age, the gear inevitably overwhelms. Batting helmets lend the littlest kids a bobblehead quality, cartoonishly flashy sliding mitts protrude prominently from back pockets.
The tournament is put on by Perfect Game, a youth baseball behemoth that provides a platform for youth athletes and a database for scouts.
King was sharp that day, throwing a 38-pitch, three-inning perfect game. According to Perfect Game, his fastball clocks in at 71 to 75 m.p.h., his curveball and slider about 10 m.p.h. slower.
The Perfect Game portal says that means King throws faster than 98 percent of kids his age. His father, Steven Flores, said King could throw up to 77 m.p.h. Now 13, he's the youngest of four boys from Westchester County, N.Y., a soft-spoken lanky lefty who's already 5-foot-11.
The quiet belies a confidence, though. Ask King who the best player he knows is and he'll ask a clarifying question, 'Except for me?'
'They all talk about it; they all see it. It's on Perfect Game's website,' Rob Krolick, another dad at the tournament, said about velocity as a measuring stick among kids. His son, Jonah, is a grade above King and tops out in the low 70s.
Jered Goodwin, the vice president of scouting operations at Perfect Game, said that at a 2018 national showcase for rising seniors, 14 pitchers threw at least 94 m.p.h. In 2024, at that same event, 49 pitchers hit 94 m.p.h.
Some experts say the prominence of Perfect Game, which charges fees for participating in tournaments and showcases, is part of the problem when it comes to keeping young players safe. Perfect Game is not responsible for what children do away from the field and at their events, players have to follow Major League Baseball's Pitch Smart guidelines, which give maximum pitch counts based on age and rest. But the whole system creates an explicit velocity-based hierarchy for amateur pitchers, who have essentially unlimited access to online tutorials these days.
'If you want to go on and look at YouTube or Google for how to increase velocity, you're going to come up with thousands of articles or videos,' said Mr. Goodwin of Perfect Game. 'It's a click of the button, even for a 10-year-old that has Wifi and an iPad.'
The question for King's parents is how hard to push.
Two of King's older brothers play baseball as well. Eddie Mambo Flores, 16 years old, took it seriously enough that Mr. Flores started a travel ball team. Beginning at 3 years old, King would tag along.
'I was always coaching, so he'd come and he wanted to play,' Mr. Flores said. Being left-handed gives King a natural advantage. 'And, for whatever reason, God has blessed him with that size,' he added.
Now, Mr. Flores, a project manager, largely oversees the boys' training himself, spending about 25 hours a week on it. At the tournament in Staten Island, he pulled up the schedule on his phone — different days of the week were dedicated to hours of throwing or hitting, infield work, gym time and team practice. On Saturday, there was also time set aside for 'laundry,' 'read/study' and 'downtime.'
King's success at the Staten Island tournament — pitching and at the plate — attracted the attention of highly ranked teams around the country. In the months that followed, he played in Florida, Texas, Georgia and Mississippi.
'It's like a big hype, clout thing,' Mr. Flores said. And there's another benefit of playing your way onto the national circuit: 'They pay for stuff.' Elite amateur baseball is expensive. Flashing an obvious, quantifiable skill can help defray that cost.
In that way, the modern showcase format can take a child with a dream and turn him into a nationally known prospect. The Perfect Game Instagram and TikTok accounts each have well over half a million followers. But while the tournaments can make a kid, the training incentivized by those structures can also break them.
Like many families with promising young pitchers, the Floreses have struck perhaps an uneasy balance between taking the risk of injury seriously — 'Arm care is a must,' Mr. Flores said — without worrying about it.
'Because it's part of the game,' he said.
The 'Significant Risk' to Getting Better
All parents who involve their children in high-level competition and training have to find a way to reconcile the risks. The same could be said about parenting in general. To offset the unpredictability, they make careful decisions. They talk to experts, do their own research, and then they land on a plan that they have to believe will keep their son off the operating table.
Frank Pescatello, of Fairfax, Va., bought a radar gun to clock speeds when his son, Tony, was 10. 'I was all about it,' he said. Now, though, he has backed off. 'I don't want that to be a focus for him,' he added.
Tony is 14 years old now. At 10, he was already throwing over 50 m.p.h. By 11, he suffered a shoulder impingement, sidelining Tony for a full season. 'It broke his heart,' Mr. Pescatello said.
Baseball's pitching injuries do not pose the same kind of long-term health risks as those caused by head injuries in sports like football or hockey, which have generally dominated the discourse in terms of parental concern. But what they are is incredibly common and becoming troublingly normalized.
'There's a pretty significant risk to getting better,' said the Tampa Bay Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder. 'I think a lot of big leaguers recognize that.'
Parents and kids may not.
Mr. Snyder said that when he was brutally honest with parents of multisport athletes about the risks their sons would have to assume to be noticed at higher levels, it 'makes them consider whether or not this is the one of two sports they should pursue.'
'Throwing Through Pain'
Now 19 years old, David Boehm, of McLean, Va., had Tommy John surgery in March of his senior year of high school.
It was just one in a long line of medical interventions that plagued his pitching career.
'To be honest, I don't really remember that much about what it was like when I wasn't hurting on the mound,' he said. 'I've been throwing through pain for so long.'
He has dealt with biceps tendinitis, a broken bone in his elbow, arthritis, a Bennett lesion in his shoulder and a U.C.L. torn completely off the bone. He relied on daily Tylenol, cortisone shots, a nerve transposition, dry needling, an entirely new U.C.L. grafted out of his wrist ligaments and, just a few months after that, labrum surgery for his shoulder.
Ultimately, it did not derail his baseball career. He's rehabbing now to play at Gettysburg College. Rather than rely on Perfect Game, his parents said they had paid around $5,000 for access to private showcases.
'If you are a family that has the means to do what your son is asking you to do, you do it because you feel like you need to help your child, and if they want to play baseball, there isn't any question,' his mother, Christine Boehm said. 'You just do it.'
And yet, there is one thing David wishes he could change. 'I'd give anything to have played my senior year or to throw a pitch in the last 18 months,' he said.
According to his mother, David was actually a little relieved when he finally had the Tommy John surgery at 18. He had spent years trying to treat the pain with other therapies.
But Dr. Brandon Erickson, who has worked with the Mets, the Chicago White Sox and now the Philadelphia Phillies, said many young pitchers and parents these days were too eager to skip to surgery.
Dr. Erickson said he performed 20 to 30 Tommy John surgeries a year, with an estimated half of those on teenagers.
There is a myth that if you have Tommy John surgery, you can come back throwing harder than ever. The reality is that before surgery, a pitcher is most likely throwing through pain and fatigue. Afterward, the repair and rest and rehab can make it look like the surgery itself has enhanced an athlete's performance.
'That's not true,' Dr. Erickson said.
While initial Tommy John surgeries have a high success rate, generally believed to be 80 to 90 percent, the best predictor of future injury is past injury.
Dr. Erickson said the success rate for second Tommy John surgeries was closer to 50 percent.
The reality he sees is simple: 'The harder you throw, the more likely you are to have a Tommy John,' he said. 'It's not a preventable problem, is what I've learned over the last 15 years.'
Noah Coury is trying to avoid surgery 'at all costs.' The 6-foot-4 17-year-old hyperextended his elbow in December. He's had an M.R.I., a platelet injection and is now doing physical therapy, wary of rushing back.
Noah trains at Driveline, with Danny Morgan. They're the youth program's two homegrown 90-m.p.h. arms. Although he's serious about pitching now, Noah's mother did not put him in organized sports until he was 12 years old.
But Noah turned out to be a gifted pitcher, and a natural adrenaline junkie. For his 18th birthday, he's asked for a motorcycle, or to go sky-diving. When it comes to pitching, 'I want to get to at least, like mid 90s, so probably 95, 96, 97,' he said.
Noah was injured doing what's called a 'pulldown,' in which a pitcher takes a running start before heaving the ball at maximum effort. Driveline's website calls the move 'controversial,' but notes 'pulldowns are a staple of our off-season program' that helps pitchers add velocity.
'I just love all the metrics and stuff,' he said.
Getting hurt has not shaken his, or his mother's, confidence in the regimen.
'That's just baseball,' he said. 'Injuries happen. The throwing motion is one of the most unnatural things that your arm can do.'