Throwing it all away

It takes Brandon Villalobos a couple of deep breaths to rattle off the baseball teams he played for last summer.

The Long Beach Cardinals. The El Monte Dukes. The Seattle Mariners’ scout team. The Anaheim Angels’ elite youth team. An Area Code Games all-star team. A U.S. Junior National Team tryout in Joplin, Mo.

A lot of teams, a lot of games and, for Villalobos, a lot of pitches.

So many that the expected ace of the Glendora High staff this season has pitched only nine innings because of inflammation in his left elbow.

Doctors told him it was because of overuse, an injury that has plagued several top high school pitchers in the region. Experts say they might be throwing too much in showcasing themselves for college scholarships, and in some cases, six- or seven-figure pro contracts.

Of the 10 pitchers featured by The Times as the best in the region before this season, three have missed significant time because of arm injuries, and a top multi-position player, Delmon Young of Camarillo, recently had his pitching terminated for the rest of the season because of tendinitis in his shoulder.

In addition, the best sophomore pitcher in the region, Trevor Bell of Crescenta Valley, has missed significant playing time because of a sore right shoulder and senior Jeff Flaig of Placentia El Dorado, once a promising pitcher for the U.S. Youth National Team, has not pitched the last two seasons because of problems in his right shoulder.

The schedule for a high school pitcher can be brutal, particularly with the recent proliferation of off-season enticements. After three or four months of high school baseball, pitchers can play on travel teams, scout teams, Connie Mack or American Legion teams and in so-called “showcases” that are attended by scouts.

Dr. Lewis Yocum, the Angels’ medical director, said the nearly year-round schedule is often too much to handle physically for a 16- or 17-year old.

“It pretty well dooms a lot of theses kids,” he said. “Their bodies aren’t strong enough, nobody’s strong enough, to endure that sort of stress. It’s kind of a sad commentary because a lot of these kids are extremely talented. You’ve only got so many pitches. Use them wisely.”

The injury trend has caught the attention of major league talent evaluators who must assess potential draftees in a sport that took 18 high school pitchers in the first two rounds of last year’s amateur draft.

As the financial investment in young pitchers becomes greater -- high school pitchers taken with the third and fifth overall pick last year each received $2.5-million signing bonuses -- it becomes harder to ignore overuse injuries.

“If there’s a pitcher we like and there’s a history of arm problems, it’s going to hurt his [draft] status, no question,” said Logan White, the Dodgers’ director of amateur scouting. “I’m much more leery of a kid if he’s had a shoulder problem. I run from him, to be honest with you. I run from him like the plague. A shoulder’s a tough thing to fix. You have to have full range of motion. If you lose that, you’re not nearly going to be that type of guy.”

The lure of lucrative signing bonuses and college scholarships is what fuels many high school pitchers to perform in front of as many radar guns as possible. But how much is too much?

Lakewood High’s Jason Wanamaker, who was 11-1 as a junior last season, has thrown six innings this season because of overuse injuries. Andy Beal of Rolling Hills Estates Peninsula, one of the top juniors in the region, had his pitching cut short less than halfway through the season because of a sore shoulder.

Villalobos’ problem last summer wasn’t an overabundance of innings on a weekly basis. Rather, it was from his throwing four innings one day, then another three within a day or two, enough to strain his arm without proper rest.

“I usually always said ‘Yeah’ when I was asked to pitch because I loved it,” Villalobos said. “I thought I was fine and I didn’t think anything of injuries because I didn’t ever have any.”

Despite only four appearances on the mound this season for Glendora, Villalobos has played well in the outfield and has accepted a scholarship to Long Beach State. But his days of playing for five or six teams in a summer are over.

“He definitely won’t be making that tour anymore,” said Villalobos’ father, Brett. “Every other team calls you up, and the phone’s ringing, and coaches and scouts are saying ‘Hey, can you come out and do this, can you come out and do that?’ These things with three and four teams are probably what’s wearing everybody out.”

Wanamaker’s off-season wasn’t quite as active as Villalobos’, but his shoulder started hurting a month before the season. He rested for almost two months before he came back and picked up a win and a save for Lakewood, but his shoulder was done after that.

Now he sits in the dugout and keeps score during games.

“It’s frustrating just watching,” Wanamaker said. “I definitely wish I would have taken it easier and let my arm rest and recuperate. What I’m hoping for is to get it going during the playoffs.”

Wanamaker’s coach, Spud O’Neil, isn’t optimistic.

“In my 20 years, I can’t remember a pitcher being out as long as Jason’s been out,” O’Neil said. “Everything is scout ball this, travel team that. They call the kids and say, ‘Hey, you have to be on my team.’ I can’t stand it.”

Yet, Lakewood fielded its own team last fall, playing eight to 10 games before ending in late November.

“In order to keep up with [nationally ranked] La Quinta and the rest of them, we have to,” O’Neil said.

A California Interscholastic Federation rule limits a pitcher to 10 innings a week during high school season. Although scout teams have pitching guidelines in place -- Villalobos threw only one inning per game with the Angels’ elite team and faced six batters per game with the Mariners’ scout team -- most travel teams do not adhere to comparable pitching guidelines.

At some tournaments, travel teams play five or six games in three days. Pitchers, already on short supply on most teams, become recycled, particularly if they are the best on the team. Coaches on those teams are bound not by rules but by morals and common sense ... sometimes.

“They’ll go for the throat,” O’Neil said. “They’ll pitch guys four or five innings after they’ve pitched three or four the day before and it’s nothing to them. They want to win.”

But don’t just blame summer coaches, said Randy Vanderhook, coach of the Long Beach Cardinals, a Connie Mack team.

“For a high school coach to put out a blanket statement that summer coaches need to be controlled is wrong,” Vanderhook said. “There are some high school coaches out there that wouldn’t know a baseball if it hit them in the nose. They don’t know how to teach a kid how to throw. They do it because there’s a stipend. They do it because it’s a job. Those are the guys that have something to learn.”

Almost all Southern Section coaches contacted by The Times said their hands are bound during the off-season because of rules that limit the amount of contact a high school coach can have with his players after the high school season. As such, coaches say ultimate responsibility lands in the hands of a player and his family.

“It’s a parent’s responsibility to monitor their kid throwing, flat out,” Westminster La Quinta Coach Dave Demarest said. “I don’t mean, saying, ‘He’s only thrown 50 pitches today.’ I mean over the course of the year. Parents are with them all the time. The kids are doing too much throwing in a competitive situation in a 12-month period and there have to be periods during the year where parents shut their kids down.”

Unlike Villalobos and Wanamaker, Peninsula’s Beal became injured in the middle of the high school season. He felt tenderness in his shoulder after a March 28 game against El Segundo and was diagnosed with tendinitis in his right shoulder.

Beal had a busy off-season. He pitched in the Junior Olympics and was the winning pitcher in the Connie Mack World Series game for his age group.

But he did not have any injury symptoms until the El Segundo game, and had not pitched in a game nor thrown in the bullpen for nine days before that outing.

However, he also had not been stretching properly and had stopped doing arm-strengthening exercises with rubber tubing.

“You can’t rely on other people,” said his father, Jack Beal. “You’ve got to rely on yourself.”

Beal, 3-0 this season, has continued to play as the Panthers’ designated hitter and has not ruled out a return to the mound before the season ends.

El Dorado’s Flaig is one of the lucky ones.

He threw for a variety of teams two years ago after his sophomore season, including the U.S. Youth National Team, but has not pitched for El Dorado since then because his shoulder has been weakened. Flaig, now a shortstop, will be drafted next month because of his bat -- he went 10 for 13 with three home runs and eight runs batted in in four games at the renowned National Classic in last month.

Still, El Dorado Coach Steve Gullotti thinks of what could have been. At the very least, Flaig would be a perfect closer for El Dorado, one of the top teams in the region.

“All indications point to overuse for Jeff, whose injury is symptomatic of an overuse problem,” Gullotti said. “Selfishly from my standpoint, that really hurt us. But from Jeff’s standpoint, when you’ve got a chance to play on the U.S. [Youth] National Team, what kid’s not going to jump at that?”

Like other high school coaches, Gullotti worries about what his pitchers do when they’re not under his supervision.

“It looks like from the outside there’s a correlation of how much they’re throwing away from high school and then they get back to their high school team and they’re done.... They don’t have anything left,” he said. “They get in front of the scouts and they’re overthrowing. Instead of staying within themselves and throwing 90, they’re trying to hit 92.”

Even though Villalobos is projected to play outfield in college, he and his father are left to wonder what might have been.

“I could have just said no [to pitching requests] last year, but I open-mindedly said yes,” Villalobos said. “Now that I’ve had that little scare, if I’m not feeling right, I’ll just say I can’t play.”