Injuries Plague Pro Athletes

TJ Sanders

Speaking Sports with TJ

Many of the top athletes in their respectable league every year miss time due to injuries and it is horrible for the fans. Obviously the NFL is most common for this due to the contact involved within that sport everyone is always getting hit hard by the opposing team. 

This past season we saw Justin Jefferson of the Minnesota Vikings who is one of the most exciting players and youngest players in the league miss seven games due to a pulled hamstring. We have seen Ronald Acuña Jr. of the Atlanta Braves tear his ACL twice now in recent years. 

We have watched Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels miss games every single year to huge injuries. Recently Mookie Betts of the Los Angeles Dodgers broke his hand while being hit by a pitch. In the NBA they have created load management to try and keep players healthy over the duration of the season. 

Kawhi Leonard of the Los Angeles Clippers gets injured what it seems like every year and misses some of the biggest games of the season for his team. We watched Kevin Durant of the Phoenix Suns, who was playing for the Golden State Warriors at this time, suffer an Achilles tendon injury in game 5 of the 2019 NBA finals and missed over a year recovering from it. 

This presents the question for the league about how they will cut down on the injury rates. The NFL recently made their schedule longer so they won’t cut down the amount of games. The MLB is known for their grueling 182 day long 162 game season and instead of having less games they implemented a pitch clock to help make the games go by faster.

 The MLB has a reason why the season is so long and it will be hard for them to shorten the season. The NBA is the most likely of these leagues to have a shorter season. With the players having load management and already skipping games it would make sense for the league to shorten the season. 

The downside of shortening the season for these sports is the revenue they will be missing out on. This prompts the question. How are players going to be able to stay healthy during the season and what steps are they going to take to prevent these injuries? 

Personally I think that they get injured because of their rigorous training in order to be the best in their respective sports. \

I also think that it is because of the continuously shifting in rule changes in these sports. They have played it one way for such a long time then they have to adjust to these new rules and it throws them off.