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into the finals, he approached Lorenzana about Harley’s availability for the next game.
    â€œGoing in the same day back-to-back,” Lorenzana said, “is a huge no-no for us.”
    And yet Martin Harrington, conscientious enough to download an app to track his son’s usage, a voracious enough reader to realize that the rash of Tommy John surgeries points back to excessive and unnecessary throwing by children, wanted his son to pitch in the final game, if need be.
    â€œIt’s not like it was the morning and there was a four- or five-hour gap,” Martin said. “To me it was about two hours, and he’d thrown fifty pitches. I thought it wasn’t a problem to throw twenty more. Honestly, I don’t think the Show is going to abuse a kid to win a medal. That’s not how they’re going to do it. But he had more left in him. Harley is one of those kids where he has unfinished business. He doesn’t need to show them he’s the best. But I think he felt shortchanged in the semifinals. I knew he wanted to go out there and finish it off.”
    Another coach lobbied Lorenzana, too, pointing to Harley’s parents. “Look at the mom! Look at the dad!” he said. Both were pictures of fitness. Also working in Harley’s favor was that unlike almost every top travel-ball player, he actually took time away from baseball, spending his summers in England or playing club soccer. The single-sport-specialization malady that affected kids across the US landscape did not apply.
    Still, nobody knew. Not Lorenzana, not Nicola or Martin Harrington, not the doctors urging coaches and parents to pump the brakes on excessive use. Nobody could say whether putting Harley in for a second time would cause damage years down the road. Every kid and every arm is different.
    At 4:15 p.m., in the fifth inning of a blowout game the Show led, about two and a half hours after he had last pitched, Harley Harrington went back out to win a tournament for a group of ten-year-olds.
    â€œIf it was anyone other than Harley, we’d have shied away from it,” Lorenzana said. “There are some horses you’re going to ride a little longer. There’s no science. There’s no process. You just don’t know.”
    I NCREASINGLY, RESEARCHERS ARE LOOKING BEYOND the major leagues and down to kids like Harley Harrington and how they’re being handled. Grave concern exists among those studying the arm that because of tournaments like the Super NIT, which lack pitch counts, the current generation of injured arms will look positively healthy compared with the kids’ coming up.
    The American Sports Medicine Institute (ASMI), the baseball industry’s foremost think tank, followed nearly five hundred youth-league pitchers for a decade starting in 1999 and found that kids who pitched more than one hundred innings in a calendar year were three and a half times likelier to get injured than those who didn’t. In 1997, Dr. James Andrews, the famous orthopedicsurgeon who had founded ASMI in Birmingham, Alabama, was performing Tommy John surgery on one or two high school kids per year. Today, he estimates he does eighty or ninety a year. “Hell, I’ve got four to do tomorrow,” Andrews said during an April 2015 conversation. He fears that even worse news is coming at the major league level. “If they don’t get involved in it from a prevention standpoint at the youth level,” he said, “they’re not going to have anybody to draft out of high school or college who hasn’t had their elbow operated on.”
    The future generation of baseball pitchers lives in a system that takes undeveloped and underdeveloped arms and pressures them to show off for the radar guns they’re taught will determine their future. The easiest way to build velocity is through year-round throwing—and year-round throwing, according to the ASMI study, is the single highest