The most precious commodity for a Major League Baseball team is a reliable pitcher.

Ballclubs in recent years have tried many ways of protecting pitchers from injury – only to see arm ailments rise further due to young men throwing all-out all the time.

To protect a club’s most valuable assets, New Age numbers crunchers in MLB front offices have turned to something they know best: basic figures. They are returning young pitchers to the minors to reduce stress, both physical and mental.

Taking a page from billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and even Donald Trump, they basically are putting prized possessions into a sort of tax shelter. The tax in this instance is physical: the over-taxing of a pitching arm. The plan to counter over-spending physically could prove monetarily beneficial.

As of 12 p.m. ET today, 167 pitchers were on MLB injured lists, according to sportrac.com, a site that tracks such things for all teams and all positions. The site showed those pitchers had been inactive a total of 12,751 days yet had contracts that paid them $232,126,576 over that time.

The list does not include hundreds of other pitchers and position players on an injured list at some point previously this season, costing clubs many more millions.

Stephen Strasberg, who has pitched 31 1/3 innings total since helping the Washington Nationals win the 2019 World Series, has been paid $24,838,704 thus far in 2023. He had carpal tunnel surgery in 2020, thoracic outlet surgery in 2021 and wasn’t even at 2023 spring training.

Three examples of many teams trying to protect assets are the Miami Marlins, Cleveland Guardians and Baltimore Orioles. All are trying to secure a playoff spot. Each nevertheless sent a key pitcher off to a protection program.

In Miami, 20-year-old Eury Perez burst to a 5-1 record and sparkling 1.34 earned run average over his first nine MLB starts. He was pounded hard over just 6 1/3 innings his next two games, surpassed his single-season career high in innings (78) and sent to Class AA Pensacola to avoid overwork. He didn’t pitch for 20 days, worked 5 2/3 innings over the next 11 and was called back to help the Marlins’ playoff quest.

Cleveland did the same with rookie lefty Logan Allen. The 24-year-old pitched well in 12 MLB starts through June, then spent 20 days at Triple-A Columbus and was back to the Guardians’ rotation on July 18.

In Baltimore, Tyler Wells had a 7-4 record and 3.19 ERA at the All-Star break, allowing fewer hits and walks per nine innings than all but two other MLB pitchers. Then in three starts, he gave up 11 runs in only nine innings and was six innings shy of his single-season career high. So off he went, too.

Such roster shuffling never would have occurred years ago. Pitchers threw through pain until they simply couldn’t.

The great Smoky Joe Wood had a 34-5 record and microscopic 1.91 ERA at age 22 for the 1912 Boston Red Sox. By age 25, he was 117-56, 2.03 – and done. He had already hurled nearly 2,000 innings, including his time in the minors.

In 1934, brothers Paul (Daffy) and Jay (Dizzy) Dean combined for 49 wins for the World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals. Dizzy was 24 and won 30. Daffy won 19 as a 21-year-old rookie. That was the high point for both. Daffy hurt his arm at 23 and won only 50 games total. Dizzy made the Hall of Fame but went only 9-7 after age 28. He was hit in the foot by a line drive off the bat of Cleveland’s Earl Averill in the 1938 All-Star Game and insisted on pitching with a broken toe for a few games. To favor the injury, he altered his pitching motion, hurt his arm and was never the same.

There are hundreds of similar stories of overuse and abuse of pitchers. Some say that was the case of Baltimore’s Jerry Walker, who was the youngest All-Star Game starter – and winner – at age 20 in 1959.

Two months later against the Chicago White Sox, he pitched all 16 innings in a 1-0 win. Walker told me in a 2010 interview that manager Paul Richards was monitoring his workload.

“I don’t think you’ll see that these days, definitely not from somebody only 20 years old,” Walker said. “A team just wouldn’t let it happen, but the truth is the Orioles were very careful with me that day, too. They counted me. I threw 169 (pitches). Sounds like a lot, but it really wasn’t for 16 innings. After the sixth inning, they asked me how I felt every time I came into the dugout. I felt great. I really didn’t have any stressful innings where I had to grind.”

That put his career record at 30-12 including a brief stay in the minors. He had already thrown 407 innings. Over the next five years, he struggled to go 42-60 overall for seven clubs, four of them in the minors. He quit at age 25.

“I hurt my arm in Kansas City in 1961. In those days you didn’t say anything. You just kept pitching. I had a bad shoulder. I tell them people didn’t have rotator cuffs in those days.”

Walker spent decades as a pitching coach and front-office exec. He advocates protecting young pitchers: “I understand the care taken these days because teams have so much money invested in pitchers. One injury can cost a pitcher his career – and cost a team a lot of money, too.”