Koufax threw out his arm and has fewer career wins than Kevin Appier.

"But just in case Keith doesn't mention this, I will: One of the biggest problems with saying that modern pitchers get hurt because they're babied -- relative to their forebears -- is that we generally remember only the forebears who didn't get hurt, while forgetting the hundreds and hundreds who did get hurt.

I don't think anybody would suggest that anybody's figured anything out. We don't know if the current amount of babying is too much, not enough, or just about right. But this longing for a bygone era in which men were men and nobody blew out elbows and shoulders is a longing for an era that never actually existed."

 This is not difficult to figure out.  The lineups are better nowadays, so the pitchers have to strain themselves.  

But even if the pitching conditions are exactly the same, Seaver and Ryan (and others) inexplicably forget hundreds of contemporaries who blew out their arms and were never heard from again.

David Clyde and Mark Fidrych come to mind.