They are twin poles, for the moment, of a grim trend that has become the story of the baseball season: Matt Harvey and Jose Fernandez, must-see ace right-handers just starting their major league careers, sidelined suddenly by a serious elbow injury.

“It’s becoming a pretty common story,” Harvey said in the visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium in New York on Tuesday, “but it’s something you definitely don’t want to hear about when the best pitchers in the game are going down for a year.”

Harvey of the New York Mets started the All-Star Game for the National League last July, but by August he was finished until 2015.

Fernandez of the Miami Marlins was the major league leader in strikeouts when the team placed him on the disabled list Monday night. Fernandez seems likely to have ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction surgery, more commonly known as Tommy John surgery, the same operation Harvey had last October.

The procedure, in which a torn ulnar collateral ligament is replaced by a tendon from another part of the body, is both the scourge and the savior of pitchers’ careers. First performed by Dr. Frank Jobe on John, then with the Los Angeles Dodgers, in 1974, the procedure has been performed on an alarming number of arms already this season.

According to research by Jon Roegele, a writer for the Hardball Times and Beyond the Box Score, 33 pitchers in the majors or the minors had undergone Tommy John surgery since Harvey’s operation. The typical recovery time is at least 12 months.

Here are some of the victims: Patrick Corbin, Jarrod Parker, A.J. Griffin, Kris Medlen, Brandon Beachy, Matt Moore, Josh Johnson, Ivan Nova, Bobby Parnell, Luke Hochevar, Bruce Rondon, Cory Gearrin. That is a full staff worth of major league pitchers.

The volume of injured pitchers seems staggering. The year with the most documented Tommy John surgeries was 2012, when there were 69 between the majors and the minors. By mid-May of that season, only 26 operations had been performed. There is no telling what the final toll will be for 2014, of course, but there is reason to fear it.

Yankees manager Joe Girardi, a former catcher, cited the increased specialization by amateur athletes as a reason for the trend. He said he made sure his 12-year-old son, Dante, stops playing baseball every Oct. 1 and takes time to participate in football and basketball.

Many young pitchers play baseball year-round to satisfy scouts and college recruiters hungry for hard throwers. Doctors regularly cite this as a cause for the spike in Tommy John surgeries among amateurs. Fastball speeds beyond 80 to 85 mph are considered more than a developing ligament can handle.

“I don’t really care what coaches want to see and what scouts want to see,” Girardi said. “I need to do what I think is best for my son: keep him healthy, keep him doing what he loves.”

The Yankees lost Nova to a torn UCL last month during a game against the Tampa Bay Rays. Nova said he did not expect to be so severely injured, and in the clubhouse Tuesday he wore a bulky brace on his right arm, which he cannot straighten.

Nova said he was discouraged to hear about Fernandez, a pitcher he admires, he said, for his “easy cheese” — baseball lingo for a seemingly effortless fastball. According to the website Fangraphs, which tracks and analyzes baseball statistics, Fernandez’s fastball averages 95.1 mph, ranking sixth among major league starters. Soon, it seems, Fernandez will be part of a group Nova never knew was so big.

“In the past, it was scarier, but right now, it’s like routine, because everybody’s getting it,” Nova said. “It’s really unbelievable. Even here, there’s guys I didn’t know had the surgery, and they told me. So that’s a good thing, because everybody says, ‘You come back stronger.’”

Not all pitchers recover so easily. Typically, about 1 in 5 never makes it back to full strength, and some, like Beachy, Medlen, Johnson and Parker, end up having the operation a second time.

Brian Wilson, the Los Angeles Dodgers reliever, grew up in New Hampshire, where the severe weather limited his pitching opportunities but did not keep him from having two Tommy John surgeries. Wilson said the modern ethos was to give in to pain, not grind through it. Modern technology can detect problems unknown to previous generations of pitchers.

“I guess I can’t compare the game to the way it was played before, but now people are getting Tommy John with the slightest tear,” Wilson said last week. “I have to believe that people would be pitching through the slightest tear three decades ago. Now you don’t pitch with pain. It’s very precautious.”

Harvey played in youth tournaments growing up in Connecticut, but he said he could not determine what caused his injury. He tried to avoid surgery and still sounds surprised that he needed it. Even on the operating table, Harvey said, he never felt discomfort in his elbow, only in his forearm.

“Guys are getting bigger and stronger, and ligaments just aren’t able to withstand the pressure of throwing a baseball,” Harvey said. “It’s obviously an unnatural movement and motion to actually throw something at 95 or 100 miles an hour. That involves a lot of stress. Thankfully they have Tommy John to make you come back and make you stronger, hopefully. I feel better about the way that my arm feels right now.”