Chance favors the prepared mind.
- Louis Pasteur
It was July 2005 when I came across the paragraph that was to
change my life.
In fact, two mechanical
flaws, backward lean in the balance position and early
hand separation, correlated with a decreased risk of elbow
pain. Two other flaws, a long arm swing and arm ahead of
the body at the time of ball release, correlated with a
decreased risk of shoulder pain.
Baseball, Innovation, and Unnovation
I was a young dad with a son who had
started pitching for his baseball team.
And I didn't want what
happened to me to happen to my son.
I hurt my shoulder — I'm still not sure, but I think it was trying to throw
submarine — pitching as a kid. So, in order to prevent that
from happening to my son, I was trying to understand what happened to me.
As a result, I did what I do.
I read EVERYTHING I could on the
subject.
I quickly became dissatisfied with the state of the art —
everybody was contradicting everybody else, some saying this was the
BEST possible thing to do and others saying it was the WORST
possible thing to do — so I decided I couldn't trust anybody and
needed to listen to the people who were at least TRYING to be
scientific, and weren't merely regurgitating the Conventional
Wisdom.
What everybody knew.
Which may or may not be true.
That led me to the work of Dr. Mike Marshall, a former MLB
pitcher who had both a Cy Young award and a PhD in Kinesiology. However, to cover my bets, and knowing that, while he talked a
good game, and had a degree in the subject, even Dr. Marshall might be as wrong as everybody else, I
decided I couldn't trust ANYBODY, and started drilling down into the
original research on pitching mechanics, going into the journals and
reading all the technical papers.
I quickly realized that the same problems — the unthinking
deference to if not acceptance of the Conventional Wisdom about
pitching mechanics — existed and I needed to dig even father.
I needed to ignore the INTERPRETATIONS of the papers I was
reading and, instead,
drill down to the raw FINDINGS.
Just the facts.
That was how, on Tuesday, July 5, 2005,
I came across a paper entitled...
Effect of pitch type, pitch count, and pitching
mechanics on risk of elbow and shoulder pain in youth baseball
pitchers.
...by some of the biggest names in the world of baseball pitching
mechanics — Dr. James Andrews and his research partner, Dr. Glenn
Fleisig — and I had what I can only describe as a CRAZY PILLS
moment.
In fact, two mechanical
flaws, backward lean in the balance position and early
hand separation, correlated with a decreased risk of elbow
pain. Two other flaws, a long arm swing and arm ahead of
the body at the time of ball release, correlated with a
decreased risk of shoulder pain.
Remember, this is Dr. James Andrews and his research partner, Dr.
Glenn Fleisig, speaking.
Illogical gibberish.
I go into all the implications of those sentences in detail
elsewhere [LINK], but, in sum, the question that immediately popped into my head
was...
If something REDUCES the risk of elbow and shoulder
problems, then how is it a FLAW?
The next morning, I dashed off a Letter to Dr. Mike Marshall
[LINK], the goal of which was to let him know that I was seeing
what he was seeing.
And I was off on a quest.
To answer some very basic questions.
How does that happen?
How do smart people say something so dumb?
And what can that teach us about Innovation and how it does, and
does NOT, happen?
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