My Opinion Of "My Right Arm"

6/1/2007

I just finished reading "My Right Arm" by Buzz Bissinger in The New York Times' Play Magazine. I generally liked the article, which is a profile of Kerry Wood. I also liked its intent. However, I have a number of problems with it because it continues to spread what I think are a number of myths about why pitchers are injured (and what to do about it).
     Before I get into specific comments and criticisms, let me first say that the biggest problem I have with the article is that it pretty much ignores mechanics and instead focuses on overuse. As a result, its big prescription is that pitchers need to spend more time on the minors actually learning how to pitch and conditioning their arms.
     In my opinion that is correct but not enough.
     You simply cannot ignore a pitcher's mechanics. In the case of Kerry Wood, the problem was his habitual rushing (which is probably what Steve Stone was talking about) more than his throwing across his body. The same thing applies to Mark Prior; his mechanics are just terrible (see for example Mark Prior's pronounced Inverted W).
     Now that I have gotten that off my chest, let's get on to specific parts of the article.

Fischer has Wood exercising three to four hours every day...He puts Wood through a series of balance exercises, to reduce his tendency to “fly open” — that is, to rotate his front shoulder outward too early — during his delivery.

I like the emphasis on making sure that Wood does not fly open. That is a lot of what I am talking about when it comes to habitual rushing. However, the problem is Wood's timing more than problems with his balance.

He puts him through a series of leg lunges to help develop lower-body strength (a key element of what made workhorses like Ryan and Clemens so durable).

The problem with the above advice is that it ignores the muscles of the core. The primary source of a pitcher's power is not their legs and how they help them push off the rubber. The push off the rubber is important but relatively minor in terms of force production.
     That is why so few pitchers actually push off the rubber as they near the release point.
     Instead, the primary source of a pitcher's power is the muscles of the core (e.g. the hips and lower torso) that rotate the torso. If your mechanics are correct, then you will stretch these muscles like Casey Fossum is doing in the photo below.

This will then enable the muscles of the core to powerfully pull the shoulders around.

There are also exercises to strengthen the hamstrings, which will help reduce the stress on Wood’s shoulder when his arm decelerates after he throws.

I'm sorry, but while the muscles of the hamstrings are important, they won't do much of anything to protect the shoulder. Instead, what protects the shoulder is the distance over which the arm is decelerated.

Wood does upper-body weightlifting three days a week, but the goal is to build endurance and strength without turning into a professional bodybuilder. Too many pitchers are overmuscled in the chest, Fischer believes. He has seen Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson without their shirts on, and he tells me that while their physiques are not exactly inspirational, their durability is.

This makes the case that the primary source of a pitcher's power isn't the muscles of their arm, shoulder, or chest. Instead, it's the muscles of their core.

PITCHING A BASEBALL is, to put it mildly, a torturous and self-destructive act. Pitching is the fastest known motion in human biomechanics, the shoulder rotating at the rate of 7,200 degrees per second at its maximum, or the equivalent of 20 full revolutions per second...Right before release, the pitcher’s elbow straightens at a rate of 2,000 degrees per second, or the equivalent of 5.5 full revolutions per second.

This is a very often-cited, and largely wrong, statistic about the rate at which the shoulder rotates. Because the rapid extension of the elbow occurs before the internal rotation of the shoulder, the internal rotation of the shoulder is much less important than most people realize.

In Wood’s case, the risk of injury was only exacerbated by the way in which he learned to throw. He tended to throw across his body, which meant that he was relying almost exclusively on his arm instead of using his legs as a source of energy.

First of all, I am not yet convinced that throwing across the body has been proven to be problematic. Second, as I said above the legs are not the most important source of a pitcher's energy. Instead, the muscles of the core are much more important.

A study by the American Sports Medicine Institute shows that pitchers between the ages of 16 and 20 who often throw with arm fatigue are 36 times more likely to be seriously injured than those who do not. In 20 years of research for the institute, Fleisig calls the fatigue factor “the single strongest statistical finding” he has ever encountered. Fatigue can cause a pitcher to overthrow and to alter his mechanics to compensate for the loss in power. This is why recovering from injuries is so precarious, because a pitcher often tries to find an arm slot in his delivery that doesn’t hurt, which in turn leads to using joints and muscles in new and unfamiliar ways. And it’s why pitching while hurt, which Wood has been doing throughout his career, may be the most devastating thing you can do.

I agree that pitching while fatigued is problematic, but for different reasons than the people at ASMI. They seem to think that fatigue is a problem in and of itself. In contrast, I think fatigue is a problem because it causes a pitcher to alter their mechanics
    As I have said before, at the end of the day it all comes down to mechanics.

Ferguson Jenkins, a Cubs Hall of Fame pitcher who spent only one month on the disabled list in his 19-year career, adds that young pitchers are too coddled. “They don’t let them pitch enough in the minors [so that] they know how to counteract all the different pressures they have in the major leagues.”
     Ryan and Jenkins’s theory is supported by the experiences of still-active pitchers who started professionally in their late teens. The San Diego Padres’ Greg Maddux threw for 491 1/3 innings before his first full season in the majors at 21. He has thrown for 200 innings or more in 18 seasons and possesses perhaps the single most impressive statistic in baseball history: he has been on the disabled list only once in his 22-year career. The New York Mets’ Tom Glavine, also drafted out of high school, threw for 536 2 / 3 innings before his first full big-league season at 22, and is now in his 21st season. He has thrown 200 innings or more in 13 of them.
     Maddux and Glavine are command-and-location pitchers, but such heralded fireballers as Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling also spent appreciable time in the minors learning their craft. Johnson pitched 418 1/3 innings before his first lengthy season in the majors when he was 25. Schilling pitched 701 2 / 3 innings before his first sustained call-up at 23. Together they have lasted 38 seasons. Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Boston Red Sox import from Japan, threw 588 innings before he was 21, following the Japanese custom of pitching lots of early-career innings

I think all of the above is interesting. However, I would argue that the thing these pitchers also share is good mechanics. The way to test this theory would be to see if there is a relationship between the length of a pitcher's career and the time they spent in the minors. If not, then the difference must be something else (like mechanics).

These apprenticeships reinforced a crucial aspect of a pitcher’s mechanics, which is delivering the ball the same way every time. Significant minor-league experience also teaches young pitchers that what they are trying to perfect is a complex tango of command and location and changing speeds, not some personal duel with the radar gun. “One of the things you learn over time is the art and value of pitching over throwing,” says St. Louis Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa. It means throwing a fastball on a 2-and-1 count with a little less velocity to disrupt a hitter’s timing, since he is expecting high heat. It means throwing well-located pitches early in the game, which can earn some quick outs and save the arm from wear and tear. “These are lessons [you learn] with experience and the only place where you can learn that is the minor leagues,” La Russa says. Instead, he believes, too many young pitchers, particularly those who have attracted media attention, come up to the majors too soon and feel an obligation to go full bore all the time. They are constantly reaching back for extra velocity, and if they are doing it as fatigue begins to set in, the possibility of their arms breaking down only multiplies.

I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that the way to be successful is to learn how to actually pitch rather than just throw all out all the time.

The wunderkind Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners, who wound up in the majors in 2005 when he was just 19, pitched a stunning one-hitter against the Red Sox this April, but shortly after was placed on the disabled list with a strained ligament in his elbow — an injury that is particularly troubling because it can be a precursor to a torn ligament.

The line above is one reason why the article makes me nervous. Felix Hernandez's recent problems did not involve his UCL (or any other ligament). Instead, they involved his Pronator Teres muscle, which is a completely different structure. I believe that Hernandez's problems were more a problem with a lack of proper conditioning more than anything.

“The economic push is to bring kids up, and it’s unfortunate,” La Russa says. Perhaps no case illustrates this better than that of Mark Prior, a dazzling young pitcher from the University of Southern California whom the Cubs chose with the No. 2 pick in the 2001 draft. The Cubs’ hope was that Prior would eventually give them another top-of-the-rotation ace alongside Wood. Prior threw for 138 innings at U.S.C. in 2001 but only 51 minor-league innings before being called up in 2002 at the age of 21. He finished 18-6 in 2003, but has since suffered from a series of mysterious ailments, many in his shoulder. He has been on the disabled list nine times; in April, Prior had surgery on his shoulder and is out for the rest of the season.

Again, the article ignores the issue of Mark Prior's absolutely terrible mechanics. While overuse undoubtedly played a role in his problems, I would argue that it was Mark Prior's poor mechanics that made his body particularly vulnerable to that overuse.

Wood was a sensation in his senior year at Grand Prairie, going 14-0 with an e.r.a. of 0.84. On June 1, 1995, the Cubs made Wood the fourth pick overall in baseball’s amateur draft. But for the moment, Wood was still a high-school pitcher under the tutelage of McGilvray. Two days after the draft, with Grand Prairie needing to sweep a doubleheader to get into the state tournament, McGilvray had Wood throw 146 pitches in the first game, then come back to start the second and throw 29 more pitches, for a mind-blowing total of 175 in a single day. Wood was the winning pitcher in both games, and actually won the second one with his bat when he hit a grand slam.

As with Mark Prior, I'm not going to tell you that overuse didn't have anything to do with Kerry Wood's problems. However, I would argue that it was Kerry Wood's poor mechanics that made his body particularly vulnerable to that overuse.