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?