I can smell an ineffective effect coming on.
Yet baseball keeps doing things the same way. It is addicted to the “theater” of having a specialized closer and the “theory” that an arm has only so many pitches in it—and that everybody’s arm will be treated exactly the same way. And when the casualties keep piling up, baseball keeps going about it the same way. The sport is so flush with money even wasting half a billion dollars a year doesn’t set off any alarms.
The incidence of injuries went down slightly in one brief period: the back end of the steroid era, when sophisticated, cutting-edge use of illegal performance-enhancers—not the industrial-strength, gym-rat regimens of the early adopters—were keeping people on the field and aiding in recovery. But since 2007—right after amphetamines joined steroids on the banned list—the rate of injuries has not improved despite the advances in science, nutrition and training. Walk into any major league clubhouse before a game and you will see all kinds of strength trainers, masseuses, massage therapists, doctors, whirlpools, hydrotherapy pools, hot tubs, cold tubs, weight rooms, gyms ... and injured pitchers.
“That means this method is not working,” Conte said. “Injuries have not gone down. With all due respect to the medical professionals, and they’re great, we’re not putting a dent in it.”
...And yet the universally accepted system is a failure when it comes to reducing the rate of injuries. What can change it? A maverick organization. (The Rangers and Giants are loosening pitch count restrictions in the minors, but the evidence is not yet very apparent in the majors.) A maverick manager. (Why won’t somebody use a closer—say Sean Marshall or Aroldis Chapman in Cincinnati—in the manner of a 1980s closer such as Jeff Reardon? And my personal idea: give each starting pitcher a 10-day vacation during the season. Recovery, both mental and physical, is an undervalued asset.) Stem cell treatments. (Baseball better be bracing for a whole new series of ethical questions as science blurs the line between performance enhancing and performance enabling.)
Who knows what the future holds? Not even Tony LaRussa, the father of the modern bullpen, likely could have envisioned a pitcher limited to about 60 innings being worth more than $12 million while representing a breakdown waiting to happen. But this much is certain: the injury rate will not be reduced if teams continue to treat pitchers the same way they do now.
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1. Enrico Pallazzo Posted: April 17, 2012 at 01:41 PM (#4108954)How much research is being done on injuries (especially with pitchers)?
Are there scientific studies done on mechanics (beyond the acquired knowledge of pitching coaches)?
I know that Mike Marshall has his own theories, is there reason to believe they're valid (beyond his PhD, of course)?
What sorts of conditions result in certain types of injuries?
What indicators, be it previous experience and usage or something that comes up in a physical, act as warning signs to injuries?
Is ice really just for injuries and my drinks?
What methods have been shown to be or are theoretically effective in preventing certain types of injuries?
Are there any public studies available? Is there a lot of proprietary research being done by individual clubs? Seems like something Epstein might have looked into at least superficially, but with the recent history of the Red Sox medical staff...maybe not.
Are there genetic indicators that we can identify with any sort of precision?
I like asking questions.
I'd still like to see starters close on their throw days.
it's unscientific, of course, but HBO Real Sports had a good piece on Steve Delabar, a Mariners reliever who came back after wrecking his arm and attributes his getting healthy to a program developed by Tom House; the key to the program, apparently, is House's discovery that tennis players, despite using a similar motion to hit an overhand or serve, rarely suffer shoulder injuries, and the exercises for pitchers are meant to replicate tennis training to strenghten the shoulder.
The year Lefty Grove won 31 games he started 30 games...11 relief appearances- 4 wins and 5 saves
But, inspired by Verducci, I've got a great solution that will cause flexibility, imagination and individualism to blossom. Strictly limit every young pitcher to only 30 IP more than they threw the previous season!
this has been discussed ad nauseum in here: it's very likely that the delivery advocated by Marshall would cut down on arm injuries, but the more important question is, can pitching this way be even remotely effective at the major league level? I suspect not
What is that concern based on? Do pitchers suffer a big velocity decline? Should be easy to test.
What massive advances have occurred since 2007?
Under current management the Rays have had a run of good health from their pitchers. They haven't lost many starts to injury and a lot of that recently (besides Alex Cobb's freak rib problem causing a blood clot, not exactly a preventable pitching injury) has been Jeff Niemann whose arm was demolished at Rice and they've managed to coax over 500 generally effective innings out of in the majors. It doesn't count as injury prevention (though maybe they managed to keep him going for longer than other teams would have) but I suspect they knew there was a pretty good chance that Scott Kazmir's arm wasn't long for this world and that it was a really good idea to trade him to a sucker, err, team that wanted him.
take a look at this
Regenokine. ;)
Interesting, but on a quick read, it doesn't say how hard the "Marshall" pitchers threw in a conventional style. They throw 10-12 MPH slower than the "elite" college pitchers, but is that b/c of the motion, or b/c they suck?
I hadn't seen film of it before. It looks horribly awkward. I can't see how it generates much velocity, but perhaps the strangeness of the release point might distract hitters enough to be a positive point for a year or two.
Oh! I know this one! "The Mariners invented the training room," right?
I think it's just unclear writing from Verducci. He's trying to say that the injury rate has been flat for a long time (not sure how long, I'd have to give him a click-through) other than a brief drop during the "really good steroid" era. So "advances" is a reference to medical advances over the entire time series.
Of course if steroids reduce injury, maybe that's a good thing. (I gave it a good 5 count, not hit by lightning.)
And of course I find it humorous that stem cell treatments to improve pitcher health are free of ethical concerns while steroids are EVIL! EVIL! EVIL!
This is pretty much par for the course... in medicine.
Mike Marshall should have never written that book!
This was a part of Bill James' arguments why 40 years from now no one will think badly of the current-era steriod users; we will be so far past that point, in terms of what we can ingest; inject; and insert into the athletic body that steriods will seem like aspirin is to us, now.
And nobody knows but it's not unreasonable to propose that continuing injury problems under lighter starter workloads are partly due to the absence of longmen and swing starters. A starter has to be getting hammered to be pulled before the 5th these days. There is some superficial evidence that it's not so much total pitches or the occasional long outing but rather having long streaks of 100+ pitches that causes problems. (There's probably as much superficial evidence the other way too :-).
And, not reading Verducci's article but ... yes, on the one hand it's obviously true that not all arms are equal but it's not at all clear to me that anybody has a method for knowing which ones will break and which won't. In fact I suspect that's part of the popularity of pitch count limits -- they know they can't tell the difference so they treat them the same. The only surefire way to know is to put them all under higher workloads and wait to see who survives.
So (a) it's not clear to me there's any performance advantage to starters, in general, going deeper into games; (b) it's not clear to me there's a health advantage; (c) it's not clear to me the roster advantages of lower bullpen usage are worth much; (d) I don't have faith that managers, coaches or GMs can identify the durable vs. non-durable group with any accuracy.
Complete games became fetishized once they started to disappear. That doesn't mean they are actually valuable.
You don't get it, we're creating a generation of weak, coddled baseball players who would have meekly surrendered to Hitler given half the chance.
didn't realize there were so many French pitchers in MLB
There aren't. They're all stuck in the minors.
Well, not all of them.
Well, I can think of one French pitcher who made the bigs but was too weak and coddled and Hitler-surrendering to keep his arm healthy.
... as long as they don't increase their IP by more than 30 in any season.
That's an interesting way of spelling Érik Bédard.
I think there's a lot to this. It stands to reason that a given number of pitches is more stressful when thrown over fewer innings, and starters are left in very high stress outings of 100+ pitches over the course of just 5 or 6 innings much more frequently than in the past, partly to "save the bullpen," and partly because pitch counts have become not maximums, but expected numbers of pitches. The starter has to "throw his 100 pitches" no matter how badly things are going.
The issue isn't steroid use per se, but the cheating -- i.e. they were using steroids surrepetitiously. Whereas we know Bartolo Colon used a stem cell treatment, he's admitted it, and it's all out in the open.
Wait, what? So it's ok if someone decided to call a press conference and announce he was going to start on a regimen of steroids?
No, but: there is a kind of logical imperative at work here. Pitching success is highly rewarded, so pitchers tend to go all-out at their work. At whatever workload they're assigned, some will be relatively durable and others will break down. If relief pitching was outlawed, we'd have (aside from high-scoring games) a population of major-league starters who could throw complete games, by definition: and some would get hurt more than others, some immediately and some not at all. There's probably no workload that avoids injury for everybody (as many have noted upthread).
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