The Arm (29 page)

I looked over Marinak's shoulder in his office at 245 Park as he scrolled through Hudson's file. It was about a month after his second surgery, and there were already 272 notes related to his elbow alone. The ones with yellow flags came from Crenshaw's almost-daily updates and the blue flags from diagnostic tests. Green flags indicated doctors' reports, like the one Dr. Michael Lee filed after Hudson's second blowout.

“Unfortunately, showed a complete proximal tear of his UCL graft,” Lee wrote. “The chance of him returning to play is high but is not guaranteed. Somewhere between 75 and 80 percent. Recovery time will be extensive, up to one year or longer as well, and there is no guarantee.”

Marinak shook his head. Pitchers never lose sympathy for their brethren.

“The question is, ‘What do you then do with that?'” he said. “You have to have some sort of hypothesis, like, OK, guys are pitching too much in the minor leagues or pitching too much from year to year or not doing the right training program or you don't have the right mechanics.” None of this will reveal itself anytime soon, surely not like the concussion DL conclusion. With another decade's worth of data, Marinak figures, complemented by the right sorts of studies, maybe baseball will find an answer or two. And once that reveals itself, it will take time, baseball being baseball, to implement any changes.

He typed in 841.1—the medical code for an ulnar collateral ligament sprain—and clicked Run. Marinak exported the data to Excel, opened the file, and started reading numbers.

Six hundred fifty-eight. That was the number of players across all levels of professional baseball from the beginning of 2010 to the middle of 2013 with UCL sprains—ligament tears of any kind,
from slight to full. The number of days lost on the disabled list to UCL sprains—145,824—averaged 221 per player. Hundreds of millions of dollars in salary, and even more in surplus value, vanished.

When Bud Selig and John Schuerholz and so many others in baseball wanted solutions now, Marinak told them the truth: They're not coming, not for a while. Finding hope in this environment requires optimism on the level of Todd Coffey. “I think it's more about creating the community,” Marinak said. “Creating the people to come together to find the insight.”

Before spring training in 2015, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association agreed to a landmark project: For the next five years, the New York Yankees, the New York Mets, and three other teams would participate in a study of all their pitchers from the 2014 draft class. They would undergo biomechanical analysis, reveal as much detail as possible about their history in youth baseball, and serve as a pilot program for vast data-gathering that soon enough could be standard across the sport.

The class of 2014 study allows Pollack and Curriero to watch in real time the ascent and breakdown of players. It fills in the context that the trove of HITS data lacks. Combine the two—a wide swath of well-documented subjects and a smaller, intensely followed group—and Pollack is not shy with her intentions.

“What I'm comfortable saying,” she said, “is that I would be confident we can make significant positive public health progress into this injury.” Translation: if she can't fix UCLs tearing everywhere, she can at very least provide better ideas as to why they're tearing. The ball is then back in Major League Baseball and Marinak's court. He plays policymaker, and his answer to Bud Selig's plea to fix the elbow started not with major league players but with players at the lowest levels possible.

On November 11, 2014, Major League Baseball launched Pitch Smart, a website dedicated to educating coaches, parents, and children about the dangers lurking within the arm. The slick
production includes sections offering an age-appropriate pitchcount chart, a Tommy John FAQ, and a list of taboos. Almost all of the recommendations stemmed from a 2012 study from ASMI's Glenn Fleisig published in the journal
Sports Health
. Almost everything on the website points to usage. Regularly pitching while fatigued left kids thirty-six times more susceptible to arm injuries. Children who throw more than one hundred innings a year are three and a half times likelier to get hurt. Even though no studies concluded definitively that preteen curveballs were bad for the arm, Dr. James Andrews urged in a video on the Pitch Smart website, “Don't throw a curveball until you shave.” Andrews's folksy chestnuts were everywhere on the site, and they appealed intentionally to an underappreciated group: moms. “Sometimes,” Andrews wrote, “the only person they will complain to about having a painful shoulder or painful elbow is their mother.”

By targeting the youth system, baseball was issuing a warning that over the next decade it intends to reappropriate the sport at all levels. “So many of these youth organizations are very much mom-and-pop-type places,” Marinak said. “That's where we need to start educating and convincing them this is good for present and future. And that's not even to consider these travel-ball-type teams.”

Perfect Game, the fulcrum of the showcase circuit, pledged to follow the Pitch Smart pitch-count recommendations almost immediately. Its commitment gave Major League Baseball the use of the recognizable PG logo, the one Perfect Game wanted to be as ubiquitous as Nike's. The league, hopeful that Pitch Smart could evolve from a slick PSA into an influential program, needed all the support it could get, even if it came from a company with a hand in the problem.

“There's a lot of catching up to do,” Marinak said. Baseball's $10 billion industry can't allow Perfect Game's $15 million business to continue threatening it. It needs educated, forward-thinking scientists to build a culture of knowledge instead of a
culture of fear. Because that's exactly what the charlatans use to ensnare their prey.

L
ATE AT NIGHT, WHEN THE
rest of his family was asleep, Ed Harvey surfed the Internet looking for tips and tricks to teach the kids he coached at Fitch High School in Groton, Connecticut. One night, trawling a message board, he stumbled upon a poster named Chris O'Leary, who ran his own website dedicated to hitting and pitching mechanics. Harvey clicked, liked what he saw, and navigated to a link that said: “Baseball Pitcher Evaluations.” For twenty dollars, O'Leary would give a thumbs-up, thumbs-down analysis. For forty dollars, he offered a detailed write-up. And for a hundred dollars, the deluxe: a frame-by-frame breakdown of a pitcher's delivery.

Ed Harvey reached out and said he wanted the works. His son, Matt, was about to start his freshman season at the University of North Carolina. He turned down $1 million from the Los Angeles Angels, who had drafted him six months earlier. Harvey refused to sign for anything less than $2 million and resolved to bet on himself. Ed just wanted to ensure his son wasn't gambling on an arm that might break sooner than he figured.

Just like Neil Pint and Nelson Molina and Hirokazu Tatsuta, Ed Harvey took an active role in his son's career. Matt started only once a week. Never threw more than 120 pitches. Ed couldn't help that his son threw 98 miles per hour at seventeen years old. It was so effortless, so smooth, that injury issues rarely concerned him. Still, he wanted to hear it from someone else. On January 17, 2008, an email from O'Leary arrived in his in-box.

Dear Mr. Harvey,

I reviewed the tape of Matt that you sent me. In general, I really like what I see.

When I am looking at pro prospects, I evaluate their pitching mechanics for their similarity to Greg Maddux at a similar age. I use a 2–8 scale where 8 is a clone of Greg Maddux and 2 is a clone of Mark Prior.

I would put Matt at a 7, which is very good (and relatively rare).

Matt also has a lot of Roger Clemens in him, which is good. If you compare the clips of Matt to the breakdown of Roger Clemens that I have in my Proper Pitching Mechanics essays . . . you will see a lot of similarities.

After his analysis, which covered ten categories and was almost wholly complimentary, O'Leary offered a “LEGAL DISCLAIMER”:

When reading the above, please keep in mind that I am not guaranteeing your son's future health or success. Instead, what I am giving you is an educated guess. Also, keep in mind that I have no formal medical training, so you should consult with a doctor before deciding to act upon any of the recommendations that I make.

O'Leary is not a doctor, kinesiologist, or biomechanist. He has no educational credentials that might lend his insights some authority. The closest he came to the medical profession, he admits, was a summer job with his attorney father going over medical files for an asbestos lawsuit. O'Leary is, on the other hand, a damn good salesman, and Ed Harvey could've seen that for himself on the website. Right next to his link for pitching evaluations was one for a book O'Leary wrote called
Elevator Pitch Essentials
, about selling someone on an idea in less than two minutes.

The ascent of Chris O'Leary as one of the most influential voices in pitching mechanics happened because he sold the baseball world a damn fine elevator pitch. Amid Glenn Fleisig's bur
densome academia, Mike Marshall's jargon-loaded instruction, and Tom House's teacher-to-the-stars reputation, O'Leary came across as comparatively relatable, a self-taught guy with an awfully compelling message.

“He did a good job of promoting himself,” said Paul Nyman, the Tesla of the arm. “Chris is representative of picking the low fruit. The low fruit was, ‘I'm going to tell you how not to get injured.' Immediately, people are going to say, ‘Whoa, let me hear what this guy is saying.' Chris O'Leary is a perfect example of what self-promotion will do.”

Frustrated like Mike Marshall, Nyman stepped away from baseball for five years, only to resurface in April 2013 on the website of a pitching coach named Lantz Wheeler. Nyman wanted to set the record straight on a term he coined: “Inverted W.” In trying to break down pitchers' deliveries into three distinct categories, Nyman described one group as hanging their pitching arms in an inverted fashion before bringing them up to form a W with its glove-side arm. It was a benign motion. Over the previous six years, Chris O'Leary had taken the phrase “Inverted W,” twisted it into a Godzilla-like monster worthy of fright, and built his business on the back of such fear.

The rebranding of the Inverted W was O'Leary's masterstroke. He was just another Marshall adherent, parroting Doc's teachings on his website, until he one day noticed a common point in the delivery of some pitchers. Both their elbows came above the top of their shoulders mid-delivery. Their arms formed an M shape—or, as O'Leary started calling it, an Inverted W. He found a number of his Inverted W pitchers who suffered from arm troubles and began evangelizing that it led to injuries. Even if O'Leary couldn't prove causation, correlation was enough, and his definition stuck.

The problem: no evidence existed that the motion itself blew out elbows or injured shoulders. In 2015, the
Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine
published a study by Wiemi Douoguih, the
Washington Nationals' team doctor, that looked at the deliveries of 250 pitchers and broke them into groups: Inverted W and non–Inverted W. Of the roughly one-third of the pitchers surveyed who threw with the Inverted W, 30 percent had arm surgeries. Of those with non–Inverted W deliveries, 27 percent underwent surgery. The difference was negligible.

O'Leary argued that the findings didn't invalidate his theories. He said the Inverted W in and of itself wasn't troublesome but caused a timing problem in which pitchers' arms lagged behind when their torsos started to rotate. Indeed, Douoguih's study showed a statistically significant difference in surgery rates among those with early rotation. It did not show that Inverted W pitchers were any likelier to exhibit the tendency than the other group.

The greatest obstacle in the guru business is science; besides Glenn Fleisig, few in the biomechanical community bother with it. Research—real research—is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, and it doesn't make money, which ultimately drives so much of what happens in biomechanics. Nyman called the biomechanical world “a swamp, quicksand, a horror show,” and he's right.

Which makes Lloyd Lee's humility so refreshing. Lee is the CPA. Next to nobody knows who he is. He believes he understands the pitching arm as well as anybody, even if his elocution could use some work. “I don't have a PhD in kinesiology,” he said. “A lot of times when I'm talking, people want to correct my pronunciation of words. And all I've done is read the word. And I don't look it up and see the phonetics in the dictionary.”

Lee can't say whether he'll change the game. Just that he wants to. For nearly a decade, he has honed his theories in a ten-page abstract with the intention of expanding it into a book that Paul Davis and the Cardinals can use as a research primer. “Everything I've got just about contradicts everyone else,” Lee said. His grand theory would indeed turn everything baseball knows upside down. Lee believes pitchers who extend their elbows and delay
the internal rotation of the shoulder until after releasing the ball not only generate more power but stay healthier. While it violates the principles of the kinetic chain—everything is supposed to move inside out, or proximal-to-distal, instead of outside in, like the elbow extending before the shoulder rotating—a 2011 study from Dr. Masaya Hirashima at the University of Tokyo supports Lee's theory and suggests that it merits a deeper look.

“I don't have the peer-tested science,” Lee said. “But there's places to jump logically, and I could wait until I'm a hundred years old to test it, or I can take what I've got practically to see that it works and logically see and throw it out there and let guys try it. They can prove it to be bullshit. I'm not scared of anybody proving me wrong so much as I am wanting it to be done in a fair way.”