The Arm (32 page)

Then it happened. This wasn't a false alarm like the previous night, when Kris mistook Diamondbacks closer Addison Reed's number 43 for Hudson's 41. This time, after the Diamondbacks scored an insurance run to go up 5–1, the top of the eighth inning would belong to Hudson.

The bullpen gate swung open and he ran down the stairs and toward the mound. It felt a lot farther than he remembered. “You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling” blasted through the stadium's sound system. He jacked up his pants before climbing the mound
slowly. He did not do a 360. He just wanted to savor that feeling again, the one that climbing the world's biggest ten-inch mountain gave you.

“Your attention, please. Now pitching for the Diamondbacks: Daniel Hudson.”

The commercial break ended and ESPN's national broadcast of the game cut to Hudson standing on the mound as play-by-play man Pedro Gomez gave a CliffsNotes version of his story, catcher Jordan Pacheco laid down the sign, and Hudson nodded. Kris zoomed in with her iPhone to take a blurry picture, which couldn't have looked more beautiful to her, even if it did capture a rather dreadful pitch, 94 miles per hour but bouncing in front of home plate before it reached pinch hitter Abraham Almonte.

Kris looked at Sara and smiled. Sam reclasped his hands. Baylor stopped crying. Kris and Sam started. At third base, Cliff Pennington shot Hudson a quizzical look. He noticed Hudson shaking his arm after the spiked fastball. Hudson indicated to Pennington that he was fine; his elbow was caught on his sleeve, and he was trying to loosen it. To prove it, his second pitch to Almonte was a called strike and lit up the radar gun at 95.

“There it is,” Kris said.

Hudson threw eleven more pitches. Diamondbacks shortstop Didi Gregorius saved a hit with a diving play. Yangervis Solarte screamed a line drive right at left fielder Alfredo Marté. A weak groundout to second base by Alexi Amarista ended the inning. Three up, three down. Hudson walked into a dugout full of hugs and congratulations and tears.

The Diamondbacks won, 6–1, and when the clubhouse doors swung open, the media swarmed around Hudson. Three months earlier, he had started scripting out what he would say upon his return. As presumptuous as it was, this felt like his chance to thank everyone: Crank and Arnie, Gibby and KT, doctors and trainers, friends and family. Then his mind went blank. It filled
back up not with gratitude but with the rawest, most honest reaction he could muster.

“Even if I go out tomorrow and it blows again playing catch, it was worth it, just to try again,” Hudson said. “It's been a long road. Thankfully today came.”

Baseball marveled at Hudson's return. Kris Medlen and Cory Luebke and Brandon Beachy and Jarrod Parker and all the others coming back from quick-turnaround revisions saw hope. Doug Brocail welcomed another member to the club. Hudson's 1-in-300 elbow—the one Dr. James Andrews said had failed like only a handful he'd seen—was good enough to retire major league hitters again.

“The dude is special for doing what he did,” said Wade Miley, the Diamondbacks pitcher. “He was a week away from being back in the big leagues last year. This dude busted his ass last year.”

“We've had a lot of Tommy John guys,” Trevor Cahill, another pitcher, said. “And he hasn't said a single bad thing during his rehab, about it sucking, about not wanting to do it. Not one.”

“He just did it,” Miley said. “This was one of the cooler things I've been a part of in baseball. We went to the playoffs in 2011. That was cool. But this—this is incredible.”

In a nearby locker sat Montero, the only Diamondback with more tenure than Hudson. “I get goose bumps talking about Huddy,” Montero said. “Because he's great. He always came with the right attitude. He hated it. Of course he hated it. Everyone hates being on the disabled list. Not getting to do what he loves to do. Not being able to contribute. Knowing that he could contribute to the team if he were just healthy.”

Montero parked himself in front of a video monitor. He wanted to see Hudson's stuff on film. The delivery looked slightly different, though not the sort of radical departure Hudson had dreamed of, muscle memory being what it is. What Montero really wanted to study was Hudson's stuff, how the fastball, changeup, and slider all interplayed. Harmoniously, it turned out, each pitch playing
off the other, like the Huddy of three years earlier. “That was awesome,” Montero said.

When the crowd in the clubhouse dispersed, Hudson turned off his camera-friendly face and tried to unpack his night. Congratulatory text messages blew up his phone. Diamondbacks president Derrick Hall said: “Really proud of you. I was emotional. You were awesome, kid.” Hudson's brother, Dylan, wrote: “So proud of you. All the mountains you've had to climb over and how you came back strong just makes me so proud to be your brother. You were great tonight. So proud brotha.”

Hudson stole a nip of vodka from Cahill's secret stash—“I prefer whiskey,” he said, “but I'll take what I can get”—mixed it with orange Powerade, and leaned back in his chair. All his teammates were gone. The clubhouse was his alone until Gibson jumped out from the manager's office for a quick debriefing.

“How'd it feel today?” Gibson said.

“Felt good,” Hudson said. “I've got to figure something out. I hadn't thrown since four. I don't know if I need to play catch in the third. It took me a little while to get [ready] on the mound.”

“A little blood flow going out there?” Gibson said.

“Yeah, a little bit of a chub,” Hudson said.

“Good job, Huddy,” Gibson said.

Gibson understood. He hit one of the most famous home runs in baseball history, the one-armed, dead-legged walk-off shot against Dennis Eckersley in the game one of the 1988 World Series that inspired a million fist pumps and helped win the Dodgers their sixth World Series.

“I'm riding this shit,” Hudson said. “This one's going, and that's it. I'm not doing this again.” The last stage of Hudson's career had just started with three outs in San Diego. If something bad was supposed to happen, it could wait.

T
HE RADAR GUN DOESN'T LIE.
I learned this long ago, never to forget it, even when the numbers didn't seem real. I was standing in a warehouse in middle-of-nowhere Washington state, watching someone named Casey Weathers, a guy whose elbow had no right to be pushing the limits of human performance, throw a baseball harder than any I'd ever seen.

105.8.

When the numbers first flashed, nobody said anything. They were too high. Granted, this wasn't a normal or legal throw—Weathers took a seven-step running start, muscled into a crow hop, and launched the ball as hard as he could into a net—but still, the fastest anyone had flung a five-ounce baseball off a mound was then-Cincinnati Reds closer Aroldis Chapman at 105.1 miles per hour. Weathers left that nearly a mile in his rearview.

Standing behind the net that mid–November 2014 day was Kyle Boddy, the owner of Driveline Baseball and the man ultimately re
sponsible for these numbers. Which, truth be told, he could barely believe himself. Even though Boddy trained and nurtured baseball pitchers for a living, he had never seen anyone do with a regulation-sized baseball what Casey Weathers had just done.

“I don't know that I believe this,” Boddy said, and he poised the radar gun once more, as Weathers kicked into gear for another rip.

105.3.

About fifteen feet to the side, Trevor Bauer, a starting pitcher with the Cleveland Indians, trained a camera on Weathers that captured video at 240 frames per second, necessary for Bauer to study how Weathers's arm worked. These drills were Bauer's domain. He'd long held the Driveline record for fastest fiveounce throw.

“I guess I'm behind now,” Bauer said.

“Don't worry,” Boddy said. “Nobody else on the planet throws as hard as you two.”

105.8.

Weathers had just done it again. It was an ugly day in Puyallup, Washington, home of Jon Lester and Driveline. Weathers wore a gray T-shirt, black shorts, and neon orange shoes, Bauer gray sweatpants and a navy hoodie, and Boddy his customary uniform of a black Driveline Baseball T-shirt, gray sweatpants, and old Nikes. Others milled about the complex, as they often do at Driveline. Fourteen-year-olds mingle with major leaguers. Loud noises emanate from a combination office-laboratory upstairs. Boddy rents the space, so the run of the facility isn't exactly his, even if he and the Driveline crew walk around here—and everywhere, really—like they own the place.

“I'm the most skeptical guy that does this shit for a living,” Boddy reiterated. Every day he used a tuning fork to calibrate his radar gun, and it continued to spit out numbers that boggled his mind. For the last half decade Boddy had lived to see someone have a day like Casey Weathers was having.

Boddy seemed to ignore the core principles of the arm. It is made of bones and muscles and tendons and ligaments, all of which are fragile; when any piece of the arm is strained or stressed beyond its limit, it breaks. Boddy believed his training allowed pitchers to throw hard and stay healthy, and he saw Driveline as baseball's Bonneville Salt Flats.

“Let's do some crazy shit,” he said, picking up a four-ounce ball.

If Weathers could throw a five-ounce ball 105.8 miles per hour, Boddy wanted to see what he could do with a baseball with the same circumference but an ounce lighter. The first four-ounce ball Weathers threw lit up the gun with a new number: 115.3 miles per hour. The throws with three-ounce balls topped 118. With a two-ounce ball, Weathers nearly hit 120 miles per hour.

The unlikeliest part of it all actually had nothing to do with the numbers or the science behind throwing what amounted to feathers, and everything to do with the guy behind it. When Weathers arrived in Puyallup for the first time seven months earlier, he was a complete wreck, barely touching 92 miles per hour on his maximum-velocity crow-hop throws, acting like someone scared of his elbow, which was a rather warranted fear.

Weathers wasn't the typical player to seek help at a facility like Driveline. He had pedigree: a distinguished college career as Vanderbilt University's closer, the number seven overall pick in the draft by Colorado in 2007, a nearly $2 million signing bonus, bronze medal from the 2008 Olympics. Two months after the Beijing Games ended, Weathers tore his UCL during an Arizona Fall League game. The fallout was a mess. Weathers didn't throw until seven months post-op. Platelet-rich plasma treatment in his elbow failed to help. A bone spur started to hook off one of the tunnels drilled into his arm. When he returned twenty months after surgery, Weathers couldn't throw strikes. The Rockies released him. He signed with the Cubs in 2012, walked fifty-three
batters in thirty-four innings, and lost the will to lie to himself anymore.

“One thing I never wanted to do in my whole life,” Weathers told me, “was make excuses and say, ‘Well, I've walked eleven guys per nine in the last three years, I'm basically a bust at this point in my career, and it's not my fault, it's your fault. It's the doctor who did the surgery. It's my elbow's fault.' Making excuses is just not something I enjoy doing.”

Surgery cleared out the bone spur. It also left Weathers damaged goods, the sort on whom no team dared take a chance, not with him barely hitting 90 off a mound. Weathers needed a facility to help rebuild him, and his old Vanderbilt teammate Caleb Cotham, a New York Yankees organizational player whose overhaul at Driveline turned him into a big leaguer, recommended he read up on Boddy. His website is a font of information and myth busting, and after receiving an email from Weathers on March 27, 2014, Boddy invited him to Puyallup.

The first step was to reprogram Weathers's brain as much as his arm. No longer would professional baseball's take-it-easy standard apply. Weathers would subsist on a diet of underweight and overweight baseballs, the product of research Boddy did in his homemade biomechanics lab and reinforced by a paper from University of Hawaii professor Dr. Coop DeRenne that showed training with weighted balls had a significant effect on velocity gains. Throwing weighted balls, a controversial practice that only recently gained traction with major league teams, was at the heart of Boddy's training. When a pitcher throws an overweight ball—Boddy disciples use balls up to 11 ounces—his arm slows down to handle the added mass and increased force on the shoulder and elbow. Boddy believed the body desired to get stronger, and this sort of adaptation built speed and strength while allowing humans to throw overweight balls safely. Underweight balls encouraged throwers to reach peak force, a onetime stressor that complemented the slow build of overweight balls. Throwing anything
below five ounces calls upon the shoulder muscles in charge of deceleration even more than regular-weight balls, rounding out the best-of-both-worlds training Boddy aims to employ.

Weathers bought in. Within a month, he constantly hit 95 off a mound and went from zero prospects to an offer from the Tampa Bay Rays. He shipped out to the low minor leagues and couldn't throw strikes, but his arm didn't hurt for the first time in six years. So back he came to Driveline for the winter, took a six-month lease on a place fifteen minutes away in Tacoma, and resolved to learn how to throw strikes. He wanted one more shot. It didn't feel foolhardy, not when the training at Driveline helped his mashed-potatoes elbow feel right again, especially not when the ball came out of his hand the way it did.

“There's no way you should believe that a guy with a destroyed elbow threw 105.8 multiple times,” Boddy said. “There's no reason to believe it.”

T
HE FIRST TIME I SPOKE
with Boddy, he told me I was going to see someone throw a baseball 106 miles per hour. I called him a liar and figured he was just another velocity-crazed parasite. Boddy, much to my surprise, didn't turtle away or snap back defensively.

“The people that are my enemies or whatever have a point,” he said. “Velocities have never been higher, and those guys sort of tend to get hurt more. It's kind of close cut. I get it. From a pure biomechanical standpoint, of course torque is incredibly high, right? And so that should lead to injuries. But nobody focuses on the kinesiology of it.”

Over his seven years studying baseball, Boddy has constantly run studies to test his ideas, challenge himself, and learn more about whether he really can churn out pitchers who throw hard and stay healthy. Boddy was wrong about one thing: He wasn't the most skeptical guy in the pitching arm business. That was me. I'd seen Daniel Hudson's arm blow up a second time and Todd
Coffey's take him nowhere good. I'd heard a guy named Tommy John say he's going to make Tommy John surgery obsolete with electric pulses. I'd witnessed kids risking arm injuries across my own country and in another halfway around the world. I'd watched a team pay $155 million for an arm that might require surgery. Nobody was more skeptical than I, and now I'd seen a guy with a chronically bad elbow throw 105.8 miles per hour and declare himself healthier than ever.

“His arm was killing him for four years,” Boddy said. “Now it doesn't, and he can train as hard as he wants and maybe make something out of himself. That's way more fun. The problem is no one gives a fuck unless they've had elbow problems, because they just assume it'll never happen to them. You can't sell people preventive medicine. I think the American healthcare system and the rise of antivaccination people is proof enough of that, and baseball people are at least one order of magnitude dumber than the average American citizen.”

Boddy's active dislike of the baseball establishment brought him here. In many ways, Boddy is a slightly more sociable, far less peremptory Mike Marshall. The name Driveline was cribbed from a favorite Marshall phrase. On the back of Boddy's Driveline T-shirts is another Marshall axiom: “Rest Is Atrophy.” Those are for sale on Driveline's website, $24.95 a pop. While Marshall erred in alienating the public and never building a viable business, Boddy sells T-shirts, weighted baseballs, medicine-ball sets, and Alan Jaeger's tubing bands, and makes a tidy-enough profit that kids who want to train at Driveline pay only a nominal one hundred dollars a month.

I walked into the upstairs portion of the facility and was greeted by a wall with inch-thick mats backed by two-by-four reinforcements every foot or so. Driveline students whipped medicine balls into the padding with reverse throws, like a tennis backhand, to strengthen the three rotator cuff muscles that contract during the deceleration portion of the delivery. On the adjacent wall, there
was visible electric piping. The place looked more like a meth lab than a science lab.

Boddy's desk, which he shares with the CEO he hired, a former waste-management operations manager named Mike Rathwell, was a disaster covered by weighted balls, batteries, two printers, and a PC missing a side panel, its guts exposed. A few feet away, Weathers had dropped a weight on the ground after a grueling set and destroyed the plywood in the floor, leaving a gaping hole beneath the carpet. Rather than fix it, Boddy covered it with a mat and told everyone to avoid the manhole. Of the stack of books on top of a drawer, one was Boddy's much-thumbed copy of
Gray's Anatomy
and two were in Japanese, written by Kazushi Tezuka and Ryutaro Himeno, the theorists behind the mysterious gyroball pitch. The body-mobility bible
Becoming a Supple Leopard
had yet to be cracked. “I am not a supple leopard,” Boddy said. “I think I'm going to celebrate with some pizza tonight.”

Boddy claimed moments like Weathers's 105.8 as his own victories. They validated his decision to leave behind his previous career as a nerd-for-hire and pursue Driveline full-time in 2012. Until then, he had worked exposing security flaws at the gambling operation PokerStars, played cards and bet sports himself, spent a year at Microsoft, and jumped around in data-science jobs. He was depressed and suffering from anxiety attacks, convinced that he was missing his baseball calling. The game had been his passion since his Cleveland childhood. Boddy's father worked as an electrician and his mom stayed at home. Boddy was a bad ballplayer, more knowledgeable than skilled. He spent his senior year in high school taking classes at a nearby community college and turned down opportunities at more challenging schools because he couldn't afford them. Instead, he took a full scholarship to Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio, but eventually dropped out.

Driveline Mechanics
, the blog Boddy started in 2008, relied significantly on the theories of Mike Marshall and Chris O'Leary.
Parroting others' work didn't satisfy him, so he set out to create something that seemed impossible: a biomechanics lab, just like Glenn Fleisig had at ASMI. “It's just math, man,” Boddy said. “I'm Asian. I got into MIT. I can do this.”

At a dilapidated warehouse in Seattle, Boddy installed four high-speed cameras and enlisted the help of a research assistant for Jesus Dapena, one of the earliest baseball biomechanics experts, to walk him through the rest. As Boddy moved into bigger, better spaces, the lab grew as well: EMG sensors, force plates, inertial measurement units, and even a contraption made from a Nintendo Wiimote that aimed to measure elbow torque. Working out at Driveline meant being part of a running experiment. Never in professional baseball had any team done this. The most active research that teams do on players involves a biomechanical analysis at ASMI or another lab. As former Boston Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington said, “We don't want to turn them into guinea pigs. If there was a parallel universe somewhere with baseball player clones and there was no human attached to it, you could do whatever you want.”

Cherington's science fiction is Boddy's science. He wants to marry velocity with health, and his simple, reasonable proposal is an extension of the epidemiological study Major League Baseball is undertaking. “You take all first-year pitchers and measure everything,” Boddy said. “Maybe you even spring for MRIs on everyone to do a cool research project. Then you track specific metrics at all levels every two to four weeks and see where things go from there. When there are large deviations, experiment with recovery techniques. See which ones work well and which ones don't. Discard the shit, keep the good stuff. Constantly iterate.”