The Arm (33 page)

For three years, I'd waited to hear someone say this. Teams operated more than $600 million in the black during the 2014 season, according to a Forbes analysis, and money spent on injury research amounted to nothing. Moreover, the union would instantaneously object to major league players being used as guinea
pigs, even if the greater good was obvious. In the minor leagues, where the union has no say, teams still didn't bother with substantive research.

“They don't do it because trainers aren't paid shit, strength-and-conditioning coaches at the minor league level are totally unqualified to do any of this stuff, and, well, it's never been done before in baseball,” Boddy said. “And since it's never been done, why start it now?”

Major League Baseball's and the MLB Players Association's agreement to the study on the 2014 draft class of pitchers is the closest they've come to following Boddy's suggestions. Not even the Houston Astros, baseball's avant-garde franchise, for which Boddy consulted, were ready to try it. And it's not like they're categorically averse to new ideas. The Astros have instituted the long toss for all their minor league teams, piggybacked their young pitching—two starters throw in every game, like Toronto did with Noah Syndergaard, Aaron Sanchez, and Justin Nicolino—and hired Bill Firkus, a Cal-Berkeley MBA, as director of sports medicine and performance. While Boddy's weighted-ball program proliferated throughout college baseball—starting with Vanderbilt and Oregon State, two national championship–caliber programs—as well as in high schools around the country, major league teams retreated to their fiefdoms. This left Boddy with few allies and forced him to dig into the deepest corners of the Internet, seeking intellectual equals to help grow Driveline. Trevor Bauer was one, and he was a good one to have, because he was every bit as smart as Boddy and even more curious. On the day of 105.8, he came to Driveline with his father, Warren, a chemical engineer who helped make Bauer a major leaguer. And amid discussions about health and mechanics and physics, Warren piped up during a lull in the conversation.

“Kyle, Trevor and I had a question for you,” Warren said. “Do you think you can teach command?”

D
URING LUNCH PERIOD IN HIGH
school, Trevor Bauer used to escape to room J2, which kids called the Physics Palace. Martin Kirby, a renowned teacher at Hart High, thirty miles northwest of Los Angeles, presided over it with great majesty. As a sophomore, Bauer took AP Physics with Kirby, and it introduced him to a new world, one with force and momentum and everything else that went into throwing a baseball. Kirby spoke Bauer's language far better than any of his peers. “I didn't have a whole lot of friends in high school,” Bauer said. “I'd go in, and I'd play chess in his classroom. Or talk to him about quantum physics at lunch just so I didn't feel awkward out there standing alone, again.”

Kids used to laugh at Bauer for wearing baseball pants to Meadows Elementary School. He spent his teenage years as an oxymoron: the elite-athlete outcast. He was too smart for his own good, too dedicated to the craft of throwing a baseball to hone his social skills. When Bauer wanted an ultraheavy ball for training, he drilled holes into softballs and pounded lead fishing sinkers into them with a hammer. Little did those around him understand how hard he had to work to overcome genetics. Even now, after maniacal training, Bauer's vertical leap is barely thirty inches and he runs a bit like a mule. As a freshman, his fastball was in the mid-70s, fifteen miles per hour less than the Anthony Molinas of the world.

“Trevor was never an elite arm,” Warren Bauer said. “Trevor made himself an elite arm. There's a difference.”

Bauer's long-term plan irritated his coaches. Bauer's high school coach sent him note after note telling him he would amount to nothing if he refused to follow the standard, mappedout protocol for pitchers. Every day after school, Bauer rode to nearby tennis courts on his bike with a bucket of baseballs on each handlebar and a heavy rope around his neck. His three-hour workout included a long-toss session into the fence sur
rounding the courts. One morning, police officers showed up at his coach's office, asking about a kid named Trevor. It turned out that a tennis instructor had called the cops on him. “The fence deformed a little bit,” Bauer said, “so I was a vandal.” When Bauer's coach was through berating him in front of the team, Bauer said, “Sorry my parents didn't raise me to be blindly allegiant.”

Bauer framed the coach's most obnoxious letter, glanced at it for motivation, came to be one of the best players in Los Angeles as a junior, and graduated a semester early as a high school senior so he could enroll at UCLA as a seventeen-year-old. Six weeks later, he was closing games for the Bruins.

Bauer's routine irked his college coaches, too, but nobody questioned it. He estimates that he threw 360 days a year, the rare American to embrace nagekomi. He struck up a friendship with Alan Jaeger, the long-toss guru, and became its greatest acolyte, throwing balls four hundred feet and beginning his innings with a running crow-hop throw, many of which soared to the backstop. By his junior season at UCLA, he was the best pitcher in the nation, a six-foot-one, 175-pound anomaly, a mite next to his six-foot-four, 220-pound teammate Gerrit Cole, who was born to throw 100 miles per hour.

Bauer is exhibit one in favor of sport specialization, the exception to the rules against year-round baseball and year-round throwing and everything else I'd come to believe. He was a freak of intelligence, self-awareness, and dedication. Bauer's body gave him 80 miles per hour. He discovered the last 20 himself.

“I'm an argument in favor of development, that it's possible subpar genetics can get to the level I'm at,” Bauer said. “People could be a lot more like me than you see if they did it as long as I've done it. It's one of the reasons I have such a clean throwing pattern and arm action and don't have pain when I throw. I throw all the time.”

Bauer built himself into a pitching machine with help from around the country. He spent weeks at a time at Ron Wolforth's
Texas Baseball Ranch. Every offseason, he visited Dr. Marcus Elliott, who took his Harvard Medical School degree and devoted himself to athletic performance and injury prevention. Alan Jaeger counted him among his most dedicated students. And for two years he had gone to Driveline because Kyle Boddy made him think.

The issue of command was a particularly good brainteaser. Control—throwing strikes consistently—was difficult enough. Command is the ability to locate those pitches. It is considered unteachable. Pound strike-throwing into a guy's head enough and he probably can get the ball over the plate. Command, the belief goes, is as inborn as eye color, and no matter how hard he tried, Bauer hadn't found it. He struggled with it after Arizona drafted him third overall in 2011. He wasn't much better after a trade to Cleveland prior to the 2013 season. Bauer refused to believe he couldn't master it, and his father wanted to know whether Boddy had any ideas to complement the offseason plan they were about to hatch.

Bauer wanted to expand upon a randomized-training program from the previous offseason. He would throw either a four-, a five-, or a six-ounce ball, different every time, and the varying weights would help him gain better proprioception, the subconscious feedback that allows muscles to repeat movements and organize the body. That wasn't enough for Bauer. Baseball is imperfect. Some mounds are slanted one way, some another. Days are hot or cold, sunny or gloomy. Pitching in the first inning is an entirely different animal than going in in the eighth after one hundred pitches. The variables in a game are infinite, Bauer figured, so if his training were the same it could theoretically help him command pitches in any type of environment.

“I throw a pitch, and before the next one I do twenty single-leg squats with my right leg,” Bauer said. “Now I go to throw the pitch, this [leg] is partially fatigued. I still have to try to hit that at sixty feet, so that's going to be different, but still trying to
execute the pitch. So you teach your body to be able to, if this is slightly fatigued.”

Bauer didn't stop with the squats. He wanted to “destabilize the system.” After throwing a six-ounce cutter, he would do some sort of rotational drill. Then he would throw another six-ounce cutter before reaching randomly for a four-, five-, or six-ounce ball to throw. One more six-ounce cutter preceded the final flourish. Bauer would take a ball and shoot into a bucket, like he was playing hoops, or kick a soccer ball, or swing a bat, or jump. And finally he would grab a four-ounce ball and try to cut it to the same spot he had with the six-ounce ball.

“The more you change up the system of how your body has to move, the more natural your body actually looks to solve that trick,” Bauer said. “Your body is a great problem solver, so you're going to solve that equation a lot better.”

Nearly every day Bauer followed this routine with his fastball and cutter, the two pitches he wanted to throw for strikes. Boddy had predicted six months earlier that Bauer would come into the 2015 season sitting 100 miles per hour. Had he scrapped the experiment and focused on velocity, Bauer probably could've. An extra couple of miles per hour for a guy who sat 94 off the mound wasn't going to change his life nearly as much as command would.

“I've gone through a lot of changes to be able to actually execute, make it all better,” Bauer said. “It's taken a couple years, and I've become a head case and a bust and all the different stuff in between.”

Performance determines reputation, and Bauer understood that his career ERA of 4.44 going into the 2015 season gave him little leeway. He was lucky to be with the Indians, an organization deep in pitching minds—Eric Binder, with whom Bauer had worked at the Texas Baseball Ranch, was the team's assistant director for player development—and willing to let him experiment. If one of the 750 Major League Baseball players in the world wanted to use training modalities rooted in decades of ob
scure studies to defeat the impossible, the Indians wouldn't argue. It would be a far easier sell if he cut a point or two off that ERA. If the command training worked, he would, and it might help him move closer to achieving another dream.

“
ESPN the Magazine
's Body Issue,” Bauer said. “Five years. That's my goal. The Body Issue in five years. You want to hear my life plan? In five years, be on the body cover, and that's going to buy me enough notoriety that in six years I can find the most attractive gold-medalist track athlete from the 2020 Games.”

Though he had grown up since his trade from Arizona and had found comfort and camaraderie in the Indians' clubhouse, on occasion Bauer lapsed back into the weird kid who hung with the physics teacher during lunch. Stumping for eugenics qualified as one of those times, and yet he was as serious as could be: the curious side of Bauer wondered what a structured intersection of nature and nurture could produce.

“My kid is going to be raised in an environment that loves growth mind-set and work ethic,” Bauer said. “And by the time he's fifteen, he's going to be throwing a hundred.”

Genetics being what they are, he was reminded, it's about as likely he would father a girl.

“If it's a she,” Bauer said, “she'll be number one in the world in something.”

M
ICROCHIPS, AS MUCH AS MUSCLES,
contain the keys to unlocking the secrets of pitching arms. Moore's law says computing power doubles every two years, which for baseball means the future is nigh. It may already be here. In Philadelphia, a company called KinaTrax built a platform that it says can capture motion data without markers. If KinaTrax's technology works as advertised, it means that the twenty-three reflective pads Glenn Fleisig sticks on pitchers at ASMI, or the full-body motion-capture suits athletes wear to help map out movement for video games, could soon be
obsolete. The implications are enormous. The two great drawbacks of Fleisig's biomechanical testing are the unnatural feeling of being marked up and the sterile feeling of throwing off a portable mound inside a laboratory. KinaTrax purports to capture the same kinematic data as Fleisig's and other indoor labs but in natural environments like Tropicana Field, where in 2015 the Tampa Bay Rays became the first major league team to install a system.

KinaTrax is essentially a high-powered multi-camera version of the Xbox Kinect, the first mass-consumer motion-capture product. Its eight cameras shoot 200 to 300 frames per second and use telephoto lenses accurate up to three hundred feet. Every pitch takes up more than ten gigabytes of data, which gets uploaded into the cloud and is available for retrieval the next day.

mThrow, a compression sleeve with an embedded sensor that claims to capture live data and send it to a smartphone app via Bluetooth, says it can provide a more immediate pitch-data fix. For two years, Motus Global, a Long Island–based biomechanics company that caters to baseball, football, tennis, golf, lacrosse, and track athletes, has poured money into the sleeve in hopes that it becomes standard on not only big league pitchers whose arms are worth millions but also Little League pitchers who want to avoid injury. mThrow is a clean, simple device. A packing-peanut-sized sensor slips into the sleeve and is placed in the nook of the elbow where the UCL ties together the upper and lower arms. After every pitch, the app registers the newton meters of force on the elbow, the angle of the forearm at release, the shoulder's range of motion, the speed of the forearm, and the number of pitches thrown. The question, as with KinaTrax, is whether it actually does what it claims to do. Motus has the exclusive right and ability to download mThrow's data, a fact that bothered Kyle Boddy.

“I did what any mad Asian would do,” Boddy said. “I impersonated the Motus servers using software, intercepted the ‘phone calls home' [that] the unit and my phone make to Motus, and figured out exactly how to get the data I want.” Boddy ana
lyzed the data and came away doubting its accuracy. Compared with the Wiimote contraption he built in 2011 that measured the same things, Boddy said, the mThrow wasn't the revolutionary solution Motus claimed, as did
Popular Science
magazine, which trumpeted: “This Sleeve Will Help Save Pitchers' Arms.”