The Arm (34 page)

The mThrow was a fine first step, Boddy thought—certainly better than nothing—but it needed complementary pieces. The sleeve gave no advice about how to correct bad mechanics or what to do if the torque on a pitcher's arm jumped too high. Numbers are just numbers without context, and even the numbers themselves depended on the position of the sensor, which could slip without a pitcher noticing.

“The measurements are still wildly incorrect,” Boddy said. “Do I have to do everything in this fucking industry to get things done? Is everyone that incompetent?”

Given Boddy's bouts of egotism, the email he sent me February 13, 2015, felt uncharacteristic. He linked to two papers written by Dr. James Buffi and said he was close to hiring him:

It's actual genius-level material that goes beyond the inverse dynamics of what ASMI does. It could be exceedingly revolutionary. Fortunately for me, he's read my site and he thinks that I'm the only guy who understands how to train pitchers. Works for me.

Never before had I seen him lavish praise on a peer without caveat. And to call Buffi a peer was a stretch. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, biding his time for a few more months after finishing his research on the muscles in the forearm and their effect on the UCL. After hours of scouring the Internet for his intellectual and scientific equal, Boddy had found one.

Buffi, who grew up in Smithfield, Rhode Island, playing baseball, was always one of the smallest kids—he stands just five feet six today—and wanted to learn how to throw as fast as his
taller teammates. Buffi's parents bought him a Tom House book on mechanics. “That's when I realized how complex the pitching motion really was,” he said. After graduating from Notre Dame, Buffi went to Northwestern to study the forearm muscles in hopes of making better prosthetic limbs. He stumbled across medical literature relating to baseball, got hooked, and received permission from his advisor and PhD committee to write his dissertation about the forearm muscles' impact on the throwing motion. Buffi's goal was to figure out exactly how much the muscles contribute to protecting the UCL and how it varies from pitcher to pitcher, and to do so, he used a method rarely applied to baseball.

Almost every biomechanics lab, including ASMI's, uses a process for measuring force on joints called inverse dynamics. It starts by figuring out the total loads on joints, then works backward and assigns the amount of force to individual joints, including the valgus torque on the elbow. Buffi specialized in musculoskeletal modeling, in which he loaded motion-capture data of a college pitcher throwing a pitch into a computerized version of the human body created by his advisor. He used the model to simulate the force on each of the four forearm muscles that make up the flexor-pronator mass. This was called forward dynamics, and while in the biomechanical world it's nothing new—researchers have used it to analyze walking patterns for years—the gait is a far simpler pattern than the throwing motion.

“One of the things Kyle said when we were talking, which really struck a chord with me, was that compared to where technology is, baseball science is like back in the 1970s and '80s,” Buffi said. “When I follow Kyle's stuff, he's fairly close to the present. When I started looking into baseball research, I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. I can do anything I want and it's going to be novel and awesome.' This whole field is wide open.”

Prior research had focused on the flexor-pronator muscles. One of Mike Marshall's grand theories held that the pronator teres, the largest muscle of the four, helped protect the UCL. A study
overseen by Dr. Frank Jobe in 1996 using EMG sensors said the flexor-pronator muscles “do not supplant the role of the medial collateral ligament during the fastball pitch,” a conclusion that another paper eight years later would dispute. In that study, Dr. Christopher Ahmad, now the team doctor for the New York Yankees, wrote, “The flexor-pronator mass dynamically stabilizes the elbow against valgus torque.” Translation: valgus torque, the injurious force believed to rip apart elbow ligaments, could be lessened with better use of the forearm muscles. Of particular importance was the flexor carpi ulnaris, a muscle that Jobe's study said covered the UCL during 120 degrees, or nearly two-thirds, of shoulder rotation.

Buffi's initial research confirmed the importance of the flexor muscles. Perhaps they were what enabled R. A. Dickey to pitch without a UCL. Maybe they explained why some pitchers stayed healthy and others didn't. To further test his hypothesis, Buffi worked with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital's biomechanics lab, which captured the throwing motions of twenty college pitchers with markers as well as ground-force data collected with force plates. Buffi's optimization algorithm fit the markers in the model as close as possible to those on the real pitchers. “The goal,” Buffi said, “is to get the model to move in exactly the same way the real pitcher moves.”

Of the twenty pitchers, thirteen had no previous major arm injuries and seven did. Blinded to the results, Buffi correctly identified six of the seven injured pitchers and twelve of the thirteen without injuries based solely on the model's data. Buffi then used inverse dynamics, the standard method, to assess all twenty pitchers. It could not tell the difference between who had been injured and who hadn't.

This was just the beginning of his research, too, and that's what excited Buffi the most. “I'm optimistic it will also be predictive,” he said, and if it were—if a simple biomechanical analysis fed into his model really could portend danger—the implications would be huge. Same with the knowledge Buffi could glean from
other pitches. Motion-capture data is almost always restricted to pitchers throwing fastballs only. Baseball, meanwhile, is littered with theories on the adverse effect of other pitches on the elbow.

Bill James long wondered whether sinkerballers are more injury-prone. Sliders are anecdotally death to elbows. Split-fingered fastballs fell out of favor because of concern that they led to arm troubles. Cutters and curveballs and screwballs at one time or another have all been Public Arm Enemy Number One.

Perhaps Buffi's model could establish a stronger relationship between particular pitches—or even the particular grips on pitches—and health. Boddy wanted to try that and a million other things with it: test different strengthening exercises on each individual forearm muscle to find a proper way to train the flexor-pronator mass; run Driveline clients' biomechanical profiles through the model to sniff out red flags; and maybe even produce a proper compression sleeve whose engine would put the mThrow to shame. If Buffi consulted with Driveline, or even joined full-time, it would ensure the world could see his research.

“If you work for a team, nothing gets out,” Buffi said. “Everything stays in-house. I'd really like to help as many people as I can. I've never been trained as a clinician or in therapy, so I need to work with someone in science who can translate the findings into something that can train pitchers.”

Drawbacks to forward dynamics do exist, and Buffi's findings weren't an automatic change to how we view the arm. “Parsing the individual contributions of muscles and stresses experienced by ligaments and tendons is very difficult,” said Neil Roach, the biological anthropologist who used inverse dynamics for his study on the evolution of prehistoric throwing. “Forward dynamics is a potential way around this problem, but it requires some major assumptions and can be quite error-prone. I think a combination of the two methods is advisable. This allows us to cross-check any errors in both models and further parse total joint contributions into the constituent parts.”

Still, it was different. And though baseball frowns upon things that are different, that's what made it such a potential gold mine. Roach read through Buffi's work and was impressed. Mike Marshall called Buffi and wondered if he could run one of his pitchers through the model. When Buffi wrote a series of articles outlining his methodology and results for Driveline's website, baseball took notice.

“I don't want to say I can fix elbow injuries, but I think I can compensate for the thing that I found with training,” Buffi said. “It's a really, really hard problem to solve. Hopefully I'm making some good steps toward solving it.”

I
N THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY
2015, Casey Weathers was throwing only 90 miles per hour off the mound. Every day, he came into Driveline Baseball's rickety gym, and every day he stared at the radar board on the wall and wondered what the hell happened to his arm. It felt fine. He was still healthy. The arm that threw a ball 105.8 miles per hour simply vanished.

“I suck,” Weathers muttered, and Kyle Boddy would nod along, still confident his grand plan was unfolding at just the right pace. A month earlier, Weathers agreed to a minor league deal with the Cleveland Indians. He would report to Goodyear, Arizona, for spring training just like Trevor Bauer, and he'd bring with him stories of playing test subject for Bauer's and Boddy's mad-scientist routine. Weathers was doing command training, too, a variation on Bauer's but taxing nevertheless.

Depending on the day, Weathers would throw anywhere from twenty-five to sixty pitches at a seventeen-by-seventeen-inch black pad that serves as a strike-zone proxy and looks like the back of a chair. Bauer first used it at the Texas Baseball Ranch, and the thud when the ball hit the pad was a nugget of positive reinforcement for a job well done. Weathers wanted to make the drill even harder. Rather than aiming for a specific area—low and
away, high and inside, middle-out—he spaced dime-sized colored dots a centimeter or two apart from each other and aimed for one minute spot. Often he was close enough that a miss didn't feel as much like a miss might have otherwise.

Weathers started at fifty-four feet with only five-ounce balls. Once he started hitting his target on 75 percent of his throws, he moved back to sixty feet, six inches, and added weighted balls to the mix. Five throws at six ounces, five at four ounces, with mixed intent—sometimes 80 percent, sometimes max effort, always chopped up.

“We want them to hate their workouts,” Boddy said. “Well, not really, but the training has that effect. Like, throw a four-ounce ball at 80 percent of perceived maximum effort to a low target, then your next throw is a regular baseball as hard as possible to a high target. That's impossible to do. But over time it absolutely helps because you don't get trapped in ‘throw a pitch, miss, complain, throw a pitch, hit, great, who cares.' They actually have to think every rep through.”

As February dawned and Boddy tapered down the intensity of Weathers's workouts, his velocity returned alongside his command. He was sitting at 92, touching 95, and banging his low-and-away strikes 70 percent of the time. The plan was working.

“I knew it would,” Boddy said. “I took the foot off the abuse meter. It's not physical. A guy like Casey has no problem with the physical stuff, but they've generally never been mentally challenged or psychologically challenged in that way. It's very tedious, boring work that they're bad at. Not only is this boring, it's really hard and it sucks.”

How it would translate a few weeks down the road Boddy didn't know. If Weathers and Bauer threw strikes, maybe he was on to something. If they didn't, he'd try his best to understand the limitations of the training and apply the pieces that did work, adding new components.

“I haven't solved shit,” Boddy said. “I think I have a good
idea how to get people throwing harder and how to get guys healthy who were written off. But not everyone. Two kids have had elbow injuries, severe ones, while training here. There were extenuating circumstances, of course, but that's weaseling and cheating to hide behind that. It's the truth. Kids have been hurt under my watch, and more will.”

I grew to appreciate Boddy because, for all of his arrogance, he refused to present failures as exceptions. One was an elite high school kid whom he couldn't convince to throw less in high school and on the showcase circuit. He underwent Tommy John surgery as a junior. The other dove for a ball at first base, hurt his elbow, and kept pitching. He suffered an avulsion fracture, like so many of the kids in Japan, and wound up needing surgery. A longtime adherent of year-round throwing, Boddy has peeled back his offseason program in recent winters as an acknowledgment of its potential harm.

He wanted so badly to fix what was wrong with professional baseball's approach to the arm. Boddy tried to appeal to the rational side of baseball's front offices with a blog post entitled “Making the Sabermetric Argument for Increasing Fastball Velocity.” In it, he argued that a player whose fastball jumped from 86 miles per hour to 90 would be worth around an extra marginal win per season because of the likelihood the extra velocity would lop off some home runs and add some strikeouts. It behooved teams to encourage their pitchers to throw harder and hope the training protocols he employed could help keep them healthy.

“This can be done to Todd Coffey,” Boddy said. “This can be done to Scott Kazmir. This can be done. . . . I'm asking you to believe that someone who was good, who has been failed by player development, like Casey Weathers, could again be possibly worth something to the organization. Casey Weathers is worth a lot to an organization even if he never throws a pitch in Major League Baseball because it's an amazing, not story, but validated experiment, that this can be done.”

While Boddy chafed at the Astros' unwillingness to implement more of his training methods—he even had the backing of Brent Strom, their big league pitching coach, who ran in the same hipster-pitching-coach circles—he found a new favorite team in a familiar place: Cleveland, where he grew up rooting for the Indians. Bauer and Eric Binder vouched for him. Mickey Callaway, Cleveland's pitching coach, visited Driveline in the offseason before 2015 to understand what Boddy did. Others in the organization liked his work. Weathers was a testament, as was Nick Hagadone, the Indians' hard-throwing left-handed reliever who trained with Boddy and emerged with a new cut fastball. If Buffi joined the staff, which Boddy expected, Driveline only would get better.