The Arm (35 page)

And maybe at some point, as with the sabermetric revolution, major league teams would no longer be able to ignore the world of arm health. Perhaps it would take a standard-bearer, someone waving a bright flag of major league success, to speed up the process.

“If Trevor wins the Cy Young, it makes a big difference,” Warren Bauer said. “The difference isn't going to be any change, but it's going to put a question out there.”

Trevor Bauer didn't come to Indians camp in the spring of 2015 in
ESPN
Body Issue shape, but he looked nonetheless like a new pitcher. One of his new toys was a drone he built during the offseason that Major League Baseball banned him from flying around the Indians' facility. The other was a new pitch nobody knew existed.

The laminar-flow fastball was the brainchild of Trevor Bauer. Other pitchers threw it. They just didn't realize how or why it moved like it did. A video on YouTube featuring an Australian professor named Rod Cross discusses the idea of laminar and turbulent flow. Laminar flow is when air goes over an object smoothly. Turbulent air, as every airline passenger understands, is rough. Cross showed how with the right grip and proper axis
of spin, a pitcher could throw a ball with a large smooth patch on one side and a rough seam on the other, and the turbulence would cause the ball to move almost twice as much as standard spinning-ball physics would suggest.

Bauer felt comfortable enough with the laminar-flow fastball that he unleashed it during his wildly successful spring training. Over 27⅔ innings in exhibition games, Bauer walked one batter and struck out twenty-six. His stuff was as good as ever. His command of it was better than he could've imagined.

On the other side of the Indians' complex, Casey Weathers kept throwing strikes and was assigned to Class A Lynchburg. At twenty-nine, he was seven years older than the average player in the league, and in order to validate his position in the Indians' organization, he needed to show one of two things: exquisite command or monster velocity. Weathers walked two in his first game with Lynchburg and two more in his second, and his fastball sat around 93. It started ticking up, and he didn't walk anybody in half of his next ten games, and the velocity went a little higher, and the outs were coming, the ERA dropping. And on May 24, 2015, the same day Weathers walked two batters, the same day he hung a slider that got tattooed for a three-run home run, he did something that before going to Driveline never could've happened.

The guy with the mashed-potatoes elbow hit 100 miles per hour off the mound.

I
USUALLY AGREED WITH KYLE BODDY
and his analysis of why baseball keeps regressing while ostensibly trying to keep arms healthy, but one thing he said struck me as terribly pessimistic: “I think we are about twenty-five years away from having the same type of revolution that
Moneyball
struck.”

What I see doesn't look nearly as grim. Soon enough, the mThrow sleeve will seem comically oversized. Maybe Motus
creates the mSticker, a disposable adhesive affixed to the elbow that wirelessly sends every sliver of biometric data imaginable to a computer. Perhaps it's a molecule-sized device injected into the elbow or fastened via minimally invasive surgery that allows for twenty-four-hour monitoring. Biohacking isn't just for sci-fi movies. Offer pitchers unparalleled knowledge about their most vital equipment and plenty will ask for a pen and the dotted line.

The nanotechnology revolution will arrive well before the next quarter century has come and gone and bring with it entirely new ways to treat injuries. The repair of a torn UCL without surgery? Not out of the question. The growth of stronger ligaments in laboratories using stem cells? Quite possible.

For today, we already have KinaTrax, or whatever markerless motion-capture company eventually corners the market. We have ASMI's Throw Like a Pro app, which keeps track of pitchers and offers educational videos. We have the potential prospect of Jeffrey Dugas's modified Tommy John surgery to halve the recovery time.

Lurking on the periphery of this landscape are individuals like James Buffi, hoping somebody notices their work. If his model really could help predict injuries, Kyle Boddy said, “he could be Dr. Frank Jobe.” Boddy wasn't the only one paying attention. Buffi heard from Matt Arnold, the Tampa Bay Rays' director of pro scouting. The Rays are one of baseball's most progressive organizations, employing a disproportionate number of analysts and data crunchers for a team with such a low payroll. For years, they avoided pitching injuries, emphasizing one of the best shoulder-strengthening programs in the industry. Then their young star Matt Moore needed Tommy John surgery. And so did his replacement atop the rotation, Alex Cobb. Even without a breakthrough, Buffi wouldn't make enough money for there to be any downside to the Rays' hiring him.

Another call frightened Boddy far more than Tampa Bay's: a man named Doug Fearing, the director of research and develop
ment for the Los Angeles Dodgers, wanted to speak with Buffi about his findings. The Dodgers were run by Andrew Friedman, the hyperintelligent president of baseball operations who had just left the Rays after a decade-long run of success. In Los Angeles, no budget bound Friedman. The Dodgers had just started an $8 billion local-television contract that allowed their annual payrolls to threaten $300 million. Even better, Friedman and general manager Farhan Zaidi were allowing Fearing to build baseball's biggest, best think tank. They were seeking experts in quantitative psychology and applied mathematics. One of Buffi's friends from Northwestern's PhD program, a data scientist named Megan Schroeder, already was working with the Dodgers as an analyst. She raved to Buffi about the Dodgers' new front-office brain trust.

Boddy's chief concern was that the Dodgers would steal Buffi and his work for their organization alone, further setting back the cause of all baseball pitchers.

“He's gonna work for the Dodgers,” Trevor Bauer told Boddy.

“What makes you say that?” Boddy said.

“When you were twenty-nine and I met you,” Bauer said, “would you have worked for Ron Wolforth or for the Indians?”

“Ah, fuck you,” Boddy said.

“Exactly,” Bauer said.

In June 2015, Buffi accepted a job with the Dodgers about three months after he told me he didn't want to work for a team.

“I did believe that,” Buffi said. “But when I came back from the Dodgers, I was so impressed by the people they had on board. They were talking such a big game about research and creating a premier baseball think tank and hiring the smartest minds in baseball. And they have Andrew and Farhan and Doug.”

Buffi wasn't a hypocrite. He was a realist. Working for the Dodgers provided an incredible opportunity to continue his research. He had endless money, an available pool of test subjects inside the Dodgers' farm system, and the chance to learn from
some of the finest minds in the sport. If he wanted to track the arm using inertial measurement units—a sensor used more often to guide airplanes, spaceships, and missiles—track it he could. Buffi could buy all the joint-angle-measuring electrogoniometers his heart desired.

The Dodgers would be happy to provide whatever it took to perfect his model, especially if it did what he thought it could. As he completed his research, Buffi used his model to develop a radical hypothesis: valgus torque may not be the right way to measure ligament strain (how far it stretches compared with its length at rest) or stress (the amount of force being placed on it). Considering that decades of baseball research, including much of what has come out of ASMI, leaned on valgus torque, Buffi's findings had potentially significant implications, particularly if another researcher could replicate them or Buffi could show similar findings in a different study.

Now the public won't know, at least not in the immediate future. Buffi's knowledge goes directly into the Dodgers' information silo.

“I traded the opportunity to impact a ton of people, which I do want to do because I'm still only twenty-nine,” Buffi said. “I just thought this opportunity to get in the ground floor—I had to make a choice. It feels like a selfish decision. But I did the best I could.”

In a conversation with Buffi about spreading potential innovations to the masses, Friedman said all the right things about being open-minded. Buffi wasn't so naive as to think the Dodgers would simply give away proprietary information for the good of baseball. There are championships to be won, and the easiest way to do it is with a pitching staff full of healthy arms and the wisdom to flip those whose arms won't be.

When he called Boddy to tell him he took the Dodgers job, Buffi teared up. “I'm a sensitive guy,” he later said. He was fond of Boddy, appreciative of the opportunity to write about his work,
certain that Driveline would maintain its spirit of research and development without him.

“I was pretty pissed for about twenty minutes for the future of Driveline,” Boddy said. “The company is going to go on. It just sucks. For all of baseball. It sucks that not everybody's going to know about his work, no matter what happens with the Dodgers. The worst-case scenario is he has a breakthrough with them. Because then the world won't see it.” He sighed. “You can only learn you hate pro ball one way,” Boddy said. “By working in it.”

Boddy's own moral position was soon put to the test when the Indians wanted more information on his weighted-ball program and a better understanding of his command drills. They offered him a consulting deal to evaluate the deliveries of draft prospects. He jumped at it. “The short-term money in this business is lying to nine-year-olds about select and travel baseball,” Boddy said. “The long-term money is becoming a cornerstone that pro teams rely on, which gives you implicit power, and dominating college baseball so you have a constant feeder system of high-level clients.”

Over the winter, Boddy spoke to a captive audience at Vanderbilt that included its most distinguished baseball alum and Casey Weathers's college teammate David Price. When I asked Price in February 2015 what he thought of Boddy, he said: “I couldn't believe he had the knowledge he did about building arm strength. It all made sense. I got it.” Maybe Price would work with him in the future. For now, though, he wasn't changing anything. Price was a free agent after the 2015 season, and he wouldn't risk deviating from what he knew. On December 1, 2015, Price signed a sevenyear, $217 million contract with the Boston Red Sox. It was more than three times as much as their first offer to Jon Lester.

Maybe Boddy would've made Price better. Maybe he would've suffered a season-ending injury like Nick Hagadone, who trained with Boddy going into 2015 and underwent surgery a few months later. Knowledge in baseball was fluid as ever. Even Alex Antho
poulos, the Blue Jays' general manager, admitted that Toronto no longer treated pitchers of Noah Syndergaard's, Aaron Sanchez's, and Justin Nicolino's ilk with strict inning limits. Anthopoulos could have pointed to their clean arms—especially Syndergaard blasting 100-mph fastballs for the Mets as a World Series starter—as evidence that restrictions did work. He didn't. It would have been self-serving and intellectually dishonest.

“Over the last four or five years, there's more Tommy Johns, even from some guys who have been protected,” Anthopoulos said. “They still got hurt. They still broke down. We owed it to ourselves to reevaluate things.”

It's true everywhere, even on the cutting edge, where the rest of baseball must place itself sooner than later. If major league teams refuse to stop spending well over a billion dollars on free agent arms—with Price's $217 million deal and the Arizona Diamondbacks lavishing Zack Greinke with $206.5 million, teams guaranteed pitchers nearly $1.5 billion in the winter of 2015—perhaps it would behoove them to prioritize learning about what they don't know. Inside Major League Baseball's offices, this comprises two efforts. The first concerns kids. Over the next five years, MLB plans on extending its tentacles deep into baseball's youth network, not just to endear itself to a fading fan base but to strengthen control of its feeder system. By targeting Perfect Game—baseball could buy it out, force changes, or crush it—MLB would send a strong message to the youth baseball–industrial complex: join in the effort or go away. The blowback will be significant, not just from Perfect Game but from the year-round baseball racket. Equipment sales exceed $500 million annually. Year-round facilities exist to serve a game that now has a twelve-month season. The fear of a slain cash cow would set loose an army of lobbyists from across the industry on MLB. Ultimately, the power resides on Park Avenue.

And that's where part two factors in: Nobody will know whether the Inverted W really is sinister or how the ARPwave
may actually heal UCL tears without scientific research, a world into which MLB has already dipped its toes without drowning. Baseball needs to dive in headlong. Considering the monetary cost of arm injuries—and the prospect of even more, at salaries climbing above $34 million per year, as the sport fills with players from the Perfect Game generation—baseball should look at this as a crucial investment in itself and its health rather than a loss leader.

MLB's epidemiologists need access to more data, from baseline and follow-up testing to nutritional profiles and sleep patterns. Doctors, trainers, managers, and coaches must agree that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the arm and shift toward individualized programs, the kind Trevor Bauer espouses. Every body is different. Every arm is different. The idea of standardized throwing protocols is antiquated and nevertheless convention across the game. An expanded health staff—more athletic trainers, more strength coaches, more massage therapists—would help craft plans to address weaknesses while respecting limitations. Medical analyses would feed the HITS database with even more information for the researchers trying to snuff out injuries.