The writer is the Editor-in-Chief of Mechanical Engineering magazine and a die-hard baseball fan.
by John G. Falcioni
Major league baseball is big business and its major assets, the star players, are well compensated. But these assets also represent the greatest liability for team owners and Major League Baseball executives.
Even though coaches emphasize the concept of team, the game is made up of individuals who are prized for their ability to either hit a baseball coming at them from 60 feet 6 inches away, or to deliver the ball to the batter in a manner so elusive that the batter will be unable to hit it consistently.
It stands to reason that team owners would make every effort to protect this investment and manage the risk to these prized assets. It would be unfair to say categorically that they don’t, but a growing number of baseball executives believe that more can be done in the form of preventive training.
Celebrated major-league pitching coach Rick Peterson is a loud voice in this arena (read Falcioni’s editorial: Newton, Biomechanics, and Baseball). He preaches the use of biomechanical methods to help pitchers throw better, keep healthy, and thus play longer. Doing so, he argues, enables a longer return on the investment club owners make in their players.
Starting in the late 1980s, when he was a coach in the Chicago White Sox organization in Birmingham, Ala., Peterson realized the benefits of exploring the biomechanics of pitching and began working closely with the American Sports Medicine Institute, also in Birmingham.
Peterson said that working with ASMI was akin to “getting a postgraduate degree in pitching.” At ASMI, Peterson met James Andrews, a surgeon who has long been highly respected for his work with baseball players and other athletes, and Glenn S. Fleisig, a mechanical engineer who focuses on biomechanics. In them he met two kindred spirits who believe in a holistic approach to the process of pitching a baseball—arguably one of the most unnatural things the human body can do.
Since the early 1990s, Peterson has taken professional baseball pitchers to ASMI for an analysis of their pitching motion and a personalized evaluation.
Well known pitchers on top of their games have undergone the ASMI motion analysis, as have those who are underachieving. This process works by recording a “baseline of excellence” for those pitchers who are doing well and by which they can be judged against during times in their careers when they exhibit flaws in their delivery. These baselines are also used to compare and evaluate other pitchers who are struggling with their motion and effectiveness. The data is also analyzed for stresses and strains on the body.
According to Fleisig—who holds undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University, respectively, and a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama at Birmingham—the biomechanical sessions at ASMI go something like this: The pitcher is outfitted with reflective markers up and down the body and in different joints. Once the sensors are attached, the pitcher throws a bullpen (or practice) session which is recorded by eight high-speed cameras that are electronically synchronized to take 240 pictures per second (eight times faster than normal video). These data is captured onto a computer and digitized to create a three-dimensional motion image of the pitcher. Peak performance normative ranges of the pitching motion are then determined.
“We look at the kinematics, which refers to motion, and the kinetics, which is the forces on the elbow and the shoulder that produce the motions,” Fleisig said.
From there, pitchers and their coaches are made aware of how to improve the efficiency of their deliveries in a way that will decrease stresses on the joints, reduce the probability of injury, and improve performance.
In many ways, the game of baseball is stuck between a breed of traditionalists who perceive that the science of the game begins and ends with their own instincts, and progressives who, like Peterson, believe that technology has to play a growing role in the game.
From 2003 until about halfway through the 2008 baseball season, Peterson served as the pitching coach of the New York Mets baseball club. But when then-manager Willie Randolph was fired, most of his staff, including Peterson, went with him. Peterson joined the Mets with a résumé filled with success stories from his days as the pitching coach of the Oakland Athletics. There, under his tutelage, that team’s pitching staff had recorded impressively low earned run averages—a significant measure of a baseball pitcher’s effectiveness.
The Athletics were run by general manager Billy Beane, who represents a new breed of GMs. Beane is generally credited with being among the first in the game to use statistics and probabilities as a major factor in signing ball players—a highly nontraditional approach in a game that greatly celebrates its tradition. Beane also was a proponent of Peterson’s emphasis on biomechanics and his overall unique approach to pitching. Peterson takes a holistic approach that includes biomechanics but also taps into his understanding of psychology and yoga. He was a psychology major as an undergraduate and later trained under some of yoga’s highest gurus.
Based on his extensive work with ASMI throughout more than 20 years, Peterson, as he awaits another opportunity to coach in the major leagues, has teamed with former Mets general manager and Baltimore Orioles vice president of baseball operations, Jim Duquette, in a venture called 3P Sports, aimed at using biomechanical techniques to minimize the health risks of youngsters involved in youth-based, scholastic, and other organized baseball programs.
“It’s ridiculous that 18-year-olds are coming in for surgery based on chronic injuries,” Fleisig said. Problems arise from “too much pitching and poor mechanics.” Fleisig is a pitching safety consultant for Little League International and a member of the USA Baseball Medical and Safety Advisory Committee (USA Baseball is the governing body for all amateur baseball in the United States). The emphasis at ASMI is on fixing the mechanics of a pitcher, he added, on strength training, and on avoiding overuse—ensuring sufficient rest between pitching sessions.
“The analysis part is the diagnosis,” Peterson said. “The program we develop as a result of the diagnosis is the prescription.” Some people in the game just “don’t get this,” he continued.
Peterson and Fleisig agree that it is important to educate parents, coaches, and players on the right way to train youngsters. Youth and scholastic baseball pitchers can be shown that there are “most efficient motions that will reduce the force and increase the velocity on the arms” of young players, Fleisig said, “you get two for the price of one.” The same goes for professional pitchers.
This isn’t the first time in the game of baseball when the past clashes with the future, nor will it be the last time. Take for example the disagreement over whether instant replay should be used to determine the outcome of controversial umpire calls. The summer-long soap opera of baseball, which begins in April and ends late into October, is unique and engaging. It is composed of conflicting parts physical movement and athletic feats, with unscientific managerial decisions, all monitored by the precision of statistical matrices that track winners, losers, and performances.
Fleisig and Peterson believe that to succeed, today’s coaches will have to accept the ways of engineering and science. It’s clear that the baseball dinosaurs will have to adapt and engage engineering, or risk extinction.
For more information on ASMI (www.asmi.org), and areas of interest related to this article, click on the following links: Summaries about ASMI biomechanics studies (www.asmi.org/asmiweb/research/baseball.htm); on how to become a biomechanics student at ASMI (www.asmi.org/asmiweb/education/stuResearch.htm). For online discussions: http://asmiforum.proboards21.com/.
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