Strength in Numbers #131
We strengthened our presence on X, which comes with controversy, as 280 character limits don’t go well with educating those who do not see the ArmCare.com platform and education as the apex technology and approach to attacking baseball’s throwing arm injury problems.
No other time in the game’s history has a solution to safer velocity gains and mechanical changes been so apparent. How many more articles headlined referencing fatigue do we have to read that don’t reference the importance of arm strength in baseball players?
Many people like text wars on X, but we sent out a call to action against Eugene Bleecker, owner and operator of 108 Performance.
If you don’t know Eugene, he is one of the brightest and best movement specialists in the world, correcting the pitching delivery and the swing for 1000s of athletes throughout his career with great success.
He is also wildly passionate and speaks his mind, which is a quality I admire, and he inspired my viewpoints on why strength matters most and the hierarchy of decision-making for Strength and Coordination. Decision Tree—leaving players who do not display pain or poor performance alone.
To summarize a company-defining post on X, we asked, “Change our minds, strength matters most to preventing injuries, and mechanics are most effective to performance, but not injury prevention.”
“Change our minds, strength matters most to preventing injuries, and mechanics are most effective to performance, but not injury prevention.”
Eugene caught this, and as one of the leaders in the mechanic’s space in alleviating pain, he wasn’t letting that fly and could argue his point well for a lifetime.
Instead of dedicating 3 hours a day to go back and forth with Eugene, we decided to hash out our viewpoints in person in front of 300+ people in a large ballroom at the American Baseball Coaches Association Convention and have more than 1700 people listening in on Instagram live including Tom House, the greatest living pitching performance specialist of all-time.
Eugene and 108 Performance represent the Goliaths. They are at the top of the game regarding movement-based principles. ArmCare are the outlaws and the underdogs, and you must stay tuned for the following parts of this series as we go deep into the aftermath.
Above is the post from Eugene that put the wheels in motion for the greatest debate in ABCA history – what does matter most? Strength vs Mechanics to manage the injury epidemic experienced at every level in the sport.
You may still be on the fence after reading the threads and building up the energy around the debate.
I’m sure you have read many articles and have been sold on “bad mechanics” as the cause of the Tommy John epidemic, but can you accurately define what “good mechanics” are in preventing Tommy John surgery?
Our first order of business is to illustrate that “good” and “bad” mechanics don’t exist, especially if the athlete is performing well and pain-free.
OUR SUBJECTIVE OPINION OF GOOD VS. BAD MECHANICS IS FLAWED
We put out three consecutive videos and polls on Linkedin, where I am most vocal and active. We asked the audience what pitcher they believed to have better mechanics.
We didn’t define injury-proof or even performance; oddly, these comparisons showed that we don’t know what we don’t know.
We asked questions in a manner that allowed freedom of choice, and man, we were not surprised by the results.
OHTANI VS. WEAVER
Interestingly, the respondents and even attendees of the tech expo believed that Shohei Ohtani was the clear winner.
I will not lie; he looks strong and is a super athlete packed with power.
He has a direct line to the plate, holds his hinge, keeps his ground forces prolonged with his heel to the ground, and separates a lot at foot contact. He does not have an inverted W at a weight-bearing foot flat, has hip mobility to lock in his pelvis, forward flexes toward home plate, and doesn’t veer off.
BUT he cannot stay healthy!
Now look at Weaver. He doesn’t look as strong, probably doesn’t jump 38 inches in the air, steps into the other dugout and throws in the opposite direction, major crossfire, long arm stroke, elbow not getting to 90 degrees in flexion at weight-bearing foot flat, lots of arm leg, and doesn’t have the thunder of Ohtani.
BUT he pitched for 12 seasons with 7 – 30+ starts.
Ohtani, who both Jordan and I worked with at various stages in his career while we were with the Angels, may never reach 30 starts in a season, especially after two TJ surgeries already and almost a billion dollars invested in him with contract insurance.
THE WINNER – Jered Weaver
With Ohtani consistently testing his arm strength and ironing out an individualized arm care and workload process, his level of pitching production could significantly improve.
What he has done is nothing to be understated, but his ability to long 200 innings in a season on the mound is overstated, and I am not confident we will see him pitch a perfect game for risk of losing him for future years.
Three elbow surgeries are not something to mess around with, let alone a secondary surgery.
O’DAY VS. HADER
This one is tough, just like before.
One guy throws from a few feet off the ground, has a short stride length, opens his chest before foot contact, leads with his elbow, is in the inverted W position for a while in the delivery, and hyper-angulates his arm with an early elbow hike (arm is way behind him, raised above his shoulder line in internal rotation).
The other guy throws overhead, has a long stride, powerful propulsion, closed shoulder at foot contact, and the flexibility many envy.
Now, when you compare the two, O’Day has never missed a season due to an arm injury.
Neither has Hader (and hopefully never will), BUT when you look at the WAR impact at this time, O’Day played 15 seasons and has a WAR rating of 17.4, and Hader is only at 11.7, but his career is building.
In a nutshell, this sidearmer has provided more value to wins despite his funky delivery. The way the game works is that sidearmers tend to develop when they cannot achieve velocity overhead, but what about shoulder anatomy, the joint structure, your acromial angle, and the bony surface that sits over the shoulder joint?
You could have an athlete with an acromion that is angled down, leading to pinching of the rotator cuff fibers. You may cue that athlete to raise their arm, but they can’t, so they lean and have elbow problems.
You may alter their anatomical path of least resistance. I work with many athletes who have shoulder and elbow problems only to find they have a type 2 or type 3 acromion (hooked acromion) that offers limited space to raise the arm.
The combination of a weaker arm trying to do something it shouldn’t and listening to years of “get your arm up, get to the t-position, etc.” have caused significant damage to athletes’ careers.
THE WINNER – Darren O’Day
Josh Hader has a long career, but Darren is currently the better reliever.
Darren is physically larger and stronger, but in both instances, whether your pitchers are throwing over the top or from down below, if you think they have “bad mechanics” and want to change them, the absence of pain is a Band-Aid.
A weak arm is a weak arm that needs to be strengthened to handle the constant high-speed loading associated with pitching.
Lastly, before you try to change a sidearmer who is pain-free and performing well to throw over the top, ask the question,
“How can I optimize this athlete’s delivery given his motor preferences, physical joint structure, mind, and soul that have been hardwired together for all these years?”
Our answer is that the Certified Pitching Biomechanist Course will teach you with our Strength and Coordination Decision Tree.
JOHNSON VS. MADDUX
Of all the comparisons, this one was personally my favorite.
The long-held belief is that Greg Maddux has the best mechanics of all time and that he threw underhanded essentially (equivalent of today’s high school pitcher hitting 86-88mph).
Tom House clarified that for most of his career, Greg could bring it into the mid-90s as the old radar guns captured the velocity at home plate and could up to 8 mph off if not calibrated each game.
Randy is the tallest of the “tall and fall” pitchers, hardly any of those anymore in the game, and throws the ball like it’s on a carousel, arm straight across his chest essentially, everything on the same plane with a relatively short stride length to body height.
In your mind, there’s no way he’s beating Maddux – I mean, how could he? There are more articles on Greg Maddux’s delivery than you can imagine.
Almost all articles reference his mechanics as the Holy Grail, but see the picture below.
His elbow is dropped at foot contact, and he has a steep elbow climb to get his arm in position at layback during the turn – he’s not your 90-90-90 guy at weight-bearing foot flat (90 degrees shoulder abduction, 90 degrees elbow flexion, 90 degrees external rotation).
In our present day, most of us would correct him with the “elbow up” cue; therefore, we would never know Greg Maddux like we do today.
Greg Maddux, heralded as the greatest delivery of all-time, the model of pitching efficiency and longevity pitched with a severely dropped elbow at foot contact and an extreme elbow climb upward in getting into layback of the throwing arm. In today’s game, his throwing arm position would be corrected, and he wouldn’t be Greg Maddux.
Like Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson never missed a season in his career and is second of all-time in strikeouts, while Greg Maddux is facing being ousted from the top 10 this season by Max Scherzer, a pitcher who will never see triple digits in complete games over his career.
Starters are dying, and “Don’t believe your lying eyes,” which is a song written for the state of where we are at with our constructs of “good” and “bad” mechanics.
If you are more convinced that you should be monitoring strength as mechanics do not tell the most accurate story of injury prevention and even high performance, can I ask you a couple of questions?
What are your players’ ArmScores heading into the preseason?
And for those who have undergone rehabilitation this offseason and have been built up to pitch in competition this year, have you made their arm stronger than ever and that all imbalances are corrected before their first pitch?
There’s no debate that missed strength observations are the leading cause of injury in baseball and that sitting on the fence is to blame – it’s now your turn to change minds and change the game.
Remember, Strength Matters Most!
