Felix Hernandez

#34 / Pitcher / Seattle Mariners

Height: 6-3

Weight: 230

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Apr 08, 1986

Ah, the King. I remember drafting him into my minor league system back in 2004, then watching him put up stats like this. Check his AAA line - he struck out 100 batters in 88 innings and allowed just 3 home runs. At age 19. Notoriously aggressive with prospects, the Mariners didn't waste time promoting him through as many levels as possible until just the big show remained. Still, Felix was very young and they knew what a prodigy they had on their hands - even though Bavasi was an idiot, he wasn't stupid. He knew that Felix had a chance to be one of the best pitchers in the league and to screw it up by overloading his arm would cause a major backlash by the fans.

Bavasi limited Felix's innings to 140 IP in 2005, but let him jump up to 190 IP the next year. He also limited the use of Felix's slider - restricting it to just 3.3% of pitched balls in 2005 and 7.0% in 2006. Take a look how much it jumped up in 2007 (Source: Fangraphs):

When they let him throw it, he went nuts - and for good reason; it's a hell of a pitch. I find it interesting that he cut down on the use of the slider in 2008 and threw his fastball significantly more - it's probably because he fell in love with it in 2007 but decided to start mixing it up with his plus-plus fastball and average changeup rather than relying on his plus slider. Felix is still just 22 years old, which is extremely hard to believe given how much service time he's put in and how effective he is. He shows a real tenacity on the mound, refusing to come out of games even with a broken leg, and his fastball velocity routinely tops the charts of the Fangraphs average fastball velocity chart.

Readers will note a small drop in velocity in 2008 - I don't think there's anything to it, at least injury-wise. His changeup velocity is higher, so velocity is not down across the board. I would imagine that he's throwing his two-seam fastball more often, which would correlate well with the total increase of fastballs, and that he's playing around with changing the speed of his slider (like Johan Santana does).

Read on to delve farther into King Felix's stats, his PITCHf/x player card analysis, and a preview of Part Two, including a great clip of his devastating two-seam fastball...

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Carl Pavano

#0 / Pitcher / Cleveland Indians

Height: 6-5

Weight: 240

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Jan 08, 1976

Let's get a few things out of the way:

• That picture is hilarious.
• Carl Pavano was hurt a lot.
• Pavano has serious questions about his commitment to strength and conditioning.
• I'm an Indians fan.

Now that we have those points out of the way, we can start to analyze Pavano's mechanics. The only reference to his mechanics on the Internet was Mike Pagliarulo's article on Dugout Central. (Note how BJ Ryan tops the list.) Mike mentioned that Pavano has problems "leaking the front side" and "balance position over the rubber." What? He doesn't go into much detail, but he does talk about "leaking the front side" - it is apparently when the front side opens too early and causes the pitching shoulder and arm to "speed up," making him a big injury risk. I actually agree with this quite a bit, and I think it helps to explain the frequent shoulder injuries that Rich Harden experiences. It's something I'll track and research a bit more. (This will probably fall under the "Arm Action" phase of my analysis.)

However, I spot other problems in Pavano's delivery that make him at-risk for injury. Take a look at this unrelated image from NoMaas:

Alright, that was uncalled for. Let's actually do some work...

Continue reading this post »

SB Nation poster NoNameOnCard is a frequent contributor to this site and has published his own blog about biomechanical research as it pertains to baseball - TexasLeaguers.com. For those who think that I go on at length about biomechanical and anatomical concepts, you should check out his stuff!

He has an excellent article up right now that discusses the internal rotation of the shoulder and how it contributes to valgus stress on the elbow (the primary cause of UCL rupture). Dr. Marshall believes that UCL rupture occurs due to "forearm bounce," or when the pitching arm goes from zero acceleration to maximum acceleration with the forearm being "laid back" in a position of shoulder external rotation. An example of external shoulder rotation can be seen below:

As a slight digression, Paul Nyman (SETPRO) believes that shoulder external rotation is the cause of high pitched ball velocities. I disagree. It is the effect of high pitched ball velocities.

NoNameOnCard believes that by extending the pitching arm before internal rotation takes place that the triceps can maximally project the baseball towards home plate with higher velocities and reduce the risk of UCL-related injuries.

I'm not sure I agree. I emailed NoNameOnCard this blurb in hopes of stirring up some discussion:

I love the blog so far. However, I don't think that I draw the same conclusions that you do about internal rotation. Dr. Marshall's students experience significantly higher degrees of internal rotation about the shoulder than "elite" pitchers from ASMI, as documented in this study. This would indicate that Dr. Marshall's pitchers should be at much higher risk for UCL injuries than traditional pitchers. Do you think that Dr. Marshall's pitchers use of their triceps via pronation helps to protect against valgus stress?
 
As for your comments about the anterior deltoid needing to flex to maintain the full length of the forearm behind the shoulder to avoid "forearm bounce" (vertical pitching forearm laying back in external rotation), you are correct - their pitchers do not do this. However, Dr. Marshall does want them to do so. Bill Peterson of RPM Pitching has indicated that his son Patrick had serious injuries in the anterior portion of his shoulder - particularly the deltoid area - after years of training with Dr. Marshall. To me, using the anterior deltoid in this manner causes a position of hyperabduction and poses a serious risk of injury. It takes a genetically gifted individual to accelerate a baseball at meaningful velocities using this technique, and Patrick was one of the few that could. It directly contributed to anterior shoulder injury.
 
The flaw of "looping" that Dr. Marshall talks about (the bending of the pitching elbow) is not a flaw at all, IMO.

I need to review the videos of Dr. Marshall's students, because while it is true that the internal rotation of their shoulders is significantly higher than ASMI's "elite" group of pitchers, the lack of UCL-related injuries to pitchers in his group could be related to an extended pitching arm before internal rotation, if NoNameOnCard's theories are correct.

I've emailed Dr. Marshall about this issue as well, and I'll start pulling video to see what I can conclude.

I promise that less verbose articles will be published in the future and more pitcher analyses will go up. I'm just knee-deep in tons of research that I want to understand a bit better before I continue. Thanks for your understanding.

Scapula Stuff

In "Differences in Scapular Upward Rotation Between Baseball Pitchers and Position Players" (Laudner et. al. - link), it is confirmed that pitchers have significantly less scapular upward rotation than position players at 60 and 90 degrees of humeral elevation.

Your arms at rest are 0 degrees. Raising them parallel with your shoulders straight in front of you is 90 degrees.

At 120 degrees (hyperabduction), it is not statistically significant, but the trend does seem to hold water.

This is important because insufficient scapular upward rotation has been empirically linked with several shoulder disorders.

The question now is: Why does this happen?

In "The Role of the Scapula in Rehabilitation of Shoulder Injuries" (Voight, Thomson - link), Voight et. al. conclude that while "rotator cuff strengthening has been an obvious treatment for various pathologies," the scapula is the base of the rotator cuff and therefore the muscles that control it should be strengthened as well. Weakeness causes altered biomechanics of the glenohumeral joint, possibly leading to unnecessary stresses on the rotator cuff (particularly the subscapularis) and the anterior capsule.

Still, we have no real link between why scapular upwards rotation is decreased in healthy professional pitchers compared to position players of the same organization. Nevertheless, we can regain some of this upwards rotation by performing various types of PNF stretching, D2 patterns with SPRI bands, tons of different types of rows (Eric Cressey of Cressey Performance loves these exercises for pitchers), and serratus anterior punches with SPRI bands.

Altered push-ups with chains or blast straps would be a great way to work similar muscles, especially if you focused on retracting the scapula at the top of the exercise.

Schooling

After careful consideration, I have decided to go back to school and finish my undergraduate coursework. Previous to dropping out of a full-tuition scholarship at a quality private university in the Midwest (very smart, I know), I was studying Economics and Entrepreneurship - two fields of study that I still enjoy reading about today. However, since my plan in life is to work around baseball (and sports medicine/training overall), I'll be taking some general coursework at the local junior college to get my prerequisites out of the way (sadly enough I have 90+ semester credits finished but nearly none in the hard sciences) before applying for admission to a local college to study Exercise Science. After graduation, I will take the ATC and CSCS exams for certification and attend graduate school to earn a Master's degree in Kinesiology. Though I can't really see myself attaining a Ph. D., I suppose it is entirely possible that I will continue on.

Biomechanics Lab

I'm happy to report that the high-speed camera works wonderfully - if there's enough light. I took it to the batting cage to mess around with, and unfortunately there's not much to share due to the poor lighting conditions. However, I managed to take some great footage of Matrix-style choreographed fights at work last night, and that turned out wonderfully.

Dr. Glenn Fleisig of ASMI (hazel's hero, if I recall correctly) was good enough to speak with me on the phone about planning out a biomechanics lab in the Pacific Northwest. He was happy to hear that I planned to study Exercise Science and that I was interested in opening up a biomechanics lab up here to do similar studies on pitchers and hitters. He said that he had a few people interested around the country in opening up "satellite" offices and that he would put me in touch with said people in about a month, after the Injuries in Baseball Conference in Houston.

Dr. Fleisig invited me to come down to Birmingham for a few days to understand the general layout of the facility and to help me get an idea of the cost and planning it would require to build such a lab myself. I look forward to visiting him sometime in 2009 to make this happen (and to think I have yet to visit Bill Peterson of RPM Pitching in Colorado).

The goal of Driveline Mechanics was to establish a baseline of what I thought I knew and see if it panned out, and it turns out that many of you are interested in similar pursuits! There exists a significant body of work out there that I am delving into that suggests that scapular loading below the acromial line can be very beneficial, and as such I am thinking about changing my mind on this very subject (though I never really cared about people passively "loading the scapula," only people who forcibly took it behind the acromial line and especially in a hyperabducted state). I hope that you never stop questioning both what I write and what you read, because the truth is that none of us have all the answers. One day, we may very well have them - but it does us no good to simply know what we should do; we must figure out how to relate them to the youth baseball players who will grow up to be professional pitchers so they can pitch with less injury concerns.

A few people have emailed me about the broken Coaching link in the Pages section in the left sidebar. I have since fixed that problem, but both the Pitching and the Coaching pages should be updated with new and additional information that I've researched over the past year. For now, I think my readers are happy that I'm updating the blog with some regularity and I promise to get around to updating the pages in the near future!

As for coaching, readers have emailed me asking about my location and my availability to analyze hitting/pitching clips for a fee, so I will talk about this on the front page. The intention of this site (Driveline Mechanics) was not to tout my coaching services or analyst skills, but to publish a blog that analyzes MLB players and prospects from a different point of view - combining the performance analysis of sabermetrics with a scouting perspective as well to form player profiles. Still, this blog has attracted a fair amount of interest with regard to coaching services, and as such, I have begun work on a dedicated coaching site. This site will have free content with drills and strength and conditioning tips as well as a forum to post to, and it will have more information about my coaching availability.

Much of my background comes from a strength and conditioning background, which is how I got involved in safe and effective pitching mechanics (suffering elbow and shoulder pain myself certainly accelerated this journey). Most of what I have studied with regard to general biomechanics, strength and conditioning, and nutrition are not suitable for publication on this blog, but would be very useful for amateurs and professionals alike who are looking to improve their skills and sport-specific performance. These topics will be covered on my new coaching site.

A major coaching/analyst goal of mine in 2009 includes finding a batting cage facility to partner with to setup a complex biomechanical lab (with help from Dr. Fleisig's instructions) in Seattle, WA. It will include reports similar to what ASMI provides with traditional, high-speed, and infrared imagery available to hitters and pitchers at any level. This prospect of developing the first full-featured biomechanical lab to analyze baseball players in the Pacific Northwest is very exciting to me, and I hope to be able to share these facilities at reasonable costs with others in the area.

As always, if you have questions, please feel free to email me directly - kyle@drivelinemechanics.com, or post comments. I love feedback of all types, and I know the other authors appreciate it as well.