Ubaldo Jimenez, Lost Velocity, and the Need for Dedicated Video Review
My post on Ubaldo Jimenez’s lost 96 MPH fastball went up today over at The Hardball Times. In it, I talked about the need for dedicated video review by an analyst in the Player Development department of every MLB club. I strongly believe MLB teams should set up two high-speed video cameras that take film from behind home plate and from the side of the pitchers mound; if they did this, they could capture a significant amount of kinematic data that would be useful for pitching mechanics analysis, injury review, and player development.
It really shocks me that this hasn’t happened yet.
At any rate, check out the post if you haven’t yet, as well as new high-speed videos over at our YouTube channel. And follow us on Twitter – @drivelinebases!
Weighted Baseballs, Wrist Weights, Elbow Injuries – Q&A Video (May 1st, 2012)
Got a bunch of questions on Twitter (@drivelinebases) and via email – wanted to answer them in a 10 minute video. Check out some information on weighted baseballs, wrist weights, and elbow injuries in our new Q&A video!
Michael Pineda, SLAP Tears, Forcing a Change-Up, and Pitching Mechanics
Posted by Kyle in Injuries, Mechanics, Motion Analysis on April 30, 2012
As most of you know by now, Michael Pineda (RHP, NYY) is out for the season due to a shoulder injury. Pineda reportedly suffered an anterior labrum tear and his velocity was significantly diminished in Spring Training for the Yankees. GM Brian Cashman reportedly subjected the young hurler to an MRI before agreeing to complete the trade that sent Jesus Montero and Hector Noesi to Seattle, but saw nothing negative on the MRI.
Allegedly, the second MRI done to diagnose the labrum tear (better known as a “SLAP” – superior labral tear from anterior to posterior) showed significantly increased structural damage in the shoulder when compared to the first MRI.
Both Yankees’ and Mariners’ fans want to know: What happened here?
Forcing a Change-Up: Mechanical Problems
All anyone could talk about from 2011 to 2012 was the “fact” that Pineda needed to develop a change-up, because… well, you know. You just need to have one of those to be succeessful, and Pineda’s change-up sucked. You gotta have one of those to get lefties out.
Except… that’s not true. Pineda’s L/R splits were not completely out of line with the league average, and in fact may have been better than most RHP. (source: Fangraphs)
There is no law that states that starting pitchers must have three pitches to succeed. The number of pitchers out there that can reliably command and control three above-average pitches are all superstars. Most are lucky to command two pitches that are above-average with regards to “stuff,” and I don’t think anyone would argue that Pineda’s fastball and slider were below-average.
So what’s the big deal? How could Pineda’s shoulder injuries be related to developing a change-up? Well, as I’ve stated before, forcing someone to develop a better change-up often kills a pitcher’s fastball velocity. I said it on the Pro Ball NW podcast about training, and I said it in a previous article about teaching youth pitchers how to throw a change-up.
Paul Nyman made this observation many years ago, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. Youth pitchers who rely on a changeup and throw it often in their bullpen sessions will often change their throwing mechanics to get better sink and velocity separation off their fastball. As a result, their pitching mechanics become highly linear and their arm speed decreases due to poor use of rotational force, and this loss of velocity creeps into all of their pitches, including their fastball.
Repeatable mechanics play a role when it comes to reducing shoulder/elbow injuries, so it could very well have been the constant forcing of the change-up that helped Pineda along the path to shoulder surgery – to say nothing of the fact that sinkerballers tend to have shoulder issues in the first place!
Much of this could have been detected if only the Yankees and/or Mariners had an on-field system that analyzed the biomechanics of a pitcher in real-time to see if pitchers appreciably changed how they threw their pitches after making tweaks to their deliveries. Even multiple high-speed cameras installed with constant video review would have been helpful. This type of system would be inexpensive to develop (we have one in our Seattle facility) and could produce a huge edge for any MLB team willing to deploy it. (I’ve been beating this drum for some time now, and while I’ve had some interest from pro teams, there’s a general lack of motivation on this particular subject – why this is, I can’t figure out.)
Damaged Goods? Previous Shoulder Issues?
Pineda’s effectiveness went down as 2011 wore on, and while his velocity ticked down a bit, no one was really worried about his health except for the somewhat-large workload he accumulated as a rookie. (For the record, I don’t think it was unreasonably large at all.) Many are wondering if Pineda was “damaged goods” when he was sent over to the Yankees, but if this had been true, shouldn’t the Yankees have seen something on the initial MRI they did?
The problem is that people view an MRI as a diagnostic panacea, when it’s barely a baseline tool for analysis. When you consider the torque about the shoulder that’s required to throw a baseball 90+ MPH and how often it’s done, there’s no way you wouldn’t expect massive structural changes in the connective tissue in the glenohumeral and acromioclavicular joints – and this is exactly what you see. Consider that MRIs of the shoulder in asymptomatic (completely healthy) pitchers are really screwed up (source 1, source 2), and you’ll begin to understand that the initial MRI is more of a formality than anything else. Unless the Yankees had seen a complete tearing of the labrum off the bone, they wouldn’t fail Pineda based on a wonky MRI.
The Lowdown on the Situation
As with most things injury-related, this is a highly complex and multivariate problem. You can’t just force a pitcher to learn a pitch that was previously pretty bad without expecting a lot of secondary and tertiary changes. It’s not as simple as developing a change-up (one of the hardest pitches to master) and leaving everything else the same. Athletes who struggle with throwing a particular type of pitch will change their pitching mechanics to accommodate the new pitch, and these changes will creep into their other pitches. Occasionally, this leads to great results – especially if you’re re-learning how to throw a fastball harder – but usually it leads to velocity-killing issues and/or and increased risk of injuries in the pitching arm.
MRIs aren’t perfect; they’re diagnostic tools. As I said above on my Twitter feed (@drivelinebases), you get a basic diagnostic with the MRI, pain levels, and crappy velocities – you can only confirm the extent of the damage if you insert an arthroscope.
The Yankees didn’t act negligently when it came to acquiring Michael Pineda. They may have acted negligently when it came to developing him.
Summer Training, Spring News, and Crazy Coaches’ Corner
The summer season is nearly upon us, where high school seasons will be falling by the wayside and school will be out, allowing for more time to train. This summer will be a fun one, as we’ll have a bunch of our college guys back:
- University of Washington commit Jack Scheideman (6’1″ 240 lb., KingCo 4A best shot put 57′ 8″, best discus 152′ 10.65″, #3 shot put and #19 discus in WA state)
- UC Davis commit/transfer Joe Marsh (6’3″ 195 lb. RHP; FB 84-85, plus-plus sinker, good slider, graduate of Top 25 program Campolindo HS [California])
- Whitman College freshman Eli Mathieu (6’1′ 190 lb. RHP/3b; FB 83-84, plus curveball, plus sinker)
- Yakima Valley (JC) freshman Reid Martinez (6’0″ 180 lb. CF, batting .320+ in the NWAACC)
- University of San Francisco freshman Tim Moore (5’9″ 160 lb. Rugby wing, or whatever it’s called)
We’ll also have our great group of high school guys, led by long-time clients Alex Mason (P/RF, 13 years old, Shorecrest ’16), Ted Weber (SS/2b, 17 years old, Shorecrest ’13), and Travis Thompson (C, 15 years old, Highline ’15).
Spring News
As mentioned in the last entry about training to meet your goals, Jack Scheideman (University of Washington ’16) accepted the scholarship offer from UW and signed his letter of intent last week at Driveline Baseball / Driveline Athletics (never mind the goofy smile from yours truly):
Congrats, Jack!
To see the improvement he made from 2011 to 2012, all you need to do is go to his athletic.net profile. His season records are on the right, where his personal record (PR) in the shot went from 43′ 1.25″ to 57′ 8.00″ and went from 116′ 1.00 to 152′ 10.65 in the discus. I think this is a good time to mention that he never touched a discus in his off-season throwing program; he only threw the shot six times per week and lifted heavy. Proof that focusing on rotational power and mechanics easily transfers into similar movements! (I bet he could touch 85 MPH with his best fastball right now.)
Our comprehensive fastball velocity training book is scheduled to be released in 2012 – much of it has been written, but there’s a ton of work ahead of us. We need to have it edited for content, edited for grammar/spelling, edited for layout, cover design, tons of pictures shot, illustrations put to paper, 50+ videos shot for the complementary online content, forums set-up for customer support and community building, and so on, so forth. While you’ll be able to buy this book on Amazon.com or through our website (signed copies!), that doesn’t mean that’s all you get. Nope, when you buy the Fastball Training (working title) book, you get access to online content, a community to help you with programming/lifting advice (staffed by Driveline Baseball interns and yours truly), and new techniques and concepts that get added via the website. We won’t charge $200+ for this product; all the videos will be freely available. The book will very likely run under $50 with free shipping and will contain a complete training program that includes throwing mechanics drills, weight lifting programming, mobility/stability movements, prehab/rehab planning, and so much more. No product/service out there can compete with this offering, and we’re very excited to bring it to you in late 2012 (if all goes right).
If you want to be notified when the book comes out, you can either request a free copy of our weighted baseball training book (automatically adds you to our list), or you can sign up for our mailing list on the right side of the website – just put your email in and click subscribe. No spam, we never sell your address or anything like that. I haven’t even sent an email out on the list yet, to be honest!
Oh yeah, and if you didn’t see my article on Mark Appel (Stanford RHP) who’s projected to go in the top five of the 2012 MLB draft, go check it out at The Hardball Times: Scouting Mark Appel.
Mark Appel at Stride Foot Contact
Almost forgot: I did a podcast with Pro Ball NW about how training is the new market inefficiency in Major League Baseball. I thought it went well, even if I rambled a bit. Thanks to Jon Shields for having us on!
Crazy Coaches’ Corner
Now that our guys are in college and HS programs, I’ve been treated to a myriad of ridiculous stories from clueless coaches. Here’s a smattering of them:
- After four games in three days where one of our client’s teams was swept, the coaches decided to run suicides in the gym to death. After 9 of these, many of the kids went down with groin strains and were sidelined for at least a week. Smart decision, coach!
- After a kid quit on a client’s HS team, the coaches forced the whole team to run for 45 minutes. That’ll show ‘em!
- After a kid was having trouble throwing his three-finger change-up with decent run, the coach demanded that he throw a circle change-up or he would never pitch again, instead of working with his existing grip. He threw a bullpen this week with me and we spent four minutes working on a two-seam sinker that immediately produced ridiculous arm-side run. It’s not that hard, coach – just have an open mind!
Fun stuff – that’s why I got out of coaching teams. Too many coaches want to leave their impact on a player and take some credit for it. We’re very hands-off here at Driveline Baseball – we want to work with your personal style to get the best possible results. I was offered the head coaching position of the very best select team for a given age group (we’ll keep that anonymous) without an interview, because the coach loved my website and the results we get. I turned him down on the spot and didn’t even give him a chance to make me an offer, which I’m sure would have been considerable. Coaching teams isn’t what I do anymore – just players who want to get the absolute most out of their body and who want to bust their tails to make it happen.
Join us and our fun (but hard-working) client group for summer training – whether you’re a high school baseball athlete, college baseball athlete, or youth baseball athlete, we’ve got room for you. If you’re interested in personal one-on-one baseball lessons, let us know ASAP – now is the busy time, and when summer hits, we do mostly semi-private training without much room for private lessons. Just a fair warning!
Find Us on the Web!
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Kyle’s Hardball Times Articles- Chris Sale and his faulty elbow May 14, 2012
- Ubaldo Jimenez: A quick mechanics review May 7, 2012
- Ubaldo Jimenez and his missing 96 mph heater: A mechanical look May 4, 2012
- Scouting Mark Appel: the possible first pick overall in 2012 April 11, 2012
- The 39-year-old who won’t give up on his dream February 21, 2012
