Paul thanks for you comments in regard to my post on the
elbow, you are spot on with most of what you say. However I do wonder how you
can be so sure of the cause of Strasburg’s injury without being privileged to have actual
biomechanical analysis of his pitching. I do not mean TV footage, I mean true
3D biomechanical analysis. Without that detailed analysis you are merely
offering an “educated opinion”, not sure we need more of those. We need facts.
Incidentally Cooper and his mentor Sammy Ellis have been
preaching that “upside down” idea forever. I heard it continually and
constantly during the time I worked with them. In reality those pitchers were
not injured any more frequently than those whom they considered to have perfect
mechanics. From my point of view if we do a good job of preparing for the
demands of pitching with proper training then we minimize the risk of injury.
That is all we can do.
Pitching mechanics, just like any skill are highly individual. By the time a
pitcher is signed to a pro contract he has been pitching for 6 to 8 or more
years, substantially changing mechanics at that point is dicey. In my opinion
some of the injuries that I saw in my time in pro baseball were from pitching coaches trying to
change mechanics, especially arm action, rather than preparing them for the
demands of their technique through proper strengthening.
In addition you wrote: “And if things "just
happen", then why are we all wasting our time trying to thoughtfully
determine how to help athletes be their best?” Did not mean to imply that at all. The point of this is sometime
things just do happen, it can be an odd occurrence, one pitch. Nobody did or has
done more that we did with the White Sox minor league system to prevent
shoulder and elbow injuries than we did from 1988 through to 1996. Dr Andrews
saw what we did, hence the genesis of that comment. There was no logical
explanation for the elbow injuries we saw that one year. Sometimes you can do
everything to prevent injuries and they will still happen. I did not mean to
imply that prevention was/is futile, prevention is part of any sound
conditioning program.