High Heat Page 20

  “You ready to throw?” says Glenn Fleisig, tossing a hardball in my direction.

  Actually, I look better suited for a pickup game of softball in the park. I try to snag the ball nonchalantly, which is pretty much impossible with the softball glove I’ve brought along. It’s so old it’s been endorsed by Ted Williams—yes, the vintage model from Sears. I’m dressed in black spandex biker shorts, white ankle socks, and running sneakers. Also, I’m bare-chested—my red Washington Nationals T-shirt draped over a nearby chair, well out of camera range.

  As part of the search for the secrets behind high heat, I traveled to ASMI early in the summer of 2009. Located on the St. Vincent’s medical campus, a few blocks east of downtown Birmingham, Fleisig and his staff work in conjunction with Dr. James Andrews, the most famous orthopedic surgeon in sports. His office lies only a short walk away, where framed autographed jerseys from Drew Brees, Clinton Portis, and Carmelo Anthony line the hallways. But this afternoon, we’re in the cavernous motion laboratory, the domain of Fleisig and his research crew.

  I’m bare-chested because 21 reflective markers have been attached to the end points of the bones used for pitching. I sport three on my right pitching wrist and hand alone. Overhead, eight cameras on the ceiling are ready to record my every move at 240 frames per second. The high-speed cameras will be electronically linked, with the data flowing into a single laptop.

  Soon it becomes apparent to everybody watching that my catcher, Wesley Pennington, can put a lot more on the ball than I can. Only later do I learn that Wesley played intercollegiate ball. Right now he’s humming the ball back to me with attitude, as big leaguers say. His throws have such bite that I can feel my palm, barely protected by the Ted Williams softball mitt, already beginning to ache.

  “Tim looks ready enough,” Fleisig says. “Let’s go.”

  I’ve asked to undergo ASMI’s basic pitching evaluation. The cost ranges from $500 for youth players to $1,000 for elite players. Fleisig has agreed to do this for free. In some ways, I’m the comic relief for the afternoon.

  I step atop the portable mound and peer in at Wesley, 60 feet, 6 inches away. He’s wearing shin pads but no mask. He doesn’t seem concerned about my fastball catching him in the noggin. The plan calls for me to throw 10 pitches, as hard as I can, and then do three more, under the bright lights, for a video.

  Before my first delivery, I find myself flashing back to Steve Dalkowski. No wonder he couldn’t throw a strike during that infamous session at the Aberdeen Testing Grounds. A guy feels alone out here, with everybody ready to measure his every move.

  “I’m a little self-conscious,” I shout to Fleisig.

  “Self-conscious?”

  “You know, self-conscious, with everybody looking at you?”

  “The good ones aren’t,” Fleisig replies.

  I nod, taking that in.

  “Try not to move the hat,” Fleisig adds. “It could affect the readings.”

  I nod more slowly, remembering that I have four reflective sensors attached to the white ASMI ball cap I’m wearing.

  “All right,” Fleisig says. “We’re ready when you are.”

  My first delivery skips a foot or so in front of the plate and Wesley stabs it with a hint of disdain. The way he flips the ball back to me I can tell he isn’t impressed.

  My second attempt rides only slightly out of the strike zone and Wesley doesn’t have to scramble too much to catch it. My next one actually hits the glove with a resounding crack. I’m not doing too badly for the shape I’m in. I awoke at five this morning, flew to Atlanta, and drove two and a half hours down Interstate 20 to get here.

  Maybe it’s my mind wandering. Whatever the reason, I’m becoming wild in a hurry. In an effort to keep my throws accurate I decide to really concentrate on Wesley’s glove, to shorten up my delivery, make it more compact. Too late I realize that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. In compromising everything for accuracy, my velocity plummets. My windup becomes more ragged, really out of whack, and as a result I don’t even hit 50 miles per hour on the ASMI radar gun.

  Growing up in Rockland County, north of New York City, Glenn Fleisig loved to play baseball. In fact, his car sports a Mets license plate and a hardball atop the stick shift. His real aptitude, though, was for how the world moves and fits together. He attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying mechanical engineering. His plan was to find a job in that field and play ball on the weekends.

  He worked hard at MIT, on track to earn his degree in three and a half years. The only thing standing in his way was the senior project, a schoolwide requirement back in 1983. At first, Fleisig wasn’t sure what to do. But then he wandered into the biomechanics lab and a whole new world opened up to him.

  “They were applying the laws and mechanics of physics to human motion,” he says. “Basically, that’s biomechanics. Before then I’d never heard the word. Here they were not just building cars and bridges, but seeing how people move. I thought this was really cool. In the lab, they were breaking down the components of a golf swing. I thought that if I have to do some schoolwork, I might as well do it about a golf swing.”

  Fleisig became so enthralled with biomechanics that on the eve of graduation he asked his professor where he could find a job in this field. The prof only smiled. Biomechanics was so new in the mid-1980s that there were no real jobs to be had. One of the few places serious about such work was the U.S. Olympic training center in Colorado Springs. Fleisig was lucky enough to land an internship there in the summer of 1984, when the center was ramping up for the Summer Games in Los Angeles. Barely an afterthought much of the time, the Olympics moves front and center in the years the games are held. And that’s when Fleisig found himself studying the biomechanics of top American athletes about to compete on the world stage.

  But such heady times ended almost as soon as they began. Soon after the Olympics, Fleisig’s internship in Colorado Springs ended, and once again he was looking for a job. He heard about an up-and-coming orthopedic surgeon, Dr. James Andrews, and the two of them spoke over the phone.

  “I want to apply biomechanics to baseball,” Fleisig said.

  “That’s exactly what I want to do,” Dr. Andrews replied. “But I’m not ready yet.”

  Nobody else in the country was as enthusiastic about applying rules of physics to sports, really investigating how the basic motions we’ve done since childhood can be honed and improved to lessen injury and heighten performance. So, Fleisig began to pursue his master’s in mechanical engineering and got work building missile defense systems for a firm based in New Jersey. On Thanksgiving Day 1986, two and a half years after his conversation with Dr. Andrews, the phone rang at Fleisig’s parents’ house. After rising through the ranks, Dr. Andrews was ready to open his own practice, and he wanted Fleisig on board.

  “He asked, ‘You remember us? You still want to do this?’” Fleisig recalls. “Of course, I did. I couldn’t think of anything else in the world I more wanted to do.”

  From such impromptu beginnings, a sports biomechanical empire has flourished in the hills above Birmingham. Here, the doctors rely on the information discovered in Fleisig’s lab, as well as the data from a more grisly setting. Within easy walking distance of the motion laboratory and the doctors’ offices, down a narrow hallway, lies the metal vault, where the cadavers are kept cold.

  Instead of full torsos, ASMI requires joints—shoulders, elbows, and knees. Almost regardless of sport, these are the pivot points where things start to break down. To determine how well and how long a surgically repaired elbow can hold up, for example, the operation is performed on a cadaver joint and then put to the test. Drills and a vice are the tools of the trade found in this windowless room. On this day, two knee joints sit on a small table. Holes have been drilled into the side because Dr. Andrews and his staff are debating the best entry point for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) operations.

  “It’s the only way to determine what really wo
rks,” says Becky Bolt, a biomechanist at ASMI.

  Perhaps I’ve seen Young Frankenstein one too many times, but I can’t help asking her if it’s difficult locating such body parts for testing.

  “Most of them come from people in their 50s,” she replies. “We’d love to have younger ones, but they’re tough to procure.”

  Is it just my imagination or does Bolt keep flashing looks at my knees and elbows? Hopefully she has my chart for the evaluation. I’m older than I look. Honest.

  The next morning, Fleisig and his staff meet with me to analyze my pitching motion. To throw a ball with any velocity or command requires a series of movements, sometimes working in opposition to each other, to be adeptly performed in a set order. Fleisig calls these motions “the kinetic series,” a sequence composed of The Windup, The Pivot or Balance Point, The Stride, The Release, and The Follow-Through.

  “If any of these factors fall out of alignment, isn’t doing its job, then whatever energy has been built up quickly dissipates,” Fleisig says. “Picture that we’re out skating and Wes is on the end. We want to send him flying, really propel him. So, we join hands and if each of us puts some effort into it, that energy is passed down the line, with Wes being the beneficiary.”

  What the ASMI research director has described, of course, is “crack the whip,” the childhood game played on frozen ponds and roller rinks across the country.

  “But if everyone doesn’t give a little push,” Fleisig adds, “or worse yet, the chain is broken—we drop hands—then the energy isn’t transferred. No matter how hard Wes skates he cannot go as fast as the rest of us could propel him. The same process happens with throwing a baseball.”

  We’ve gathered around a large-screen television. Freeze-framed on it is an image of me—about to go into my windup. Thanks to video and computer analysis, every step of my motion has been broken down and compared to the steps of pitchers of all levels, from youth to the elite. The reflector sensors allow the data to be crunched into a biomechanical report.

  The first stage is The Windup. For the evaluation, I decided to go with a complete delivery. No going out of the stretch as pitchers do with a man on base. As I bring my left leg up, begin to turn at the waist, everything flows well enough. As I reach the point where I stop turning, in effect trying to turn my body into a human catapult, Fleisig pauses the video.

  Here I’ve reached The Pivot or Balance Point. After moving away from the plate, the pitcher gathers himself here before picking up speed and throwing toward the catcher. Even though I’m on one foot here, looking like a flamingo about to take flight, I’m pretty well balanced. Despite leaning back a shade, the staff agrees, so far I’m doing the job. Unfortunately, my kinetic chain is about to go headlong into the ditch.

  Soon comes The Stride, and mine is way too short. Instead of looking like Tom Seaver, who stepped toward home plate with such purpose that he routinely scuffed the knee of his back, drive leg, I look like I’m hopping, rather daintily, over a mud puddle. Until this point, I’ve been within “the normative range” throughout the evaluation. But now the data fades from black to red numbers, meaning I’m screwing up—bad.

  My stride should be slightly less than my height (69 inches). Instead, it’s a lackluster 55 percent of my height. In comparison, elite pitchers are in the 78 percent to 87 percent range. In addition, the position of my lead left foot isn’t right. Quality pitchers plant that foot directly in front of the pitching rubber, with the toes slightly to the side. Instead, I’ve come down too far to the side and my toes are toward the catcher. On top of it all, my elbow, as I cock the ball, is a bit low.

  “The energy that you gathered during The Windup is now being lost,” Fleisig says. “So much of throwing hard comes from the legs. You hear that all the time. What it means is that what you generate from the lower half of the body needs to be transferred to the arm and ultimately the ball. Here, that connection, the link, is lost. Any strength from the legs is gone. From now on, you’re trying to generate all your power just with your arm.”

  Wesley Pennington adds, “Pitching effectively is an elaborate system of pauses, stops and starts. If one thing is off, it doesn’t matter how well you do the rest.”

  From here on, my pitching motion becomes a runaway train on a downhill track. As a result of my short stride, my elbow doesn’t flow back far enough. That results in my release point being too far above my head. The speed of my arm when my elbow extends should be 2,200–2,681 degrees per second. Mine is a pedestrian 1,707. In my Follow-Through, my pelvis should slow by 23–38 meters per second. I’m still flying off the handle at 11. A pitching motion that began with such promise now resembles a Rube Goldberg drawing—all bad angles and poor intentions.

  The staff’s consensus? If I pitched like this on a regular basis, I’d end up on the disabled list, or at least at my chiropractor, in a few weeks. I decide not to tell them my shoulder has been pretty achy since yesterday’s session.

  In reviewing the data, I realize that my mind-set was completely off, too. In trying so hard to control the ball, I ended up aiming it. Almost pushing the ball toward the plate like a guy at the local pub would propel a dart. In essence, I’d throttled back on how hard I could throw simply to get the ball across the plate. As a result, I gave away whatever real talent I’d brought to the table. The real pitching geniuses among us may be the ones with enough confidence to keep throwing hard, no matter the consequences or initial results. They certainly make adjustments (what I’d give to throw at ASMI again with a longer stride off the pitching rubber), but they never compromise or stop believing in themselves.

  After a biomechanical analysis at ASMI, pitchers receive an 11-page report and a DVD. The older ones then huddle with their strength and pitching coaches. Specific exercises can be prescribed, and everyone keeps an eye out for the same bad habits.

  A few hours after my evaluation, a local dad brings his nine-year-old into the ASMI motion lab. (To my ever-lasting dismay, the kid is clocked two miles per hour faster than me.) After watching the video, the father pays mostly in cash, so his wife won’t be the wiser. If that seems a tad excessive, you haven’t been around youth sports much.

  The days when kids marked the seasons by sports—football in the fall, basketball and hockey in the winter, and track and baseball in the spring—are pretty much gone. From New England to California, kids have become pint-sized specialists, playing just one sport year-round.

  “We have reached the point of saturation—a vicious revolving door of never-ending seasons,” says Fred Engh, president of the National Alliance for Youth Sports, in his book Why Johnny Hates Sports. “Children cannot even take a couple of months’ hiatus from a sport for fear of falling behind their peers and being excluded from teams the following seasons. Those elite teams, all those trophies—that’s what the parents want.”

  In fact, the number of kids who specialize has grown to such proportions that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy statement a decade ago warning that serious health risks come with concentrating too much, too early on a single sport. “More injuries, more signs of psychological stress and more cases of early burnout” are the results, says Steven Anderson, the chair of the academy’s committee on sports specialization in children. “The returns for this early investment of time and energy do not seem to justify the costs.”

  According to the AAP, signs of overload include chronic injuries and illnesses, weight loss, sleep disturbances, and falling grades in school. When any of these problems present themselves, Anderson says, “the sport, the intensity, the source of motivation and the fun level need to be closely examined.”

  At ASMI, Fleisig fields calls from concerned parents, and he often agrees with the AAP and other youth experts: Specializing too early in one sport doesn’t make much sense when it comes to biomechanics.

  “In generations past, when kids got tired they usually played a little more and then went home,” he says. “But now you have the guys i
n the uniforms, the supervising adults, saying, ‘Oh, no, we have three more innings to pitch.’ In generations past, little boys’ bodies were calling the shots. Now we’re listening to the adults, not the kids.”

  Fleisig says that any rigorous sports activity produces “microtears” in the muscles, tendons, and ligaments. That’s normal, and when we allow the body to rest it will repair itself.

  “We’re alive—we’re not cars or bridges,” the research director adds. “The body has a great feedback system, the ability to repair itself. It works great, if we listen and pay attention.

  “I tell people major-league baseball players don’t play year-round. They play in a cycle—preseason, regular season, perhaps postseason, and then the off-season. But somewhere along the line, in this past generation, more kids have started to specialize in one sport and play it year-round. As a result, they are really stacking the deck for injury.”

  Compare the experiences of today’s pint-sized pitchers with the way Walter Johnson or Bob Feller was raised. In many modern-day households, the exceptional athlete is elevated to what author Mary Collins calls “performer status.” Weekends and after school tend to revolve around the star child athlete. These kids often don’t have daily chores to do, as Johnson and Feller did.

  “By Little League, the better kids are on select teams,” Nolan Ryan says. “What do we do with the kid who shows the ability and coordination and timing to pitch at an early age? We overthrow them. As a result, it used to be college kids, but now it is high school kids who’ve had Tommy John surgery.”

  Although Feller had his own “field of dreams”—a backyard ball field he built with his father—neither he nor baseball was placed above the family’s daily routine. While Sundays during the summer were spent playing ball at the Oakview ballpark, the rest of the week Feller and his sister, Marguerite, helped out around the farm, and Saturdays were spent going to town and selling “the grain, corn, hogs and livestock,” he says.