Trip Somers over at TexasLeaguers.com went out to watch Strasburg pitch this past Friday at TCU. He has a very nice scouting report (with videos). I want to highlight one thing he wrote that I could not have said better:
Strasburg has some of the common flaws of traditional pitching mechanics and carries with him the associated risks. These risks will almost certainly not affect his draft status because it could be 10 years before anything goes wrong. Predicting injuries is folly, but identifying risk is always important.
Well said. And worth the read.
#1 by Sue Dinem - March 30th, 2009 at 14:10
Since most folks here aren’t the types to go digging deep, it should also be noted that Somers cites Kyle Boddy, who likened Strasburg to Mark Prior last November. Boddy says in a post dated 3/24, that he will be posting a more complete analysis of Strasburg, with the following caveat:
#2 by Hendo - March 30th, 2009 at 14:13
Why should Strasburg’s being Mark Prior II cause the Nationals to pass on him?
Prior didn’t fail because he was flawed. He failed because Dusty Baker destroyed him.
#3 by Brian Oliver - March 30th, 2009 at 14:34
Not to go too far down this road again, but Prior’s mechanics are similar to those of pitchers who have had elbow/shoulder injuries in the past. The combination of his mechanics and Baker’s overuse are the likely cause of Prior’s injuries.
The problem is that the whole mechanical analysis is not a binary thing. Just because pitcher X has mechanics similar to pitcher Y does not mean he will get hurt like pitcher Y did.
All pitchers come with inherent injury risks. It’s a matter of the team mitigating them through avoiding overuse and if possible mechanical changes that do not short circuit a pitcher’s development arc.
#4 by Pilchard - March 30th, 2009 at 15:24
Hendo,
Think that the Prior’s problems are greater than pitching for Dusty Baker. He has thrown more than 166 innings only once in his career. Throwing 211 innnings in 2003. Realize that in 2003, Prior had a number of starts where he threw a lot of pitches (which in retrospect everything blames on Dusty), but not sure if that entirely explains Prior’s breakdown or his complete inability to rehabiliitate and return to form.
There are a lot of pitchers that have thrown more innings and more pitches early in their career and even have suffered more serious injuries, yet have returned to pitch effectively Prior has not.
#5 by JMUAlumni - March 30th, 2009 at 16:00
Not a fan of Kyle Boddy’s analysis, but thanks for pointing out this one by Trip Somers. It was a good read. I agree with Somers, Strasburg’s biggest red flags seem to be in his “late forearm turnover” (one way of saying it) and his follow through. The second problem can be easily corrected, but I am not so certain about the former.
#6 by Sue Dinem - March 30th, 2009 at 17:18
I’m not necessarily endorsing either Boddy or Somers, but merely pointing out the comparison. I expect him to write the article from the angle of how these flaws can be corrected from the lens of how they weren’t fixed with Prior.
#7 by Andrew Z. Stebbins - March 31st, 2009 at 07:35
Jim Callis of BA did an article this week, scouts (the ones who tend to see the players the most) aren’t worried about his mechanics, and one says they’ve actually gotten a lot better - there’s nothing to worry about, besides the fact he is a pitcher. There’s always a risk for a pitcher. This is being magnified because he is so great.
#8 by Marc - March 31st, 2009 at 07:45
Pilchard,
To me, people WAY over-emphasize Prior’s mechanics as part of his problem, and way underemphasize the way he was developed. And that’s why you need to note Strasburg’s tendencies, but not necessarily decide not to take him on the fear of him being Prior II.
You’re right to say he threw 211 in 2003 and never more than 166 in other years, but what concerns me is the way he was brought along. He’s basically the poster boy for the Verducci Effect - he pitched 138 innings in his last year at USC in ‘01, then 168 in ‘02 (split between minors and majors) (+30), then 211 in ‘03 (+43). Verducci’s research pretty much shows that +30 is the watershed level - anything more than +25 starts to get dicey, and the Cubs added 73 IP to his workload in 2 years. Add to that the Dusty thing, and I think there’s plenty of reason to think that it wasn’t just Prior’s arm motion that was the problem.
I know this is a thread about Strasburg, but honestly, that’s what concerns me this year abotu starting Martis and Zimmermann in the rotation in April - Zimmermann threw 133 last year. Anything north of 155 is unnecessarily risking him. Figuring 5 IP per start gives you 31 starts, but he’s going to go longer than 5 in some. Basically, he’s going to need to be shut down come September 1, even if he’s a ROY/CY candidate.
#9 by Pilchard - March 31st, 2009 at 09:21
Marc,
Good stuff. Was the listening to Bery Blyleven and Tom Seaver this past week talk about how the treatment of pitchers has changed so dramatically in the last 20 years. Are pitchers more fragile now? Why was it that some pitchers could throw 250 innings even 300 innings (with almost unlimited pitch counts)early in their career and not have the same career altering injuries that pitchers seem to have with much lighter workloads?
Or is it that these old codgers are overstating the differences between pitching then and now?
#10 by Sue Dinem - March 31st, 2009 at 09:55
Pilchard - When was the last time you heard of a 26-year-old having a “dead arm?” It was quite common well into 1960s before a team with a lot of young arms decided it would try a five-man rotation. Tom Seaver, along with Nolan Ryan, was one of those five pitchers.
On the flip side, when was the last time you saw so many 40-year-old starting pitchers - answer: never before this decade.
Unfortunately, the corollary to the five-man rotation is the advances in sports medicine. It’s not purely coincidence that Tommy John surgery and the five-man rotation both about in the mid-1970s.
I would argue that the notion that today’s pitchers are “more fragile” ignores the fact that many of are pitching longer than ever.
And let’s face it, Nolan Ryan was a freak of nature - when sports physiologists tested his muscles, he scored one of the highest ratios ever of “fast-twitch” to “slow-twitch” fibers ever. Something like 80% when most of us are 50-50.
#11 by Marc - March 31st, 2009 at 11:35
I think the codgers are UNDERstating the differences between pitching then and now and also forgetting how often they pitched hurt, or threw not-quite-full-speed because “they just didn’t have it today, coach.” Throwing a high # of IPs doesn’t mean that you necessarily SHOULD have been out there throwing - Blyleven, for instance, had 25(!) complete games in his age 22 season and threw 325(!!) innings. There’s no way he was throwing full-strength, full-speed that entire time, no matter what he says he did. I also think if you asked (and I know I heard this during one of Sutton’s classic “Meh - these young guys are soft” rants) that they’d tell you they went out and threw a lot when they were hurt and just pitched through it – in an era before free agency, that probably made sense, but when you’re going to be paying $8-10m per season for 20-something arms, it absolutely does NOT make sense to go out and burn people out throwing 300+ IP.
I also think that nobody counted their pitches when they were younger - I don’t have any access to anything like Seaver or Blyleven’s HS pitching records, but I’m betting that they probably threw a LOT then too - so the arm was used to that kind of strain even early on.
As I think I said here or maybe over on NJ, I don’t disagree that pitchers probably COULD throw more, but I do think Verducci’s data suggest that how you add innings is important. I’d love to know what real pitching development folks (Spin, Saint, etc.) think about Verducci’s findings. To me, they’re very interesting.
#12 by Sue Dinem - March 31st, 2009 at 12:45
Marc with a c — You’d really enjoy “The Head Game” by Roger Kahn, particularly the chapters on Leo Mazzone and Johnny Sain.
#13 by e-6 - March 31st, 2009 at 12:58
Brian, Marc et al, Thank you, thank you for being so reasonable. I have been silently pounding my head against the wall over the Kyle Boddy and Chris O’Leary (sp?) “expert” predictions of doom that lots of people are going nuts over. First of all neither of them are professional scouts or pitching coaches. They have some interesting ideas and I can not claim to know they are wrong. However, there are no studies of any kind to prove they are correct. Let’s not talk about these ideas like they are more likely to be correct than the consensus of professional scouts and pitching coaches. Before I get jumped on about the list of pitchers with the inverted W who broke down, has anyone gone through every major league pitcher to see how many throw that way who haven’t broken down? What is the percentage of inverted W guys who break down compared to non inverted W? In addition, one of the examples, BJ Ryan, was one of the hardest used relievers in the majors for years before he broke down. I’m going to stop myself because I could go on too long. For a good article on old time pitcher abuse here is a link to a WaPo magazine article about Tom Cheney old Washington Senator who struck out 21 batters in a game, throwing 220 some pitches, and was never the same. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/19/AR2008061902831.html