"Old Hoss" Radbourn’s 1884 season may be the best single pitching season of all time. With 678.2 innings, a 59-12 record and a 1.38 ERA, his combination of durability (or perhaps more accurately, ability to endure pain) and dominance has never and will never be matched.
Of course, Radbourn’s season will never be matched due to changes in pitcher usage. Gone are the days of letting a single pitcher start more than 35 games in a season and in their place are five man rotations, pitch counts and innings limits. 200 innings is an accomplishment, and no pitcher in the past four years has topped 250 in a single season.
With confounding variables such as the continued rise of velocity aplenty, the effectiveness of these new standards can be and has been debated. Folks on both sides of the ongoing argument can agree, however, that the argument is broader than simply choosing certain numbers at which to limit throws, and must also include questions about how to condition the arm to withstand any number of throws. The latter aspect, how to condition the arm to withstand frequent high-velocity throws, is a multimillion dollar question with answers increasing in frequency and accuracy.
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To help me answer these questions, I spoke with California-based pitching coach, long-toss guru and creator of the famous J-Bands Alan Jaeger as well as Shippensburg University pitching coach Mark Chimel, an advocate of and someone who has seen the firsthand results of many of these up-to-date arm care protocols. As a former player, Chimel spoke of the all-to-recent days where "post-throwing basically you just go run some poles...and then ice," whereas now, "it is much more of an active recovery."
Rehab to Prehab
Following the first successful Tommy John surgery in 1974 on the pitcher forever bearing the procedure’s name, doctors and physical therapists were forced to develop a rehab program for the procedure. The rehab program brought John back to full strength, and many pitchers back even stronger, giving the procedure a false reputation for creating dominant pitchers. While the procedure has been a savior for many careers, the ensuing rehab program is the true cause for pitchers coming back stronger. Few, if any, pitchers in the late 70s engaged in such rigorous arm strengthening activities, so it comes as no surprise that the rehab helped strengthen previously weak areas of the arm and consequently helping some post-surgery pitchers finish the rehab program stronger and throwing harder than before.
Instead of going under the knife, proactive pitchers were able to find an edge by incorporating exercises from the rehab programs into their regular training routines. Turning rehab exercises into daily prehab has become a staple of Jaeger's protocol, and he is not alone in using many former exercises reserved exclusively for rehab in modern warm up, recovery, and strengthening regimens.
Warm Up to Throw or Throw to Warm Up?
Since then, the market for bands has exploded and Jaeger is clearly the leader of the pack. In his words, using the bands prior to throwing helps with "range of motion, blood flow, oxygenation, small muscle balance and small muscle endurance." Many of his players have been known to make remarks like "I feel like I've already made 50 throws" when describing the ability of the bands to activate muscles necessary for throwing, with the benefits of the protocol receiving adjectives like "visceral" and even "comical" (in a good way, of course).
As a warm up, bands are often paired with a simple arm circle routine. No weights are involved, but the resulting muscle activation from the routine is effective in preparing those muscles for high-intensity throwing. Although some protocols are high-tech, sometimes simple, consistent exercises can work just as well.
Trevor Bauer had to work his way into this article somehow, as Cleveland’s cerebral righty is known for championing many new and innovative training techniques. One of these techniques is a shoulder tube - a long, flexible, thermo-plastic bar with a grip in the middle and a counterweight at each end. When moving the tube, the counterweights will initially delay, then fire rapidly to the opposite side, creating force sent initially to the center of the tube and eventually up to the shoulder. Depending on the specific shoulder tube exercise, Bauer and others are able to activate the entire muscle group. While Bauer has made it famous as a warm up, the shoulder tube is also useful as a recovery modality.
Recovery and Strength
Following the completion of the throwing session, Chimel describes his protocol as involving "basically anything we can do to get rid of inflammation, soft tissue work; completely different from the approach of running trying to flush out lactic acid and icing."
Likewise, renown trainer and author of the brilliant book "Becoming a Supple Leopard," Kelly Starrett advocates replacing the traditional RICE recovery acronym (rest, ice, compression, elevation) with MCE - movement, compression of lymphatics and soft tissues, and elevation. Despite coming from vastly different backgrounds - Chimel is a pitching coach and Starrett is a full-time trainer specializing in recovery and mobility - both agree that it is in the best interest of pitchers and athletes everywhere to welcome a new generation of recovery modalities.
For many pitching athletes, this will often first involve heading straight back to the bands for some light work to promote muscle activation of specific areas of soreness. From Jaeger's perspective, "the biggest feedback we get from players doing bands is that they have a tremendous recovery period," which also "plays a major role in injury prevention and recovery of the arm." The aforementioned pre-throw benefits translate extremely well to the current active recovery, muscle activation model, making bands arguably the most essential and versatile protocol for maximizing the health and strength of the throwing arm.
For a more specified approach, MLB clubs will have team massage therapists tasked with working through affected tissue. Amateur clubs without massage therapists often use simple products such as a lacrosse ball to gain the deep tissue benefits and promote healing to the affected area.
One of the newest and most effective techniques to targeted recovery is a floss band. Unlike strengthening bands, a floss band is typically seven feet long, two inches wide, and barely millimeters thick. Following a throwing session the band is wrapped tightly around the affected area while pitchers undergo a series of manual resistance exercises forcing compression to and waste out of the affected muscles. After removing the band, blood will rush back into the arm, expediting the healing process. Building off of the compression therapy of the floss bands, which work extremely well on the forearm, elbow, and part of the shoulder but struggle to find use on the upper back, foam rollers represent a good alternative for muscle compression.
For an effective high-tech option, electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) is often used. The electric pulses sent from the EMS machine travel through pads applied to the skin and into the body, where they force muscle activation to help the muscles work through the soreness and activate the lymphatic system for clearing waste. Once used almost exclusively in rehabilitation protocols, EMS has become increasingly popular in normal recovery.
Although its effectiveness as a recovery modality has been debated in light of research debunking theories of aerobic activity removing lactic acid in the pitching arm, sprint and agility work has gained a foothold as a natural replacement for distance running. Most coaches will agree, however, that at the very least, their implementation causes positive training effects, namely anaerobic explosive power mimicking the explosive power in the pitching motion as opposed the non-transferable aerobic endurance of distance running.
The essential final piece to the arm care puzzle is arm strengthening. This is a subject far too deep for one section of one article, but arm strengthening has undergone similar changes in recent years. Light dumbbells and bands remain staples, but alongside them now are wrist weights, rope, manual resistance exercises, force absorption, plyocare balls thrown both forwards and backwards, weighted baseballs thrown and held, long toss and more.
Strength of the decelerator muscles – the muscles that slow down the arm after release – have become a priority for pitchers. The vast majority of the exercises listed above target these muscles primarily found in the shoulder and upper back. By strengthening the brakes of the arm, the body is able to confidently increase the acceleration of the arm through release without the fear of the shoulder ripping out of the socket during deceleration. This aids in both raising the pitcher's velocity ceiling and keeping the arm healthy.
Wrap
The advantages to staying healthy are obvious. Chimel notices that his pitchers "can throw a lot more, can come back from throwing a lot faster and a lot stronger." He continues "the more you train the muscles that we're using in the throwing and pitching motion, the better those muscles are going to be and the better we're going to get at pitching." By spending less time recovering, pitchers can spend more time building arm strength through high-intensity throwing, working on offspeed pitches, and throwing in the bullpen. Better recovery does not simply mean more innings, but better innings backed by more opportunity for game-like training.
Fastball velocity in Major League Baseball has risen from 89.9 mph in 2002 to 92.1 mph last season and projects to continue to rise. As training methods improve and kids using these training methods their entire lives enter into professional baseball, the long-term outlook for hitters is increasingly bleak. These new arm care protocols are not the only reason for the velocity spike, but when compared to Radbourn’s recovery protocol of women, whiskey and morphine, they surely have played an important role.
Links for further reading on why traditional recovery has been supplanted: 1. Negative effects of distance running. 2. Negative effects of icing.
Dan Weigel is a contributor at Sporting News and a pitching coach who uses many of these protocols regularly. Follow him on Twitter at @danweigel38, Jaeger on twitter at @JaegerSports, and Chimel on twitter at @Chim_27.