Eric Cressey made a dire prediction.
“We are going to see a rash of Tommy Johns in the next month,” Cressey, of Cressey Sports Performance. “We’re going to see probably 30-40 guys. . . . That doesn’t even count the guys who are getting hurt in minor league camp. The question becomes why and I think it comes down to guys are showing up (to spring training) unprepared.”
PART 1: How to prepare to avoid early-season pitching injuries
How and why are pitchers unprepared for spring training? Spring training is a time to build arm strength and get back in shape for the season, right? Cressey strongly rejects this notion. “Spring training is not training by any means. Spring training is baseball. There is no training. Training needs to take place in the offseason. It’s pretty much spring competing. You’re two weeks in and you’re in games.”
Cressey touches on two closely related probable causes of increased injury rates early in the season: players showing up unprepared and what happens at camp after pitchers and catchers report. Both are important and both play a massive role in the health, or lack thereof, of pitchers.
Teams are certainly aware and try to mitigate the risk by giving their pitchers offseason throwing programs to help them prepare prior to showing up to camp. Kyle Boddy of Driveline Baseball deals with many professional pitchers in the offseason and observes, “I’ve seen the throwing programs these players get in the offseason and they’re just horrible. They’re like, (on) Feb. 1 get out to 120 feet and make 30 throws.” Instead of following them as scripted, he notes, “The vast majority of pitchers ignore those throwing programs. They don’t listen to it. They do their own thing.”
Boddy offered another enlightening example of exactly how some team-issued throwing workouts can lead to a substantial risk in arm health. Relating to the concept of managing stress in Part 1, he said:
“In a game, let’s say every time you throw a ball it is 100 units of force on the arm, and their offseason program preps them to accept at maximum 55 units of force on the arm.”
Based on what these experts say about the conservative nature of team-issued throwing programs largely devoid of long toss or weighted ball work, Boddy’s approximations seem about as accurate as they can be as an example.
“They bring you in (to spring training) to throw your bullpen, and your bullpen requires 75 units of force," he said. "Live BP is closer to 90 units of force and then games are 100 units of force. So your body has been used to accepting 55 units of force to going to accepting 100 units of force in 11 days.”
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This is clearly an excessively accelerated buildup, and Boddy is passionately opposed to this model. “There’s no f—ing reason that should happen," he said. "It is obvious guys are going to get hurt because they haven’t trained anywhere close to the threshold they need to.”
He offers this alternative: “It’s why long toss and weighted balls are great modalities, because it gets you to 100, 110, 120 units of force. . . . The athlete trains so far above his threshold, that threshold has increased to where he is able to withstand more force.
“He is able to produce more so he throws harder. Then when he goes in games and throws bullpens at 100 units of force, since he’s prepared at 110 to 120 units of force, theoretically he should get hurt less. People who train at Driveline and such should get hurt less because they’ve trained so hard in the offseason.”
Alan Jaeger of Jaeger Sports shares this sentiment. He said that during the start of spring training, there generally is “way too much throwing off the mound from the onset, and not enough focus on arm conditioning during this period. It’s a black-and-white issue to me.”
With a schedule that typically includes bullpens every other day, then live BP, then the start of games, Jaeger believes pitchers are "so taxed from all of the mound work that their arm conditioning suffers because they have such reduced time to recover and restore.”
As a result of the standard schedule, “These guys' arms are being deconditioned.” That is a powerful word that demonstrates the sincerity of Jaeger’s belief in the power of building up the arm properly before engaging in bullpen, live BP or game work, especially considering the competition to win a job during spring training.
“If you show up to spring training and you haven’t thrown a single bullpen, even if you’ve done a fair amount of stuff, flat ground, long toss, all that, there’s nothing that simulates getting on a mound with a batter in the box getting aggressive,” Cressey said.
The stress of throwing a bullpen for a job is significantly higher than playing catch at 55 units of force or even throwing a bullpen prior to the ones in front of the people who decide the fate of your baseball career. The clear consensus of these experts is that the status quo is extremely dangerous and is likely a cause of the increase of spring training injuries.
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Things are not all bad at spring training. Cressey speaks of the treatment of one of his clients, Indians ace Corey Kluber.
“When Corey comes to spring training, nobody tells Corey you have to do this. They say, ‘Hey, here’s what we’re thinking, what do you think? What’s worked in the past, what hasn’t, and what do you want to do this year?’ They are going to listen to him giving feedback on what works for him.”
Perhaps this is simply a product of being the ace of one of the most forward-thinking organizations for pitching development in the league.
“If you look across baseball, that same opportunity is not afforded to a 21-year-old kid in low (Single)-A," Cressey observed. "It’s like the old adage that minor leaguers get fed really poorly when they’re in low-A and they say if you don’t like it, play better.
“The successful organizations are the ones that meet the pitchers where they are and let them work on whatever it is that they should work on.”
As for his clients, Cressey said, “We have minor league guys who we feel we prepare very well in the offseason. Some of these guys are throwing as early as Nov. 15 to really get ready and by the time they roll in that first week in March they show up and they feel like they are held back. They actually get a little bit detrained.”
To help mitigate this problem, Cressey feels that his biggest role is as an educator.
"I tell guys you will always be your own best coach. If I can impart some wisdom to help you be your own best coach, awesome," he said. "At the end of the day it really comes down to you learning about how your body works and how to manage it. That’s where the growth really comes and that’s where guys really improve, and (they) don’t improve when you hand them to cookie-cutter throwing programs, cookie-cutter lifting programs, and everybody does the exact same stretch pregame."
A common theme in resolving the issue is to reduce the frequency of bullpens early in spring training. “I do think there is a place for tuning it down to two bullpens a week when they first show up,” he said. Jaeger said that by spacing out bullpens from the onset of spring training, pitchers could use the month of March to enhance rather than deplete their arm conditioning.
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This is a good first piece to the puzzle, but it is far from the only piece. Boddy takes exception to the poor nutrition at many minor league levels. “They don’t feed their athletes — that’s ridiculous,” he said.
Cressey contends, “If you wanted to spend $500,000 on payroll you could get four or five really bright guys on staff who visualize absolutely everything, and give guys great manual therapy every day, but that’s not happening, so the athlete has to take it upon himself to do the learning and education.”
The consensus and the displeasure among these experts may shed some light on the spike in injuries during spring training. There are other factors at play, such as players showing up with concealed injuries, but as Jaeger says, the “shock to the arm” resulting from the traditional buildup schedule in camp and the level of preparation in the offseason certainly deserve deeper investigation to help understand and, ultimately, reduce the frequency of early-season injuries.
Dan Weigel is a pitching coach and a Sporting News contributor focusing on pitching. Follow him on twitter at @DanWeigel38. Kyle Boddy is president and founder of Driveline Baseball. Follow him on twitter at @DrivelineBases and learn more about Driveline here. If you want to throw hard, check out Driveline's max velo program here. If you're a jabroni, check out its jabroni pitching plan here. Eric Cressey is president of Cressey Sports performance. Follow him on twitter at @EricCressey, learn more about Cressey Sports Performance here, and check out his High Performance Handbook here. Alan Jaeger is the founder of Jaeger Sports. Follow him on twitter at @Jaegersports, learn more about Jaeger sports here, and check out his Year Round Throwing Plan here.