For MLB starters, “Rest is atrophy,” according to one expert.
Today (October
29), former New York Times reporter
Murray Chass wrote in his blog, “If there has been a theme to the 2017
post-season, it has been ‘Get the starting pitcher out of the game as quickly
as possible.’ It is the latest pitching development that is bizarre and makes
no sense.”
Chass made
reference to pitcher Jon Lester of the Chicago Cubs, who last week said this on
the “Tiki and Tierney Show” on CBS Sports Radio and CBS Sports Network about
MLB managers pulling effective starters out of games early:
“I hate it. I
absolutely hate it. You pay your starting pitchers to be starting pitchers. You
pay your studs to be studs. I remember growing up and watching these big-time
guys—Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, [John] Smoltz. ‘Here’s the ball. You guys go get
it. We’re going to live or die by you.’ Obviously if that falters early, you
need to make a decision. That’s different. But if they are cruising, leave them
in.
“You’re
stretching your bullpen to get 15 outs. That’s a lot of outs from your bullpen.
That’s a lot of mixing and matching. That’s a lot of high-stress pitches on
those guys. Now you’re bringing in Kenley Jansen to get six outs, which I’m
fine with. I don’t mind using your closer for six outs. But for me, you go back
to the Yankee days where you had Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, these guys going
(for seven or eight innings) and then you give the ball to Mo [Mariano Rivera].
That’s the blueprint and that’s what you want every time.
“But I just
feel like when you ask your bullpen to get nine, 12, 15 outs, there’s a lot of
things that can happen and you went from a 3-1 game to a 7-6 game. I feel like
that’s what happens when you do that. It puts a lot of stress on your bullpen.
They have the off day today. I get it on that side of it. But for me, it’s just
not baseball. Baseball is your starters go six, seven, eight and then you mix
and match and do your things that you need to do from that point forward.
That’s my opinion on it.”
Chass wrote, “I
could not agree more.”
The topic
reminded me of an enlightening
conversation I had with Dr. Mike Marshall, a former Cy Young award winner, in January 2009, just prior to reporting dates
for MLB pitchers. Excerpts of the interview ran on March 2, 2009 in SportsBusiness Journal and SportsBusiness Daily.
Mike Marshall broke into the major leagues in 1967
with the Detroit Tigers. Fourteen years and eight teams later, he retired, but
not before making his mark as the game’s most durable relief pitcher. In 1974
he appeared in 13 straight games and won the Cy Young Award after he set
single-season records for appearances (106), relief innings (208) and games
finished (84).
Marshall, who earned a Ph.D. from Michigan State in
kinesiology (the study of muscles and their movements), has devoted over 30 years
researching the art and science of pitching. He has been a tireless critic of
the traditional pitching motion and an advocate for a training program he
devised that he claims puts no stress on a pitcher’s arm. But he said he cannot
get an audience with a major league team to discuss his findings.
Q. What’s
your assessment of the business health of baseball?
Marshall: Well, I’m not involved that closely.
And when I was a player rep, the owners didn’t tell us too much about the
business part of it. Of course, the big business that they’re in now, and one
that I predicted back in the mid-’70s, is cable television. That’s a huge
revenue source for them.
Q. You saw the future in that in the
seventies?
Marshall: Oh, yes. I was sitting with Ted
Turner there in the old ballpark and we were talking about the different ideas
that he had. He mentioned that he was going to put his team on cable
television. I told him the thing I hate when I get on the radio is it’s all
music. I want to hear news. I’d like an all-news station. He sort of took that
idea pretty good.
Q. Are you suggesting that you gave him
the idea for a cable news network?
Marshall: (laughing) I wish I had. I’m not
going to say that that led directly to what he did, but certainly he thought
well of the idea. We were talking, and I had come up with a contract
negotiation technique where I would negotiate the money but then I would loan
the money back to the team at prime rate, which was certainly better than what
the teams usually got. He liked that idea, and then we started talking about
different things in business that he was doing. I guess he thought I had some
ideas about how to do things a little bit differently from what was being done
then in baseball. The idea of loaning money out and making interest on it made
sense to me.
Q. You might have been ahead of your
time.
Marshall: I always felt that baseball was an
industry that could have done a heck of a lot more, and still could.
Where I got into trouble was as a player rep. I kept
recommending to my side of the negotiation that we should stop negotiating
individual salaries and distribute the salaries ourselves by having the teams
pay their percent of the total revenue into the Players Association, and then
we’d come up with an equitable way to distribute the salaries that would follow
a bell-shaped curve. That more than anything else is what got me out of
baseball. It was more the Players Association than it was the owners that
finally got me out of Major League Baseball. The idea that the agents wouldn’t
make any money if they didn’t get to take their five percent for basically
adding nothing to the value of baseball.
Q. What’s right about baseball? What
does it do best?
Marshall: I don’t think it does anything best.
It doesn’t train its pitchers; it doesn’t play the game the best. It’s all
entertainment; it’s all star-driven.
Q. You had a 14-year MLB career with
nine teams, won the Cy Young Award, taught for 22 years in college…
Marshall: Things went pretty well for me, much
better than I ever expected. Teaching was a great joy, but I only did it where
I could also be the head baseball coach. I’ve never been interested in being
solely a professor, even with the opportunity to do research. I couldn’t have
stayed away from the baseball field if I wanted to, which is why for the last
few years I’ve been running my own baseball team: just dealing with baseball
pitching.
Q. That is the Dr. Mike Marshall
Pitchers Research and Training Center?
Marshall: Yeah, but I just turned 66. I’ve
essentially shut that down. I’m training out those guys who are continuing into
the second year of their program. As soon as these guys are gone, I’m done
training baseball pitchers.
Q. Who is it that comes to you for the
training?
Marshall: Over the last 10 years or so it’s
been pitchers who did not get an opportunity to play college ball. And then
there would be the injured players. Some were involved in college baseball,
others in professional ball who were injured and released.
Q. These are pitchers who still hope to
get a shot at the major leagues?
Marshall: Yes. The purpose I had when I started
it was to introduce my ideas into the pitching motion. I wanted the opportunity
to take pitchers and have them try new ideas out.… to see if we can’t improve
baseball pitching. The primary problem that I’ve run into over the years is the
rejection by the traditional baseball pitchers of anybody using my motion.
Q. Were pitchers trained more
effectively in the past?
Marshall: Who are the pitching coaches? Check
their academic backgrounds. Pitching coaches are ex-pitchers. Do you think they
are going to invent anything new? They’re going to do what the guy who won the
first game 130 years ago did. Scientifically, it is absurd what they teach.
Q. Your contention is that the
traditional pitching motion is essentially flawed and leads to injury?
Marshall: If somebody wanted to invent a
pitching motion that was inherently dangerous, that had all the elements of all
injuries — you could ruin your hip, your knee, your lower back, the inside and
outside of your elbow and the front and back of your shoulder — use the
traditional pitching motion.
Q. And you support this from first-hand
major league experience and from a career studying the subject?
Marshall: Oh, yeah. And on my web site
(www.drmikemarshall.com) I have a list of all the pitchers who were injured
last year and on the disabled list. It averaged out to over six per team.
That’s over half of your pitching staff. How in the world can you not
understand that there’s something wrong with what you’re doing!
Q. I saw a statistic that showed there
were 271 different injuries to Major League pitchers last year that put them on
the disabled list. Even with a minimum 15-day stay on the DL, that amounts to
several seasons of inactivity. Multiply that by the average MLB salary…
Marshall: That’s a lot of money they’re wasting
with unemployable or unusable pitchers. They might want to get a little science
in there as far as strategies and so on. There are different things that they
can do. With pitching injuries there are resolutions, and they don’t want to
deal with that. I think I would take a look at trying to find out how to
prevent these injuries, and yet nobody is. Or let’s put it this way: They are,
but they’re asking the wrong people.
Q. Who are they asking?
Marshall: They’re asking orthopedic surgeons.
Orthopedic surgeons are not the ones to ask about how to prevent injuries. They
know nothing about bio-mechanics and how to fix them. And the bio-mechanists
don’t know anything about anatomy. They’re just number crunchers, so they don’t
understand what muscles get hurt and why. I know anatomy. I know mechanics. I
know the laws of physics. And I’ve done it. I’m the only person that has all of
the requisites to deal with pitching-arm injuries.
Q. No one else is qualified?
Marshall: Let’s put it this way: I haven’t
found anyone else who is, and I’ve been looking all over for him.
Q. Wouldn’t that be helpful to an MLB
organization?
Marshall: (laughing) From your lips to their
ears. Pitching coaches are so afraid of me. I spent my time earning a doctoral
degree. I actually know what I’m talking about. If that intimidates you, I’m
sorry. But they keep saying I’m doing stuff outside of the norm. Damn right
it’s outside of the norm. The norm is killing their arms and destroying the
game.
Q. So, you can help, but you intimidate
people? Is there some insecurity?
Marshall: That’s exactly what it is. The
pitching coaches are very defensive and insecure.
Q. Putting aside the intimidation
factor, and given the pitchers’ contracts and the loss of service to injuries,
would it not be worth it to at least listen to an alternative plan, a plan that
might conceivably keep the high-priced investments healthy?
Marshall: You’re too rational. I’ve offered to
show them for free everything that I do. I’m not doing it for me. I don’t
expect them to pay me anything. I just want baseball to be injury-free, as far
as pitching-arm injuries that you can avoid.
Q. You sent a letter to all 30 MLB teams
in the mid-’90s offering your services. How many teams responded?
Marshall: Zero. In each letter I said I wanted
to talk to them about the training program I had. I said that I can eliminate
all kids of pitching injuries, yadda yadda yadda, and I let them know that I
had the doctoral degree and the playing experience, that I’ve done the research
since 1967. I was the first one to bio-mechanically analyze the pitching
motion. I think I know what I’m doing, and I’ll challenge anybody to
demonstrate that anything I do is wrong. But I can’t even get anybody to say
that.
Q. You set a number of relief records,
and in the ‘70s you averaged two innings per appearance. Nowadays, most relief
pitchers don’t throw two innings, and some of them don’t even throw one inning
on successive days.
Marshall: That’s because they’re improperly
trained. When I pitched 208 closing innings in 1974, I was never stiff, sore or
tired. If I hadn’t thrown the night before, I’d throw at least 10 minutes of
batting practice the next day. I could have pitched easily in every single
game; I believe I could have pitched two innings in every single game. Of
course, the hitters might have had something to say about that.
Q. Not to minimize what closers do now,
but they enter the game in the ninth inning with the lead and the bases empty
and just have to get three outs.
Marshall: Go ahead and minimize it. You’ve got
a lead, so if you know how to pitch, you don’t give up home runs. If you pitch
fewer innings, [the hitters] don’t get to see what you do as often, and it’s
hard for them to make adjustments. So, pitching 80 innings one inning at a time
with a lead? That’s a walk in the park.
Q. It’s easy?
Marshall: Billy Beane made a point. He said
that if you want to get something for nothing, find a guy that can throw a
little bit good and throw strikes, use him in a closing role and pump up a lot
of saves, and then you can sell him for something very valuable because that’s
not a very difficult man on your team to replace. He’s right! It’s the easiest
gig in baseball.
Q. How about bringing your closer in
with the bases loaded in the seventh inning. That’s a save situation.
Marshall: That’s right. That happened to me a
lot. I’d finish an inning and then go back out the next inning. Or try pitching
tie games in extra innings on the road. Now, that’s a gig! You’ve got to get
six outs and the other guy has to get three, and your team has to score in
order to get a win. It always amazes me that the managers never put their
alleged best closer in the game in that situation, where if they give up a run,
they lose. That doesn’t make any sense. If he’s so damn good, put him out there
then.
Q. What would you do?
Marshall: I would have a specialist: somebody
who could come and throw the nastiest sinker or some kind of overpowering
pitch. He would come into this adrenalized situation and battle his way out of
just that inning. Then I’d get somebody out there with nobody on for the easy
gig.
Q. Bring someone like Mariano Rivera or
Jonathan Papelbon into those situations?
Marshall: Absolutely. If he’s a good pitcher,
put him in when it counts.
Q. Nobody does that.
Marshall: No. You asked me what baseball does
right. There isn’t much baseball does right, in my opinion, either in playing
the game or advertising the game. I don’t think they have the bullpen right
either.
Q. It’s a copycat system. Every team does
it the same way because they’ve always done it that way.
Marshall: Pitching coaches are afraid that if
they do something different and it doesn’t work, they’re going to get fired.
You can understand that. The general managers are quick to fire and place the
blame elsewhere, and they’re very slow to try anything innovative or to bring
someone in who will be innovative. That’s why baseball is the farthest [behind]
in terms of any scientific research. They don’t even want to hear it. They are
anti-science, anti-intelligence, anti-new ideas. And the blame goes to the
owners. They have to have some intelligence about what’s going on.
Q. What will it take for baseball to at
least examine another study?
Marshall: I have no idea. If you find out, you
let me know and I’ll do it in a heartbeat.
Q. How has Greg Maddux stayed healthy
for so long?
Marshall: I don’t have research studies on him
at all, but one thing that he does extremely well is to pronate. That is, he
turns his thumb down when he releases the ball, especially when he throws his
changeup. But he does it on his fastball, too; that’s how he gets the ball to
tail back to the pitching arm side of home plate. And pronating your pitching
elbow prevents injuries to the elbow. He does some things very well
technically.
And he does one more thing that I think is great. He’s smart
and gets out of the game before hitters can hit him. He won’t go more than three
times through the lineup. Even at his greatest, he wouldn’t go through the
lineup more than three times. And he doesn’t try to overthrow. He throws balls
that move and he tries to hit spots. So, he’s not just out there rearing back
and letting lose with his body going all over the place. You put those things
together, and he’s had a pretty good career. But who’s going to get signed
today throwing 85-87 miles an hour, as Maddux does most of the time?
Q. Pitchers today are nurtured very
slowly and pitch count in tabulated religiously.
Marshall: Yeah, and that’s causing the pitching
arm injuries too because they aren’t fit.
Q. The pitchers are not fit?
Marshall: You have to be in shape to throw a
baseball hard, and pitch count is not the answer. And if you have a really
horrendous motion and every time you throw as hard as you can, you’re
microscopically tearing the connective tissue of the ulnar collateral ligament.
It tears and tears and tears very gently. You don’t ever rupture the entire
ligament with one pitch on a perfectly healthy ligament. It’s over time. And
the pitchers don’t feel any pain. When the pitchers complain of pain in their
elbow, that’s muscle. You feel pain in tendons, but... ligaments are completely
passive. They do not apply force. They’re like guy wires holding bones
together. There’s no sensory mechanism, although they do have a blood supply
and they are able physiologically adapt to stress. They will get bigger and
stronger, and my training program emphasizes that. The program strengthens the
ligaments but does not put any unnecessary stress on them.
Q. By fit, you mean arm fitness?
Marshall: Yes, and it doesn’t happen overnight,
and you certainly don’t take offseasons off. Rest is atrophy. So, when these
guys come in and say that their arm hurts, they are told to take two weeks off.
All that does is make them weaker and the next time they throw they hurt it
easier. A pitcher will have surgery, and then goes right back to throwing the
same way. That’s the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over
and expecting a different result. Yet that’s what trainers do: right back to
the same motion. No! Injury defines a bad pitching motion. If you get hurt, you
have a bad pitching motion. Change it.
Q. According to a story in the New York
Times last September, “A theory researched by the Sports Illustrated senior
writer Tom Verducci and now widely accepted in baseball …says that any pitcher
younger than 25 whose total number of innings jumps by more than 30 from the
previous season leaves himself susceptible to injury the next year, or at least
to a much higher [ERA].” Have you heard of this?
Marshall: Yeah, I have. All those sabermetric
guys look at things from a statistical standpoint. I could buck that very
easily. Just let me train those pitchers and I’ll increase the innings by 100
and they’ll never hurt themselves. It’s looking at things backward. You’re not
finding causes; you’re trying to find Band-Aid solutions by looking at
statistics. You’ve got a bad pitching motion—change it! That’s the problem.
Q. Would a major league pitcher be
allowed to come to you on his own?
Marshall: That’s been the question I’ve been
wondering about all along. All these guys are hurt. I think they know who I am;
maybe they don’t.
Q. What about reaching out to the agents?
It would seem to be in their interest.
Marshall: There have been a couple of agents
who said they would like me to take a look at their pitchers. But I never heard
back from them.... Right now, pitchers who make the major leagues are genetic
freaks: those who have the highest percentage of fast-twitch muscle fibers.
They are not skilled. They do not have the ability to throw high-quality
pitches, non-fastball type of pitches. It’s silly how ineffectively trained they
are. These pitching coaches don’t know how to teach them anything. They’re just
baby sitters who are trying to ride the coattails of some genetic freaks in the
major leagues.
Q. If major league pitchers, and major
league baseball itself, are, as you suggest, not open-minded to examining the
problem of pitching injuries, what about going younger: Little League?
Marshall: I’m having success with the parents
of 10 year olds. The parents are concerned about their sons being injured.
College coaches are dogmatic as all get-out: It’s this way or the highway. High
school coaches, because the parents can get on those coaches and keep them from
having their sons participate, have leverage. The high school coach has to take
the people who are enrolled in school. So we’re having some success with the
high school coaches. I spoke recently to high school coaches in Louisiana and
in Arizona, and was received well in both places. Several of them told me that
they are going to implement my program. I expect the same kind of reception
when I speak to the Illinois high school baseball coaches. The high school
coaches have concerns about injuries to their pitchers.
Q. Tommy Lasorda said, “You wanna fix
Little League baseball, let the moms coach.”
Marshall: There you go. Absolutely right. Moms
don’t want their sons to get hurt. They will do anything to find a way not to
have them hurt. If there is a bio-mechanically and anatomically perfect way to
apply force to a baseball and eliminate injuries, why wouldn’t we want to go that
way, even if it doesn’t look anything like the way [pitchers throw now]?
Imagine if Dick Fosbury, instead of being a high jumper, had
been a kinesiologist who designed that jumping technique but couldn’t jump.
Well, I designed my pitching motion and made several adjustments and set
several records, but I don’t get credit for it; they just say I’m a physical
freak. When Fosbury went out and jumped higher than anybody else, it was hard
for his coach to say, “I’m not going to let you jump.” Well, they tried to ban
it initially.
Q. Fosbury was ridiculed at first
because his jump was so unorthodox.
Marshall: Exactly. And because he went over
[the bar] backwards, they said he was going to break his neck. They tried to
ban it based on injury. He didn’t injure himself, and now it is recognized as
the bio-mechanically and anatomically perfect way to high-jump.
Q. You paint a bleak picture for the
future of pitching.
Marshall: Yeah. It’s going to remain as bad as
it is today as long as people continue to teach and believe in the traditional
pitching motion. But back in 1976 or ‘77, I got a telephone call from Bill
Veeck. He said, “Hey, Marshall. I want to know what you know.” He was in
Chicago and I was in East Lansing. He showed up the next day and we spent the whole
day talking about baseball pitching. I showed him my high-speed film studies
and explained everything. At the end of the day, he said he wanted me to become
his pitching coach. I was a free agent and was about to sign a rather large
contract for that time. I told him I’d love to do it as son as I was done
pitching. Of course, he sold the team before that. But that was as close as it
came to actually having some proper training in professional baseball.
Q. Original thinkers like Veeck have
been looked upon skeptically. You need another original thinker now.
Marshall: You don’t think the owners are going
to let one in there, do you?
Q. Can you concede that there might be
an owner with some imagination?
Marshall: Mark Cuban, who wants to buy the
Cubs, is an original thinker. If he were to find out that I know how to train
pitchers, he just might let me do it. Nobody else will. It’s not going to
happen. I don’t know if the owners are still mad about me getting free agency
into baseball or what, but they’re not going to let it happen.
Q. Can you send baseball a Candygram and
kiss and make up?
Marshall: I wish I could.
Q. All right, hypothetically, if you
were baseball commissioner, what would be the first order of business?
Marshall: To take out the part of baseball that
ruins it the most: to make sure the pitchers are able to pitch without
injuries. The fans can’t enjoy the game if their pitchers are injured.
Q. You obviously have this passion for
what you preach. You have offered to give away what you have learned. What is
your motivation?
Marshall: I love baseball. It’s the greatest
game in the world. No question about it. I was 5-foot-8 and a half inches tall
at my tallest. Now, at age 66, I’m 5-foot-6 and a half. I was able to pitch
major league baseball and finish in the top seven in the Cy Young five times.
That can’t happen in any other sport. I can’t play professional basketball or
football or any of the other major sports. But baseball is a great game: the
most skilled, the most intelligent game there is. I love baseball and I don’t
like injuries. There’s no reason for them. And it’s so simple to me. I can make
just three or four suggestions and eliminate all pitching injuries. Nothing
major, nothing complicated. Things you can learn in less than two weeks, and
you’ll never injure your arm.
Q. It must be very frustrating.
Marshall: I stopped worrying about what other
people think back when I was 6 or 7 years old. My obituary is written. Nothing
I do from now on is going to make any difference.
Q. What’s the first line in your
obituary going to say?
Marshall: The first closer in the game to win
the Cy Young award. That’s what’s going to be my obituary.
Q. When in the obit will it get to your
pitching theory?
Marshall: Never. Never. They don’t know about
it, don’t care about it, aren’t interested in it. It will say I had this
prickly personality, that I tried to force my own ideas about pitching on
everybody else. What a jerk he was there. But, boy, he did win the Cy Young
award. He wasn’t good enough, of course, to be in the Hall of Fame even though
he owns all the closing records and more than any other closer in the history
of the game has done.
I’m not upset. I know the politics of life. Life is not
fair. You’re taught that. You think it is, and then you find out that it isn’t—and it isn’t. The Peter Principle is alive and well. People rise to the level
of incompetence and that’s where they stay for the rest of their lives.
Q. Maybe we can get a Little League mom
to be baseball commissioner.
Marshall: (laughing) That would be a start. But
if there are kids out there who are throwing my way and enjoying themselves and
are pain-free, great!
Mike Marshall Favorites
Vacation spot: No, once I’ve seen something,
that’s great, whether it’s a place or book or a movie, but I don’t need to see
it again. I want to see something else. My wife and I love to go to various
cities in this country and spend four days and three nights. We get on the Gray
Line bus tour and listen to everything about the city. If there’s one place we
go more than anywhere else, it’s New York City, to see the plays.
Piece of music: I’m stuck in the ’60s and ’70s.
I’m a Muddy Waters fan.
Book: I’m not a novel reader. I read more
scientific journals kind of stuff.
Quote: Einstein’s definition of insanity:
“Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Movie: Cadillac Records
Best baseball movies: Bull Durham and Field of Dreams
Worst baseball movie: The Babe Ruth
Story
Superstitions: No, I’m too scientific for
superstitions.
Regrets: If you’re not trying, then you’re not
making mistakes. But if you make mistakes and you learn from them, then there’s
nothing to regret. You do the best you can. I wish I had done some things
differently, but I did the best I could with the information I had at the time.
And that’s
Most influential persons: William Heusner, my
kinesiology professor, opened my eyes to things I didn’t know existed. As a
result of that, I had a Major League career I never would have had. And Gene
Mauch gave me a chance in the Major Leagues.
Toughest opponent: Joe Morgan
Any pitchers today you admire: Greg Maddux
