The State of Pitching

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