Sorry I haven't gotten too much--I mean anything--posted so far guys, I've been experiencing some technological differences (if you haven't seen the movie Idiocracy, go rent it you will be a better person) on a couple more fun articles in the pipeline, but I'll couple things that have been bugging me. As posted by Kyle regarding the complete cheddar Zumaya throws:

Don’t let the 100 mph fastball fool you; Zumaya is high-risk.

The line of thinking Kyle is referring to here which I have seen quite a bit is backwards. Completely aside from Zumaya's scary arm action or anyone's mechanics period, simply the fact that he does throw 100+ makes him higher risk. I'm baffled as to how something this intuitive has gotten lost in the shuffle, but I'll explain it anyway inside the link...



By my pre-coffee early morning calculations, a 100 mph baseball has a little over 20% more kinetic energy than a 90 mph baseball. Explanation over. The implications of the body generating that much more energy along the kinetic chain should be obvious regarding the tearing of ligaments/muscles yet it seems many come to the literal opposite conclusion. More energy=more risk that a/the weak link will blow out. Yes, throwing hard means that pitcher is doing some (explosively) good things towards being a better major league pitcher as velocity ceterus paribus helps quite a bit but don't remotely take a high velocity pitcher as necessarily being a long-term healthy one. (Just to head this one off at the pass, I'm more than aware that a drop in velocity for a single pitcher is a 50-foot neon sign of injury. I'm not talking about that.)

Sorta kinda related: I'm gigantic about not falling into confirmation bias and love to play the devil's advocate quite a bit, so to me, when we look at a guy like Smoltz and say "inverted-L no wonder he blew out his elbow and now shoulder" vs "Maddux does everything 'right' no wonder he keeps plugging along" it's imprudent at the very least to measure them against each other singularly. We're talking 95+ mph for 20 years vs. 86 mph, again mechanics aside it's obvious who is likely to be more injury prone. Have to remember that when you put those data points in the chart. Not to say that I believe the M/L actions are healthy for a pitcher by any stretch of the imagination but just to keep as much information in the inventory as possible.

This is why, whenever I do finally post some player-specific stuff, I will always speak (type?) of mechanics regarding injuries in terms of risk rather than absolutes. There are many more factors beyond mechanics or even anything currently tangible that goes into forming a pitcher's injury report e.g. workload, pitch selection, conditioning etc...that said it wouldn't be Driveline Mechanics if we didn't pay attention to that factor.

Nick