I can understand it from a certain point of view. Here’s Morrow, the great hope for the future, they see him throwing 99 mph with sick movement and a great breaking pitch…oh yeah, this guy has to be an ace!

Then along comes Kyle saying “this guy’s arm action is risky” (note that he did not say “Morrow will blow his elbow out” or or “this guy’s a lock for labrum surgery”) and first they think to themselves “well, wouldn’t the front office have caught that?” Then comes “the front office had to have caught it!” And finally, we get “the front office had to have caught it; therefore, Kyle must be wrong!” All the while not realizing that the Mariners may have fully realized he was risk when they drafted him (remember, even though it was for different reasons, Aaron Crow was considered high-risk by even the Nymanites and he went in the first round this year). I was EXACTLY like this about Pedro Martinez a few years back with a different individual (my old baseball coach who got me into pitching mechanics) and a different team (New York Mets).

But what gets me though is that Graham says there is no correlation between pitching mechanics and injuries. Even Paul Nyman thinks there’s a correlation between pitching mechanics and injuries (though it is vastly different from our concept, it is out there). You have it from both sides…there’s a correlation between mechanics and injuries. His statement is (excuse the terrible pun) straight out of left field. With that said, I don’t want to insult the guy and would welcome him aboard at this site and others so he can learn about pitching mechanics and their correlation to arm injuries.

A lengthy post that waffles back and forth between arguing for and against your point. Let’s rebut it point by point, just because I have to wait for my code to compile.
1) I’ve seen nothing that shows we have any data on how living connective tissue reacts under stress, but I will concede your second point. Labs in the past few years have been growing their own tissues that are close to what the human body produces, and they do have the base materials they are made of, and can in fact make their own.

they’re going to analyze that pitching and use the information that is available to them to form conclusions about it

Just like the dark ages. It’s not like you’re getting measurements or extracting data on what is going on inside a joint. You’re analyzing pictures and video. Great for looking for tweaks or gives or patterns, but not so good for telling whats happening that the video can’t see.

people (idiots) still turn to superstitious and ineffective medicines that were made up and have no basis in evidence.

Replace medicines with diagnosis and this is much like your so-called studies.

we also have evidence.

No you don’t. Show me the numbers. Show me something besides this looks like someone else that got hurt here, so he will.

even bringing this like up shows the weakness of Graham’s argument:

Way to prove that you didn’t read Graham’s post.

pitcher breaks down, something must be wrong.

That something could very well have absolutely nothing to do with the mechanics he uses. You don’t know any better.

If a common mechanical element is repeatedly correlated with arm injuries (inverted w in this case) then we have evidence against its effectiveness.

Incorrect. You have assumptions. It might be evidence if every pitcher that did a particular thing had the same problem. I would imagine you’ve never worked with scientists, because your justification for calling something evidence is appallingly low.

because we are acting pragmatically, this is the kind of evidence we have to use.

This is the point where you declare your evidence is bunk. Good work.

This is based on evidence, and if you present evidence to actually argue a point made by Kyle

So I’m supposed to counter the evidence that you yourself implied is assumption based with what exactly? More assumption based evidence? Sure. I’m sure I can find two pitchers with the same motions that have different injury outcomes (or even 4 or 5).

judging credentials that you aren’t privy to

Aren’t privy to? Do you even know what privy means? He has more credentials he’s hidden that aren’t on his bio page that he’s posted? I’ve seen them, and sorry if I don’t think that someone that hasn’t done any peer-reviewed work into the subject, worked for long stretches as an “analyst”, and otherwise has read up on the works of one Dr. Marshall, is qualifications on a subject like this.

judging by your numerous posts of inane one-liners in lame chat threads on USS Mariner, I doubt you’re a mechanical expert yourself

I’ll concede that I’m not an expert, but that’s sort of the point. No one today can qualify as an expert. I would argue that I know just as much about injuries as you do, maybe more so, because I’ve been the subject of a few knee injury studies over the course of my years, and I tended to ask a lot of questions of my doctors.
 And I don’t post as USSM, I post on a fellow SBN blog, Lookout Landing, as you could probably see if you actually read the things you say you have. And those “inane one liners” are called banter and discussion. There are threads on LL that are a chat room of sorts, and being those are the ones that have people in them when I am up (time difference and work schedule means I don’t catch many games and I’m not often around when the exciting stuff is posted), those are the ones the majority of my comments are in.

Congratulations. You’ve proven yourself to be just the creationist-in-a-baseball-hat that your first comment implied.

Don’t worry, I won’t be back to argue with your assumptions anymore. After reading most of the postings, it’s clear that many of you are in it just to be believers, and don’t really care if the “evidence” that is used it real or not. See you in the reality-based part of the world.

Whilst I did skim it enough to get a gist of what Graham was saying, I wrongly assumed that it was in direct response to Kyle. For that I am sorry. However, 1) Faux just proved that there are EXACTLY people who I described in my post and 2) reading Graham’s article carefully, it comes across as too light to make a conclusion and a tad hypocritical. He himself concludes that there is no correlation between pitching mechanics and injuries. But yet, he just wrote an entire article on how “no one can be sure of x, y, and z.” How then can he himself be sure that there is no correlation?

He seems to back down in the comments section…for example agreeing with one poster that while stating “Francisco Liriano has a risky arm action” is fine, stating “Brandon Morrow will probably get hurt in the rotation” is not. Thing is, there’s such a thin line between those two statements that it may as well not exist. Yes, Liriano had an arm injury, but why then does Graham agree with pointing out the arm action (and ignore tempo, finishing, etc.)? You can also hurt your arm by just having a terrible conditioning regimen. That in and of itself is acknowledging that something must be wrong with Francisco Liriano’s arm action; else why would it be “risky”?

Further, there’s a few comments where some are accusing people interested in pitching mechanics of making it sound “science-y” and putting up a boatload of data that makes their opinion valid. Well, I hate to ask this, but how is Graham any different? I’m sure Faux or someone like him will come back and point out his academic credentials. Sound familiar? Yes, that’s right, that’s the exact same thing that the Nymanites and the Marshallites do. Graham’s opinion is as valid in its presentation as Nyman’s, Mills’, Ellis’, Gomez’s Marshall’s, O’Leary’s, Kyle’s…you name it. But like all of them, he’s just one of many differing opinions out there. What makes him any different or “right-er”? He’s one of the very people he points out as having an opinion on pitching mechanics.

His opinion is simple, really; that there may or may not be a correlation between mechanics and injuries. But his dismissal of proper pitching mechanics as being the domain of internet gurus is patently absurd. Is Brent Strom an “internet guru?” Is Rick Peterson? Jim Hickey? Dan Warthen? Tom House? These are MLB pitching coaches (or in the case of Strom and Peterson, former pitching coaches that have gone on to other things and in the case of House, a college pitching coach at a rather prominent college). They believe in a correlation between mechanics and injury, even if some seem to be wrong about it based on their results. This is not the cult-like internet movement that Graham makes it out to be.