In the last post on Matt Garza I did, I asked readers to chime in:

Did you notice a few things? Here's what I saw:

• Like fellow contributor Nick Mueller said, Garza has a faster tempo when he throws his slider, which is a tip-off. Whether or not he varies his tempo with all of his pitches or if this is just a one-time occurance is tough to tell, but it's something worth watching out for.
• Note the frame where I freeze the image for 1 second at ball release. Tell me what you see. I'll post my answer tomorrow.

Only one person commented, saying:

It appears that in the frame on the right, he is rotating even earlier and his arm is falling behind the rest of his body…

That is correct, however it is related to what Nick pointed out - he has a faster tempo when throwing his slider, at least in this specific instance.

What I saw was something else...

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In Part Two of the Matt Garza analysis, I talked about his early pronation and how it would eventually damage his elbow due to hard supination through release of his breaking balls. In my opinion, the most dangerous pitch today is the slider, as it is thrown with a supinated grip and the force of a fastball.

I received numerous emails telling me that I was wrong; that Garza's elbow was in good health and that the early pronation wasn't a problem. Only time will tell for sure, but radial nerve irritation is not a good place to start. The fact that other pitchers have this problem (including his teammate James Shields, whose mechanics I do like) doesn't mean that Garza's arm will be fine - people have varying degrees of response to mechanical flaws. Many people never made it to the minors with similar mechanics just because their anatomy is slightly different. Remember - the n-value of pitchers we are working with is always 1. The fact that humans all have similar anatomical structures does give us the ability to make broad generalizations about what is safe and effective, but in the end, each human is physically (and genetically) different from the next.

In the end, remember that Matt Garza is just 24 years old - very young for a professional pitcher.

However, I digress. Let's take a look at his mechanics using video-based analysis...

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In Part One of the Matt Garza analysis, we noted that he threw five pitches while mainly relying on his fastball/slider combination to put hitters away. In Part Two, we'll analyze the source of his radial nerve irritation, and what it means for his long-term health.

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For the first major Pitcher Analysis on Driveline Mechanics, I've decided to choose one of my favorite pitchers, Matt Garza. I have always been a fan of Garza dating back to his days in the Twins' minor league system, in no small part due to his great k/bb ratios that he put up. Garza was consistently well above 3.0 k/bb ratio in the minors, with many years above 4.0, which is a great predictor of success.

Here are a few graphs from Fangraphs that indicate that Garza's k/bb ratio has been increasing and that his bb9 continues to decline, another great sign that he is continuing to progress while with the Rays:

Next, we'll look at the pitches he throws and the video breakdown of his mechanics...

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