Scapula Stuff

In "Differences in Scapular Upward Rotation Between Baseball Pitchers and Position Players" (Laudner et. al. - link), it is confirmed that pitchers have significantly less scapular upward rotation than position players at 60 and 90 degrees of humeral elevation.

Your arms at rest are 0 degrees. Raising them parallel with your shoulders straight in front of you is 90 degrees.

At 120 degrees (hyperabduction), it is not statistically significant, but the trend does seem to hold water.

This is important because insufficient scapular upward rotation has been empirically linked with several shoulder disorders.

The question now is: Why does this happen?

In "The Role of the Scapula in Rehabilitation of Shoulder Injuries" (Voight, Thomson - link), Voight et. al. conclude that while "rotator cuff strengthening has been an obvious treatment for various pathologies," the scapula is the base of the rotator cuff and therefore the muscles that control it should be strengthened as well. Weakeness causes altered biomechanics of the glenohumeral joint, possibly leading to unnecessary stresses on the rotator cuff (particularly the subscapularis) and the anterior capsule.

Still, we have no real link between why scapular upwards rotation is decreased in healthy professional pitchers compared to position players of the same organization. Nevertheless, we can regain some of this upwards rotation by performing various types of PNF stretching, D2 patterns with SPRI bands, tons of different types of rows (Eric Cressey of Cressey Performance loves these exercises for pitchers), and serratus anterior punches with SPRI bands.

Altered push-ups with chains or blast straps would be a great way to work similar muscles, especially if you focused on retracting the scapula at the top of the exercise.

Schooling

After careful consideration, I have decided to go back to school and finish my undergraduate coursework. Previous to dropping out of a full-tuition scholarship at a quality private university in the Midwest (very smart, I know), I was studying Economics and Entrepreneurship - two fields of study that I still enjoy reading about today. However, since my plan in life is to work around baseball (and sports medicine/training overall), I'll be taking some general coursework at the local junior college to get my prerequisites out of the way (sadly enough I have 90+ semester credits finished but nearly none in the hard sciences) before applying for admission to a local college to study Exercise Science. After graduation, I will take the ATC and CSCS exams for certification and attend graduate school to earn a Master's degree in Kinesiology. Though I can't really see myself attaining a Ph. D., I suppose it is entirely possible that I will continue on.

Biomechanics Lab

I'm happy to report that the high-speed camera works wonderfully - if there's enough light. I took it to the batting cage to mess around with, and unfortunately there's not much to share due to the poor lighting conditions. However, I managed to take some great footage of Matrix-style choreographed fights at work last night, and that turned out wonderfully.

Dr. Glenn Fleisig of ASMI (hazel's hero, if I recall correctly) was good enough to speak with me on the phone about planning out a biomechanics lab in the Pacific Northwest. He was happy to hear that I planned to study Exercise Science and that I was interested in opening up a biomechanics lab up here to do similar studies on pitchers and hitters. He said that he had a few people interested around the country in opening up "satellite" offices and that he would put me in touch with said people in about a month, after the Injuries in Baseball Conference in Houston.

Dr. Fleisig invited me to come down to Birmingham for a few days to understand the general layout of the facility and to help me get an idea of the cost and planning it would require to build such a lab myself. I look forward to visiting him sometime in 2009 to make this happen (and to think I have yet to visit Bill Peterson of RPM Pitching in Colorado).

The goal of Driveline Mechanics was to establish a baseline of what I thought I knew and see if it panned out, and it turns out that many of you are interested in similar pursuits! There exists a significant body of work out there that I am delving into that suggests that scapular loading below the acromial line can be very beneficial, and as such I am thinking about changing my mind on this very subject (though I never really cared about people passively "loading the scapula," only people who forcibly took it behind the acromial line and especially in a hyperabducted state). I hope that you never stop questioning both what I write and what you read, because the truth is that none of us have all the answers. One day, we may very well have them - but it does us no good to simply know what we should do; we must figure out how to relate them to the youth baseball players who will grow up to be professional pitchers so they can pitch with less injury concerns.

As many readers know, I've been salivating over the prospect of purchasing a high-speed camera for about a year now. Initial searches turned up a bunch of professional Ethernet-connected solutions that would run about $6,000 - $8,000 for a used model that did 300 FPS and only in black and white. Eventually I found the Fastec Sportscam, which looked very promising - but cost $8,000 - $10,000 depending on the features you wanted.

Bleh.

Enter the consumer-priced Casio EX-F1 and EX-FH20, digital cameras that feature the ability to "burst shoot" up to 60 FPS and to capture high-speed video up to 1000 FPS! When I first saw the EX-F1 featured on Engadget, I knew that it was only a matter of time before I broke down and spent the $1,000 on one. After waiting a few months for it to come down in price, Casio released the EX-FH20, which did burst shooting up to 40 FPS and still had the high-speed video quality that I wanted - but at half the cost. Biding my time for about three months, I kept searching Google Shopping for the best deal, and yesterday I noticed that it dropped to $440 + tax with pickup available from Best Buy. I placed the order online (along with an 8 GB SDHC card) and picked it up last night, using it to film my friend shooting wadded-up dollar bills into tumbler glasses to test the awesomeness of 420 FPS (I didn't use 1000 FPS as the quality's not great).

The camera's everything I wanted it to be, and I look forward to taping pitchers during Spring Training to share with you all. It is simply amazing to see the level of detail at 420 FPS that you can't get at 30 or 60 FPS from standard video capture.

Readers, please join me in welcoming devil_fingers to the Driveline Mechanics writing team! He will be contributing to our site with his witty banter, excess use of the tags field, and some excellent sabermetric analysis.

You know he must be a good writer because he's a Kansas City Royals fan, and it's well-documented that I'm a diehard Cleveland Indians fan (though I root for other teams...and against many others).

Some of his work can be found at the following link. I suggest:

Royals' 2008 Secondary Averages and Power/Speed Numbers
wOBA Positional Averages 2008
The Joe Posnanski Drinking Game
Two Monkeys and a Whole Lot of Money: Marcel, Rally, and the 2009 Free Agent Position Players
Marcels + Chone + Free Agents Spreadsheet

I'll let him create his own post to introduce himself. Please forgive the inevitable overuse of tags on future posts.

Driveline Mechanics has been growing leaps and bounds due to people spreading the word to other blogs, telling their friends, and even sending in articles to journalists! Both David and I appreciate that quite a bit.

You can help us spread the word by submitting articles that you like to BallHype's blog aggregator for Driveline Mechanics, which they added for us. The page is right here, and they automatically add our content to the page pulled from RSS. If you like an article, click "Hype It Up!" and place a link to the article on your blog or a forum that you read. Every incoming link is tracked and it helps us get more exposure.

Furthermore, you can add our articles to Baseball Think Factory by creating an account and submitting news items to the main page in the top left corner. We try to add our larger stories to the news aggregator, but not everything gets through because we don't want to self-promote too much.

Every incoming link and mention of our site helps us out by spreading the word and getting us new readers. The more readers, the more the SB Nation brass likes us, and that's how we earn the big bucks! (Not really, of course.)

And finally, last but not least, please consider sponsoring a page on Baseball-Reference.com. They do a great job providing statistics to our writers and to the general public, and it was recently Sean's (the founder of the site) birthday. You can see if a page is available for sponsorship by simply searching for a player. Less popular players can be sponsored for as little as $10. For example, one of my favorite players growing up was Alvaro Espinoza of the Cleveland Indians, and his page is only $10! Hmm, maybe I should snap that up...

As readers have undoubtably noticed, my schedule for updating this blog is quite random. The reason for this is because I work 10-11 hour graveyard shifts from Sunday-Tuesday, so on Wednesday I sleep all day and on Saturday I am preparing for the incoming work week, leaving me with Thursday and Friday with some free time to update the blog.

With any luck, I'll be updating this blog 3-4 times per week with two major articles about pitching mechanics, but realize that these articles will mostly be published on Thursday.

And yes, I can schedule my posts to publish in the future to give the appearance that I am regularly updating, but I prefer to see my work published immediately. I don't want to wait for my own articles to go up, so I figure you don't either.

Just wanted to clear that up for everyone out there!

After lots of coding and nonsense with my old hosting provider, I finally got my old WordPress site up at drivelinearchive.com ... sort of. Images aren't working because they're all hard-coded to look at drivelinemechanics.com rather than the new site, so to fix this, I need to manually change all the filenames in every post.

I will start this arduous process on Sunday night, but please be patient while I take care of everything. With any luck, the SB Nation tech team will perfect their WordPress import tool and I can move everything here, but in the meantime, this will have to do.

Over the offseason, I plan to do the following things to help increase the quality of content on this blog (this is not an exhaustive list):

• Purchase an entry-level high-speed camera
• Develop high-speed measurement specifications
• Upload more amateur coverage (mostly Seattle-area prep schools and colleges; however submissions from other areas are always welcome)
• Develop more specific analysis guidelines for regular-def video
• Finish development of the Driveline Pitcher Risk Database
• Learn more about PITCHf/x and incorporate it into my work

My ability to upload amateur content may be hindered by the fact that I will probably be coaching at a local prep school in Seattle, but I'll see what I can do about that.

Suggestions and recommendations are very welcome. My coverage of pitchers in the offseason will be constrained by the availability of video sources, so if anyone has good leads or wants to help in that regard, I am all ears. Chances are good that if you find video of someone, I will post it to the website.

I was just checking my Sitemeter stats and the referrals to my site (what can I say, I'm vain/a glutton for punishment depending on the link in question) and saw the following URL:

http://oaklandscoutingplayerdev.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/stephen-strasburg/

Going to the page (or any page on the site) brings up a login screen for WordPress. Google doesn't seem to know anything about the site, either.

Anyone want to tell me what this blog is all about? Feel free to email me if you don't want to divulge the information in comments - kyle at drivelinemechanics dot com.

Sorry readers, nothing much else to report. I have been backing off mechanical evaluations of pitchers as of late because getting playoff video is tougher and because I've been reading tons of biomechanics papers, textbooks, and discussing concepts with various experts.

I've been researching a considerable amount regarding kinetics and kinematic studies of the shoulder and elbow of pitchers and athletes of all types and doing my best to better understand the different types of loads. While my main theories about pitching haven't changed much, I'm just doing my best to become better educated about the science behind it all.

Hopefully you can all understand and remain as patient as you have been. Thank you very much.

Hey everyone,

I apologize for the lack of content - I've been quite sick for the past few days, and the other writers have been noticeably missing. I've been spending my time in bed reading some interesting medical journals at SagePub, which has free access to a lot of their studies. I'll post how to access them (as well as my favorites) later tonight, after the Angels game.