Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports
Martijn Verhoeven wears many hats. As the research lead for the Twins sports science department, he is in conversation with all sorts of people, including baseball operations staffers, coaches, hitters, pitchers, and the medical staff. Verhoeven is armed with biomechanical data from KinaTrax, and the insights from the data help all these people do their jobs. For understandable reasons, the Twins want to keep these insights private. Baseball is a zero-sum game — only one team can win the AL Central, and so the Twins would prefer their divisional opponents not know what they’re thinking. But there is one area where this tendency for teams to hunt competitive advantages might be working against their interests: identifying solutions to the pitcher injury crisis.
“We have this massive injury epidemic,” Verhoeven told me. “There are times where I wish [teams] could share more and collaborate more because ultimately I think everyone would benefit from just having the best players on the field longer and more often. You can tell that people who’ve worked with this data for a long time are sort of moving toward [asking], ‘What can we do from a collective point of view in terms of making some of this understanding available?’”
In some ways, it feels that the sport is moving in the opposite direction. Teams hoover up talent from academia and wield their talents for internal use to gain slight edges over their competition. Meanwhile, the biomechanical data that KinaTrax or Hawk-Eye gathers with multiple synchronized high-speed cameras remain in the hands of the clubs, cutting off public researchers from data that could advance our understanding of pitcher injuries.
Which leads to a question of what the sport owes to itself. In July, The Dallas Morning News reported that the league had interviewed 160 individuals on the subject of pitcher injuries. A league source told me that a pitcher injury task force will be appointed after the interview project concludes, though the source could not confirm a specific date when the task force would begin its work.
Let’s assume that, in addition to the planned interview project and task force, Major League Baseball could accelerate its understanding of the injury crisis by permitting the public to access biomechanical data and by facilitating greater collaboration between teams. What steps could the league take to make that happen?
MLB could release the biomechanical data gathered by Hawk-Eye, allowing for public research to be conducted. It could fund an open-source journal for articles written by team employees. Teams could share their in-house data with researchers working at universities. Whatever form it takes, the sport ought to embrace an open-source ethos toward its data and research. Doing so could kick off a movement to unlock solutions to one of baseball’s most intractable issues.
“I think a lot of people in my position come from an academic background,” Verhoeven said. “These are people that were academically trained, have advanced degrees in biomechanics or biomedical engineering. And what I think appeals [to these people] is that idea of cross collaboration. You have findings, you share those, you see findings from others, you try to replicate them or build upon them.”
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Tyler Zombro is a recently retired minor league pitcher and a performance specialist at Tread Athletics, a pitching lab based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Zombro works with dozens of active MLB pitchers. He also suffered significant injuries as a result of a comebacker in 2021. These two facts give him a particular perspective on the question of pitcher injuries.
Zombro, who has communicated directly with MLB about the injury epidemic, frames the conversation in terms of “controllables.” One of these controllable factors, from his vantage, is a change to the “sticky stuff” policy. The league could allow pitchers to use sticky stuff to get a better grip on the baseball and, as a result, put less stress on their arms. During the 2021 season, MLB cracked down on the widespread use of illegal grip-enhancing substances, which resulted in artificially high spin rates and contributed to a depressed offensive environment. Pitchers have argued since the explicit ban that the baseballs are too slick and that the increased grip from the sticky stuff could help prevent arm injuries.
“Every major league baseball [is] different,” Zombro told me. “You don’t know how the baseball is going to come out texture-wise. And if you don’t have a substance and you need to increase feel for the baseball, you’re going to increase tension on your flexor mass to some degree. Call it 2%, call it 10% — [some pitchers] would say it’s 50%.”
The second controllable factor, in Zombro’s view, is the pitch clock. Zombro sees the addition of the clock as a potential contributor to pitcher injuries — but also allows that more research is needed.
“If you’re a muscle-driven thrower and your muscle fatigues, you have to find a new way to transfer energy across joints, which opens up the susceptibility to injury,” Zombro said. “Looking at how the pitch clock affects those energy systems and muscular fatigue, recovery times, etc. — no idea why that’s not a thing.”
More research is necessary to conclusively determine whether there is a connection between sticky stuff, the pitch clock, and pitcher injuries, though many pitchers have made arguments along the same lines as Zombro. The league sees the issue differently. According to a league source, a central takeaway from the interview project is that frequently throwing at maximum effort is a primary driver of pitcher injuries.
In any case, investigating these relationships is challenging. Part of this difficulty is the lack of public data on, say, energy systems and muscle decay among the major league pitcher population, and part of it is attributable to the culture of secrecy in major league front offices.
