Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1679: How to Keep Players Healthy in 2021

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the seemingly building backlash to the extra-innings automatic-runner rule and Dusty Baker’s comments about anti-Astros heckling, then (19:51) bring on high performance coach Gary McCoy to discuss his epiphany about preventing player injuries, the importance of deceleration, how he helped a team in Taiwan have an injury-free season, […]

How long, baby, how long will this madness be here to stay? How can we make a living on such a tiny page You got to make a change Hello and welcome to episode 1679 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. So we have a guest today who will be with us for most of the episode. His name is Gary McCoy, and he is a high-performance coach.

He has worked for many a team, many a league all over the world, worked for the Astros, worked for the Marlins, but also for teams in Australia and Taiwan and elsewhere. And we'll be talking to him about injury prevention today. So there's a really interesting story recently at Sport Techie by Joe Lemire, who wrote about how Gary worked with a team in Taiwan and managed to improve their injury prevention program to the point that the team had zero injuries all season long. He pitched a perfect game injury-wise, at least with soft tissue injuries. So we're going to talk to him about how he achieved that and how MLB teams should be approaching keeping their players healthy in general, but also in this season in particular, as everyone is worrying about innings limits, but perhaps they shouldn't be, as Gary will tell us.

And we'll also talk about how the new technology of biomechanics is changing performance science and how AI is playing a role. So we'll get into all of that in just a moment. Just wanted to say that I think the backlash is building to the extra innings automatic runner rule. And maybe this is just because I am against it. And therefore, I'm looking for all evidence that others are against it. But it seems to me like anecdotally, people just don't really like this rule. At least most baseball fans don't. And I think that it's bothering them now more than it did last year when we wrote off everything because it was 2020.

Now it's like, oh, we're still doing this and we're going to keep doing this potentially forever. And it feels like the last chance to change that. So I am seeing people, you know, I think there were just four extra inning games in a day again as there were on opening day. Again, as there were on opening day. And so when you see just all of these really exciting games come down to the wire and then all of a sudden they turn into non-baseball in the 10th, I'm just not going to get used to it. And I will eventually resign myself to it if I must. But right now, while we still have a chance to change it, I must say something. I'm sympathetic to this, but we did have a couple games that went into the 12th and the 13th.

It's not necessarily ending in the 10th yeah although i guess the counter argument to that is that like if it's not always uh if it's still sometimes giving us baseball of great length then like why change the normal rules because most extra innings games end before like the 14th inning anyway and then it would be baseball as you know it i again i think that you are perfectly justified in being cantankerous about this and i want to support you yeah thank you i'm not cantankerous often enough so i have to choose my spots if there's something i'm feeling cantankerous about i gotta gotta use that yeah but, I don't find myself being bothered by this particular thing, but I want you to be bothered by your particular things and find satisfaction in your ability to either alter them or talk about them a lot. So that anything I will say will actually alter it. But still, I must protest. And it's not so much about the length. It's not just that they end earlier. And they do end earlier. It does do what it's designed to do, not every time necessarily, but on the whole. the game in a pretty fundamental way. And so even if it does last a few innings, it's not the same sport that it was for the first nine innings. And that just bothers me on some fundamental level.

Can I just read a passage from Ginny Searle wrote about this at Baseball Perspectives? And I thought Ginny sort of summed up the way that I feel about this pretty well. So it says, a tied score as the game winds down is theoretically the most tense situation in most sports. The runner on second rule produces a situation which is entirely the opposite. Baseball is among the most chance dependent of any major sport and to introduce an element making scoring trivial at a critical juncture only increases that reliance. A runner on second alters a pitcher's strategy, a batter's incentives, and produces a situation that is fundamentally divergent from the typical gameplay. Just because the engineered situation is identical in result to a batter leading off with a double

doesn't mean it's ultimately comparable. A batter on second with no outs in 2019 produced an average result of 1.15 runs, six-tenths of a run more than in a typical inning. For the pitcher to start in such a position should be a consequence, for the batter a challenge. The pitcher has to adjust their strategy after placing themselves in a precarious position, and the batter has to focus on plating runs rather than simply not getting outs. For players to find themselves in these situations offers a challenge in adaptability. To be placed in such a situation offers a wholly different And I think that is true. I agree with that. And some see the strategy as a positive. But for me, the fact that it does diverge at a point where like I'm so invested in this game already, like if we were playing the whole game under these rules, fine. I mean, we talked about that, I think, last year. And I don't know that that would be an improvement, but I just I crave that consistency, I think. So Ginny continues, the runner on second rule is divergent enough from the typical strictures of baseball that it's reasonable to understand it as a totally different instantiation of the sport. The backlash produced after the first week of the rule's second season in which it's become apparent this is MLB's view of the future of the game rather than a pandemic-produced necessity points to this discrepancy.

Extra innings are typically among the most exciting parts of a game for hardcore fans because they combine the best of both worlds, the anything-that-can-happen potentiality of a new game, and the tense battle of a close contest winding down. The implementation of the rule has created a diametrically opposed situation in which a tied result through nine innings saps rather than produces the tension that keeps fans watching throughout overlong contests. On Tuesday, runs scored in more than 80% of the 16 extra half innings recorded. Wednesday, that figure dipped all the way to 75%. Players and teams have no reason to oppose the rule because it makes their lives easier, but it's simply not worth the trade-off so clearly felt by fans. So hear, hear. I think that that is very well argued and I find myself persuaded

and I can't really care about it that much, but it is well argued. So there's that. Yeah. Well, I don't want to make you cantankerous about it if you don't feel that way because it's not a great feeling. So if you're okay with it, then by all means, continue to be okay with it. But those of us in the cantankerous camp, I'm giving voice to that. And from what I can tell, I mean, it's hard to tell, but there was a survey that Morning Consult did last year before it was really even put into effect, just like for opening day. And at that point, I think it had like a negative eight favorability rating, but that was before most people had actually seen it happen. When there are polls at like fan graphs or MLB trade rumors about it, it's like 80% negative. And also like people feel strongly about being against it. And that's not totally representative

of the average fan either necessarily. So I don't really know what the real sentiment of the nation is. I don't think I'm capturing it myself or in my Twitter feed, but just saying there's probably nothing we can do to avoid this because everyone involved with the playing of the games is like, yeah, I want to know when the game will end and I want to go home. And so that will probably carry the day. But it does feel like something that like no one was really clamoring for except maybe those people. And it's kind of like that conversation that Sam would bring up sometimes about like, who is the game for? Like, is it for the players or is it for the fans? And, you know, it's for both to a certain

extent, but there are many more fans than there are players. And so I do tend to feel that it's more for the fans. And so if this is just something that's like, well, we want to get it over with when most of us who are still watching at that point are like, no, I'm kind of enjoying this. I want to see how it ends. That's what it feels like to me that it's, you know, it's not really, it's a solution in search of a problem to a certain extent. And it's one that mars my enjoyment of the game. But again, I'll get used to it. I'm not going to complain about it for the rest of the season and for all future seasons. But while there's still a chance to affect the course of history here, just saying, not a fan. just in case anybody wants to look back on this era of baseball and say, well, where did Ben stand? Right. Then you'll be here. They'll be like, oh, we listened to those episodes of Effectively Wild,

and now we don't have doubts. Yes. He was on the right side of history, or perhaps it'll be the wrong side of history. We can't really tell in the moment. Maybe in the future, it'll be incredibly popular, and everyone who grew up watching that role will wonder why we ever subjected ourselves to 17 inning games that were played the same way all the way through. But I'm not there yet. So the only other thing I think I wanted to mention was just to read a little Astros quote here from the incredibly quotable Dusty Baker. And usually I enjoy the quotes. And in this case, I can't get on board with Dusty's sentiment here, but it's kind of in the long tradition of whenever anyone with the Astros says something related to sign stealing, it makes it worse and just makes everyone

more angry at them. So they should probably never publicly comment on it at all. But Dusty said that fans heckling the Astros is, quote, a sad situation for America. And there are many sad situations in America. The Astros getting heckled, I would not put anywhere near the top of the list or even on the list at all, really. I guess I see what he's saying. So he said, you can tell the amount of hostility and the amount of hatred in the stands. How many in the stands have never done anything wrong in their life? We paid the price for it. How many people have not cheated on a test or whatever at some point in time? It's easy if you live in glass houses, but I don't think anybody lives in glass houses. I think sometimes we need to look at ourselves before we spew hate on somebody else. It's a sad situation for America to me. When you hear things, what are the kids supposed to think in the stands?

And some of them are kids. They're following their parents. It's sad to me. People make mistakes and we've paid for ours and I wish they'd leave it alone. I guess the thing about it is, though, that like the public feedback part and when this all happened, we talked about how advisable that was on the league's part, but the booing was part of the thing, right? That was meant to be part of the feedback loop that the team experienced. And last year, that didn't happen. And that's not the fault of the

Astros, right? We can't lay the pandemic at their feet. But just because time has passed, does not mean that the sort of public address of the of the scandal has has occurred, at least not in a way that people think is sufficient. And so I get why this is not fun. And I think that there will come a point where it starts to feel a little played out. And I think that the amount of fervor isn't always proportional to the thing. But I also think that this stuff matters in different ways to different folks. And I don't think that six games into the season were anywhere close to what would be considered like bad taste around this no i think that like

you know the the unfortunate one of the unfortunate things about the crowd administering some kind of justice is that it's not always discerning and so it doesn't always do a good job of like booing the guys who were on the team during the banging scheme and so i can appreciate how if you were say an astro who wasn't there that season you would be like what the hell man like i didn't that wasn't me but also that is part of why i think that there was risk of it going kind of off the rails when the commissioner decided that this was how they were going to address things but also that was the only way they thought they could secure cooperation from the players involved so i get why it's not enjoyable i would imagine that

for dusty baker who was both not involved and sort of was brought in to help right the ship and has to you know i don't know if he will continue managing after this season, either with Houston or with anyone else, but has to be aware that like the amount of time he has left to be a professional baseball manager is probably limited, right? Like there's less ahead of him than behind from a career perspective. And so I can understand how he might be like, come on, man. I'm just trying to get through this last little bit. But I do still think that they all need me to training. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a manager's job to stick up for his players. And

sometimes that even means saying things that you might not totally believe because it's what your team needs to hear. In this case, I don't have a problem with him saying it necessarily, but the sad situation for America part is probably a little much. And I think it depends. I don't know if this was prompted by a specific thing that he heard. If there was some specific out-of-bounds comment, if there is hatred like you know he's saying hatred and hostility like there's a difference i think between just you know good-natured ribbing or just like hey you cheated we're gonna boo you and you know like personal attacks and really

targeted and profane and who knows what so like, if he's responding to a certain comment that we didn't hear, then there are certain things that even in heckling the Astros, you should probably not be hurling their way. But if it's just the people booing and people tossing an inflatable trash can onto the field, then frankly, that's all in good fun for most of us, at least. Maybe not for the Astros. I can see why it would get tiresome for them or demoralizing for them even, but they haven't really paid the price is the thing. He said that multiple times and yeah, they paid draft pick penalties and they've paid a penalty and people not liking them and resenting them, but they didn't have the walk of shame that they were going to have last year, and now they're having it. So I think that was inevitable,

and the players didn't get suspended, and I understand why they didn't, but there are people who look at that and say, well, look at all the dinky little things that people get suspended for, and the Astros had this sophisticated cheating scheme and they didn't get suspended. And people are angry about that, even if there is a reason why it was handled that way. And so I'm not even in the most anti-Astros, like their names are cursed for all time because of the pinging scheme. I mean, I don't think it even helped them as much as most people think it helped them. And that while it was wrong, yes, there's also a long history of people cheating in baseball and even cheating in very similar ways. So, you know, like at a certain point, we'll just have to get over it. But I don't think the first week of the actual season when they've had to take their lumps from fans is the time to say that everyone needs to stop and that this is a sad situation for america yeah i totally agreed i think that there needs to be some amount of self-reflection there and an understanding that while it is a thing that

they have been living with every day since it happened it has been out of remove for most fans. And this is their first opportunity to be in the park and be close and be vocal in a way that the Astros can actually hear. And so they're going to get more of this. And candidly, the more they talk about how much it sucks, the more of it they're going to get. That's the thing. No one's going to read this and say, you know what? It is a sad situation for America. Those poor asters.

We should lay off a little. So if anything, this probably just brings more abuse upon them. But I think most people will just ignore it and continue to boo the asters. And so ultimately, the words will probably not have much effect. Certainly not the intended effect. Yeah, agreed. But it would be a bummer if you are dusty and you've had as long and rich a career as he has had. Yeah, agreed. Just not for the country as a whole. Well, and it's a blunt instrument, right? That's part of the appeal of the boo, but it's also one of its limitations.

And its exact target is sometimes not always easy to discern. And the feeling behind it is not always clear. A lot of collateral damage with the boo. Right. It's like how we need more than one kind of honk in a car. You need to have more than one horn tone because you can't address all the many situations that you would like to with just the one tone and people might get confused. So it is a blunt instrument, and I get why he's not thrilled about it, but it is also an inevitability that I think if they talk about it less, will peter out more quickly than if they don't. Right. Yeah. They are not experts at diffusing the situation or mollifying anyone.

And you'd think they would have learned that by now. I meant to mention, by the way, speaking of fan participation, during one of the extra inning games this week at Yankee Stadium. The fans were chanting, play real baseball, which I enjoyed. I don't enjoy or agree with everything fans ever chant at Yankee Stadium, but play real baseball. I could see myself chanting that someday. Yeah, I'm impressed by that. That is also, you know, when you hear that people are mad about a thing, sometimes I'm like, are we hearing that or do we just have very specific Twitter feeds? But that is like a very strong bit of evidence that this is a broadly unpopular construct within baseball. So that's good to know.

Yeah. Good chant cadence as well. Play real baseball. Yeah. You can end that with a clap, clap, clap, clap. Yes, exactly. Okay. real baseball. Yeah, you can end that with a clap, clap, clap. Yes, exactly.

Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back with Gary McCoy to talk about how deep players help. All right, we are joined now by Gary McCoy. He is a high-performance coach who has made many stops in many sports for many teams over the years. I was just looking at your LinkedIn page, Gary, and I was scrolling and scrolling and scrolling because you've been in a number of places and done a lot of things, and I'm sure that we will cover a good number of them today.

But welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. And I guess that's what happens when you get old, right? You have a number of notches in the tree, so to speak. Right. So in the Sport Techie article about the injury-free season that you were able to help make a reality in Taiwan, you say the journey started for me in 2007. So maybe we should start there too. So tell us a little bit about that journey. Yeah, it was right after 2006, the World Baseball Classic, Team Australia, where I'm from, we were the only team not to sustain, like have our players sustain

injury going into the major league baseball and minor league baseball season. And so there were a lot of questions around, you know, Team Australia haven't had injuries. So all of a sudden I was starting to get some phone calls and I retrieved a call from a guy by the name of Josh Seligman, who was the then strength and conditioning coordinator for the Florida Marlins. And Josh and I started talking. He said, hey, look, we've got some openings. We're starting to get some funding to have like a strength and conditioning coach at every level of our organization. He goes, we've got a major league strength coach, but hey, you can go anywhere you want.

Where would you like to go? And I said, well, what was closest to my home was Albuquerque, New Mexico. like to go? And I said, well, what was closest to my home was Albuquerque, New Mexico. And so for a whopping $695 per month, I became the strength and conditioning coach for the AAA Albuquerque isotopes. And that's really where the journey began. And when you started, what would you say the baseline sort of knowledge level of the players and the coaching staff that you were interacting was at that time? Were there guys who were taking kind of a smart and holistic approach to how they were training, or was it, did you have a lot of work to do to get people up to speed? Yeah, there was a lot of work to do. And it was, when I say getting up to speed, I mean, it's really coming at this from a

different area. My background was a master's in exercise Science and all my work had been performed in physical therapy clinics and working alongside medical institutions historically, working for a product manufacturer at one point called Cybex. I was their director of education. So I was pretty well armed to go in and have that fight, so to speak. But I was fighting consistently against a player knowledge that said, if I just get bigger and stronger, that's going to make me throw the baseball faster. If I just get bigger and stronger, I won't sustain an injury on the field. And I was fighting against coaches who had come out of who were playing in, say, the 1950s and 60s and said, hey, we never did that thing called weight training. And for that

reason we think that's contributing to the injuries in the sport so at that level it was kind of yeah the the entry point was a total re-education but I had a a phenomenal manager who's one of the biggest characters I've ever met in baseball by the name of Dean Trainer and Dean kind of had me because he knew I understood the game of baseball. He had me integrated. He was having me coach first base while being the strength and conditioning coach. So that was really cementing me with some credibility in the eyes of the athletes. And that really opened the door for me to gain their trust and move them to a different performance dynamic. So tell us about your central epiphany that acceleration is not the only thing that matters.

Yeah. And it got to the point where this was, we were three quarters of the way through the season at AAA. And so I think it was August. And I was watching, I was given this set of conditioning manuals to apply to the athletes. And these were, I mean, you could have cut and pasted these out of a 1950s muscle and fitness magazine, you know, squats, everyone does squats, everyone does bench press. And yeah, let's get some deadlifts in there. Oh, this thing called the Arnold press,

that looks good. We'll throw that in. Right. And so I was looking at these programs and I wasn't seeing a correlation to injury reduction, nor any correlation to performance enhancement. And I'll give you some examples of that. Velocities were decreasing on the pitching staff. And I'll give you some examples of that. Velocities were decreasing on the pitching staff. Our injury rates were still high. And so I contacted Josh and said, hey, look, a lot of this stuff, I'm having trouble seeing the end goal of these exercises. I'm not seeing the benefit. And Josh, to his credit, said to me, hey, you can go off book here a little bit.

Come up with what you think this should look like. And so when I was given that latitude and flexibility I started to implement a lot of change you know it was probably about July but it was really in August when I had a pitcher by the name of Randy Williams left-handed pitcher come to me he had sustained a sports hernia injury fielding a bunt on wet ground in Tacoma and he said to me in the weight room one night he goes goes, yeah, I'm getting through my rehab. He goes, I'll just do some exercise. He goes, but I'm done. I'm 31 years old. I'm throwing 86 to 88 miles per hour. And I really don't think the organization is planning to resign me. So I said, Randy, what are you going to do? I'd known him pretty well by this point in

time. And he said, I'm going to go drive a truck in Galveston, Texas. He goes, I've got a wife and four daughters. I've got to put food on the table. He goes, that's what I think I'm going to go drive a truck in Galveston, Texas. He goes, I've got a wife and four daughters. I've got to put food on the table. He goes, that's what I think I'm going to do. And I said, so you don't think you'll resign? He goes, yeah, my agent talks to me about potentially resigning next year with a different team. I said, do you want to give this another shot?

Do you want to try something? And he said, yeah. He goes, what have you got in mind? And again, I had his trust. And I said, look, I have this thought that we're trying to increase velocity. And that's the key thing that you need to do to get a job in major league baseball is improve your velocity. I think I can do that. And I said, I have this theory that your body is only going to produce as much force as it has the ability to control.

And I explained it to him. I said, it's kind of like you going out and buying a Ferrari. If the engine goes from zero to 200 miles an hour in five seconds, I said, but the brakes will fail at 50 miles an hour for your life. What are you going to do? How fast are you going to drive that car? He goes, yeah, I'm not going to go above 50. I said, yeah. I said, that's the innate kind of constraints of the human body. It's this fight and flight mechanism. The human body has an innate wiring system that says only produce as much force as you have the ability to control. And I said, and that's my theory around this. If we build a really good braking system on you, Randy, I think we can improve velocity.

And what were the mechanisms that you had to measure the efficacy of that braking system, right? It's one thing to say, let's design a series of exercises to kind of help to better regulate this and decelerate the body in a way that allows it to absorb that energy and not injure itself. But how were you going about actually measuring whether or not that was working beyond the eventual injury or re-injury of a player. Yeah. And I didn't have a lot of resources to do this Meg at the time either. So it was much of this was kind of hands-on and visual understanding. First and foremost, I had to look at the way Randy produced force. Every baseball pitcher that I have worked with has a unique

muscle acquisition strategy in how they throw a baseball and I think it starts you know from the first time they're standing on their feet and they throw the rattle across the crib right I think it begins there and they start to burn in that motor pattern and all of a sudden they have this unique way of throwing the baseball and that kind of accounts for differential in the mechanics that we see day to day so the very first thing that was really important to me was not to try to alter Randy's mechanics but to understand that strategy understand that neural acquisition strategy so it was a matter of looking at a lot of film front side film film from first base as a left-handed pitcher to understand okay

what were the vectors in which he produced force and how he released the baseball. What I did was track from release point, kind of made that my zero point and looked at everything leading up to that in the upper quadrant as acceleration, everything beyond that deceleration. But then you've got to look at the kinetic chain. So the body's ability to correlate these deceleration moments uh throughout the body begin with the pitcher's land leg he needs to have very first and foremost very good eccentric control of his body in that in in that deceleration moment so the things i was doing for measurement were

like loading him up uh say with an olymplympic bar across his shoulders and having him do like it's called a good morning exercise where you functionally normally on two feet stand stand on two feet and bend at the waist and come back up very similar to his motion as pitching but i had him do this on one leg so i want to see you know could he firstly control this 45 pound Olympic bar, decelerate against it and pop back up and how many repetitions before fatigue. Then we started adding weight and we started improving that. So it was a very rudimentary process to increase his ability to sustain that weight under control. And then we kind of went about that joint by joint, worked up through the hip and worked into the shoulder, into the shoulder girdle as well. So I'd have him on a device called a 45 degree back, which replicated where he was

at point of release. His spine was at 45 degrees. And then what I would do is connect him to, there's a machine developed by the company Kaiser that you can increase and decrease resistance. It's pneumatic pressure. And so I had him in a cuff. We were it's pneumatic pressure and so i had him in a cuff we were increasing that pneumatic pressure and i used to have him get to release point hold there go through this vector and i want at least six seconds of control against this weight and gradually increase the weight as and in a distracted position gradually increase that weight until we got to a point i thought we would peaked with his ability. So it was really just using weights, eyes, and pneumatic pressure to understand exactly how he decelerated

throughout the kinetic chain. So I would imagine that for someone like him, where the alternative is maybe him not being able to play professional baseball anymore, or at least not play it at the level that he's used to, that not that he's going to let you do whatever you want, but that he would be open-minded and sort of willing to embark on a training regimen and a series of experiments like that. But I'm curious how for the other guys in the org who maybe were at an earlier point in their careers or not facing such a crossroads,

how you started to get buy-in, especially early in the process like this, where there might not be a lot of precedent for this approach to training? Yeah, it's a great question. And first and foremost, I mean, you're only, like that old saying in baseball, as a position player, you're only as good as your last at bat. Well, I'm only as good as the last athlete that I worked with. And when Randy, so the follow-up story on Randy is all of a sudden he signs with the Chicago White Sox. I think it was in 2009. And 2009, he's in big league camp and he says, oh, my arm feels great.

We've been doing this deceleration work all throughout the winter. My arm feels fantastic. And right before I was ready to report to spring training in Florida, I got the chance to see him and have dinner with him out in Glendale, where he is with the White Sox. And I watched him pitch and he was still 88, 89 miles an hour. And I was like, man, he goes, yeah, but my arm feels really good. And so a second epiphany came that, boy, I've taught Randy, we've built a really good braking system on him and he feels fantastic. What I've yet to do is teach him how to put his foot on the accelerator a little bit more and so i said randy i said you

know when you hump this is the term hump up on your fastball when you're starting to give it more you're really going to let it go let it go you've now got the security you're not going to get hurt you've got the security because guess what mate 88 to 89 is not going to get you into the big leagues under a contract with this team. Let's push it. So I didn't get to see him pitch again live, but he sent me text messages. All of a sudden he was 93, 94. And I said, great, we're on pathway now. And so with that pop in velocity, I was able to reference that to pitchers. And he started speaking to other players on my behalf and say, hey, get with him.

He's doing something different, something that's very unique. And this approach and his trust in the system and the process and his results certainly helped impact other players. So you made a number of stops after that. You go to the Astros minor league system as well, work for some other companies and tell us a little bit about how you ended up working for the team that you helped have the injury-free season, the Chinese Brothers. Yeah, it's a funny journey. So in 2012, I was then in the big leagues as kind of an assistant strength coach to Dr. Gene Coleman, who had been in the organization for many, many years. And I was fortunate because the Brad Mills was fired kind of mid-season. And it is like one of the

funniest stories. I was in a clubhouse in Round Rock, Texas with our manager, Tony DeFrancesco, our pitching coach, Bert Hooten, and our hitting coach, Leon Roberts. And Roger Clemens was in there with Matthew McConaughey. And we're all crammed in this little clubhouse. And I'm like, yeah, this is a weird session that we're in. We're talking about the game. And Matthew's kind of looking at us like we've got two heads. And we're having a beer after the game. And sure enough, Tony shows me his phone. He says, hey, Ozzie, step outside. He goes, I've just been called up to the big leagues. They're at the end of the game tonight. They're firing Brad Mills and I'll be in the big leagues tomorrow. I was like, holy cow, this is our manager, Tony. I said,

you've waited for this your whole life. And he goes, yeah. He goes, as soon as I get there, he goes, I'm going to need you up there with me. So I was fortunate to finish the 2012 season in the big leagues. And by then we'd had, you know, a lot of people would say the Astros were tanking, that we had a pretty much a triple A team playing in the major leagues, which we did. We didn't have a lot of big name free agents or anything at that point in time. So I was familiar with most of the players that come through working with me. These are guys like Dallas Keuchel, Brent Wallace, Travis Bach, you know, a lot of guys that I'd worked with, Jay Happ, that I'd worked with historically and had some influence on during spring training.

So I got the chance to work with them, but we were having an ownership change and we had a lot of people coming into the organization. And next thing you know, like I'm flying back from Wrigley, the last game of the season, and having a chat with the then general manager, Jeff Lunau, and he said to me, he goes, hey, I really want you to – we're going to make some changes. We're pretty sure you're going to be the head guy next year. We want you to consider relocating to Houston. And we're having that discussion. He goes, don't say anything yet. We're going to make these changes. I want you to fly to Houston and have go through

an interview process. And the tough thing about that was everybody I interviewed with kind of wasn't qualified to interview me. Didn't even know what questions to ask of somebody in sports science or performance. So it was a really difficult day for me, and I got out of there thinking, I don't know where this is going to go. And then sure enough, a change was made. They brought in an assistant general manager over at Saw Player Development who had a personal favorite as a strength coach, and he took the helm in 2013. And because his process was so divergent from mine

I thought I and and Jeff begged me to stay in the organization was offering me great money to stay at AAA to be a roving consultant it wasn't like sour grapes for me that I wasn't in the big leagues it was like I think you know to have this conflict of training methodologies is not good for the organization I think I need to move on. And I kind of left the Houston Astros without a job. And then I think Jeff may have had something to do with it. But about three days later, I get a call from a gentleman who's now the new president of a team, an emerging team in the Taiwan League. And I'd been in Taiwan historically with the Australian baseball team, working in things like the IBAF World Cup and a few different tournaments and stuff we'd had over there.

So I was familiar with Taiwan and I was interested. And I thought, they said, yeah, we really want you to come in and build this from the ground up. And that was really the impetus. So I spent a good part of 2013 working on a system. The Taiwanese league has two halves to the league, very similar to like a lot of AA leagues in the US. And the first half, I signed on for the first half because I didn't know that I wanted to stay in Taiwan the whole year. I signed on for the first half. We actually

had zero soft tissue injury in this first half. And this was a team with Manny Ramirez and a number of major league players that were kind of washouts that were coming onto this team. So that was a lot of fun. And so fast forward, my interpreter, there a gentleman by the name of Ellery Chen, he was just assigned as my interpreter for this team. He became the, like an assistant general manager with the biggest team in Taiwan. They're called the Brothers and the full name is the Brothers Elephants.

So strange name strange team they wear black and yellow uniforms sometimes an all yellow uniform but have the biggest fan base in Taiwan and when he entered the organization he immediately started to review the injury rates and now we're averaging about 30 they had three years, and 15. The injury rates were 33, 31, and 32 soft tissue injuries. And he said, I think I know a guy that can fix this. So that was my entry point into Taiwan. And the league there has some structural advantages relative to major league baseball in that the season is shorter.

So they play in a typical non-pandemic year, they play 120 games versus 162. How much of a difference does that make in players' ability to stay healthy throughout what is still a slog? Yeah, let's put it this way. It's a difficult question to answer because on the flip side of the equation, if you look at Major League Baseball and you look at the outputs of the players, like the training, the day-to-day, what they do, Major League Baseball will have, you know, maybe a 45-minute batting practice pre-game.

Their spring training consists, you know, sometimes of, you know, very limited light day-to-day work and then they'll play a portion of a game, et cetera, and move on. If you looked at the total volume of activity, I think it's actually higher in Taiwan. And it's very much an Asian philosophy that more is better. I think it carried over from a Japanese influence in the sport. So to that end, I mean, even in that question, Meg,

we've got to separate like games of intent versus total workload, right? That becomes the value. So games of intent, yeah, there are less. And the significant advantage I have there and had there was we would have day games on the Sunday and we would have Monday off every week. And that's also a Japanese schedule thing. We have this Monday off. It's the sacred day. So I would try to work with the managers and staff and say, hey, can we push back our entry to the ballpark to as late as possible Tuesday, get a really quick short ramp workup.

And functionally, that gave me almost 48 hours in some situations to get recovery as the primary focal point for the athlete. So that certainly helped. And I know that if that was indicative in Major League Baseball, yeah, practitioners could certainly work around that. So you made progress. So tell us a little bit about the program you put in place and how, again, you got the players there to embrace it and the sorts of results that you had. Yeah, well, it really, it comes down to, you know, philosophy and the way you structure your philosophy going in. So the good news is I was kind of given carte blanche with the team to say, hey, we're a mess.

You've got responsibility. You also have the authority to make the personnel changes if you see them necessary to make. We will spend money on equipment if you need it. So I was really given a nice opportunity to go in and work with them. And so my philosophy has always been there's really two laws in sports science. Law one is reduce injury and my mate tom habistro over at espn was the one who coined the term with me one day he said relative to the nba where i was doing some work he goes gary what you're telling me

is the best ability is availability and i said yeah i said tom that's going to be a t-shirt next time i print one mate that's perfect so um he uh he coined that term i said, that's going to be a t-shirt next time I print one, mate. That's perfect. So he coined that term. I said, yeah, that's always law one. I said, the organization spends so much money on these athletes that if they're not available to play, that's the sad part of the equation. From the business perspective and from the winning percentage and gain perspective, we need athletes available. So number one, let's reduce injury.

neither that athletes available so number one let's reduce injury the second law of sports science is we want to improve the performance of the athlete to what we would believe their genetic potential entails like not everybody's going to throw 102 miles an hour like a role as chapman did last night on on a couple of pitches what is the potential of that athlete keep trying to build that potential and the good news here is we never know, right? We never know what that ceiling is, but do not put exercises in place to improve performance that put the athlete at risk of injury. And that is one of the biggest parts, I think, of the equation when it comes to strength and conditioning, is that all exercises exist on a risk benefit spectrum. For me working with an athlete, I want to have the highest benefit and the lowest risk

on that exercise as part of that selection process. So when I understood that and put it in place, that is a governing theory. So it was all about, we've got 32 injuries a year, we've got to get rid of these. So I started to look at a lot of the metrics. We started to talk to the manager in the very first kind of meetings that I had. I was talking to the manager and coaching staff. I said, tell me about your tactical approach. How are you going to manage your pitches throughout the course of the year?

What does that look like? Tell me about the technical problems some of your pitches are having. And then I will look then to the third layer which is the physical side of the equation what can I affect on the what we call key performance indicators or KPIs for that athlete physically that are going to enhance his technical ability and obviously then enhance our tactical ability so it was looking at that kind of a framework and what I started to realize and I realized this with the Astros in 2012 I don't know how else to put it we were really bad

team in 2012 and I think we lost 111 games that year and I mean towards the end of the season when we were reducing our time around you know cetera, et cetera. I started to spend a lot more time in the locker room with the athletes. And my purpose there was to look at their daily lifestyle. What do they do? They get to the ballpark, maybe at 1230, one o'clock, and they sit in front of their locker on their phone or on their iPad. And they're in a seated position, relaxing, hanging out. Yeah, I'll grab a bat i'll go take some swings in the cage you know get some eye wash in is what they would call it you know just get a couple of swings in and then we'd roll down and we'd have our warm-up you know our condition

controlled warm-up we'd go through a little bit of work and then we'd get into batting practice and then we'd have the game at night well there were two things that came from that one of the things is like with baseball and baseball conditioning specifically, we are probably the most asymmetrical sport on the planet. And I'll give you an example of that. If you're a left-handed hitting and left-handed throwing outfielder, you turn right for nothing in our game. You turn right for nothing. So if you've got that kind of imbalance, and I often use, I equate this to driving a sports car. If you've got that kind of imbalance, and I often use, I equate this to, you know, driving a sports car. If you've got bad wheel alignment, bad things happen to the chassis, right?

At some point in time, there's an overload and overuse component. So the very first thing I wanted to do was offset what we call bilateral asymmetry. So I started this program even back in the minor leagues with a guy like Dallas Keiker. program even back in the minor leagues with a guy like Dallas Kiker we started some of the work he would do post pitch is getting his body working through these myofascial slings would get his body working the other way like training him like he was a right-handed pitcher and so all of a sudden we were kind of getting him back to this neutral position and the feedback I was getting the measurable feedback from him was god I just feel. I'm not getting out of bed in the morning at the end of the season as sore as I was. And so that was kind of a very subjective kind of measure for me, but it kind of proved a point.

And the other offset that we needed to make was anterior-posterior asymmetry. So front to back, when these athletes are sitting around so much they lose what we call in in strength and conditioning their posterior chain musculature all of a sudden like i had a i had jay happ at one point in time and uh when he was sent down to triple a and i i looked at him i said hey you know i never tell an athlete i'm going to do a postural assessment because all of a sudden if i tell them i'm going to do that they they become anatomical man. They stand upright. You know, they stand at attention. And so I followed Jay to the weight room. And I'm walking behind him.

I was like, oh, my God, his posterior chain is really, really bad. He's hunched at the back. You can see the way his hips were aligned. I'm like, this does not look good to me. So the thing that cleared Jay, and I spoke to him recently, I know he still does a lot of these exercises, were posterior chain exercises that we developed for him to get that alignment back.

So getting the athletes firstly to neutral was step one. And that helped offset a phenomenal amount of these soft tissue injuries. And then the next part of the equation was figuring out how they produce power, getting those deceleration exercises in place. And that side of the equation really focused on performance. But that was kind of the methodology, you know, to give you the secret source. That's what it was focused upon. So as you were having this perfect season, did you recognize that that was going on at the time? No, it was kind of like, it was, of like, it was funny. It was like, and so it took four years to get there. I mean, that's the other thing to be really cognizant of

here. This didn't happen overnight. The first year we got down to eight injuries in the first year, I thought 75% reduction, that's phenomenal. I've got a pretty good team of practitioners. And then the next year we got it down to six and I was like, yeah, there are still things we can improve. I do these audits every year at the end of the year and say, look, what can we improve upon? Let's now analyze these six injuries. Where did we go wrong? And so one of the things I was fortunate to find, I was actually speaking at a sports science event for the NBA at the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas. My good friend with with the toronto raptors alex mckechnie invited me to speak at this and um in the audience you know i i i see this guy and he hangs around wants to ask me a question he's a former sports scientist with the new york knicks and strength and

conditioning coach background and he's asked me a lot of questions and clearly and clearly asian i said to alan i said where are you from he goes goes, I'm from Taiwan. I said, hey, is there any chance you ever want to get back into maybe strength and conditioning with a professional team? I said, because, you know, I work with the brothers. He goes, that's really intriguing. So I kind of courted Alan to come over because Taiwan has a restriction on how many foreign coaches you can have. And I needed a foreign coach who had a similar background and so Alan came in and he took us from he was the one day-to-day hands-on with the athletes that took the process from six injuries per year down to two and a lot two we had in the third year like we were cruising

along that third year and I thought man this looks really good you know we could be at zero injuries and then sure enough the last three weeks of the season we had one of our oldest athletes on the team round first place in this in this old stadium in Tainan which is southern Taiwan and hamstring injury and I was like dang it you know he just wasn't ready for it and then the next day a pitcher turns up he can't completely start because he's got a bad back so that's how I'd measure injuries if you couldn't um you know if you couldn't play or you couldn't you know man up for that day a man day lost i mean that was that was the against us and trying to figure out how this guy hurt his back and he'd had a fight with his wife and slept on the couch so it's like i looked at our training staff and said guys there's some things we just cannot control. I said, ensure to be in marriage counsellors.

This is one. And so we kind of got through that season with those two injuries and feeling ultra successful. But then we get into year four. And all the way through the season, I was like, okay, because I was kind of coming in and out at that point in time. I'd spent about 150 days a year on site in Taiwan and be watching every game at night when I was back in the United States and adjusting plans. And I had an incredible team of trainers that were good at

some soft tissue management for us. But we got to the end of the last two weeks and it's kind of like a no-hitter, right? You don't want to talk about it. You don't want to look at the scoreboard and you go, okay, what does this look like? And sure enough, we got to the end the scoreboard and you'd go um okay what does this look like and sure enough we got to the end of the year and it was really just the day after the end of the season we're in championships and we we'd lost the championship that last year and it was like we were disappointed around that it just came up against some buzzsaw pitching from uh opposition team with lamigo and it just got to the point where um we weren't even thinking about it a day later i i said to the head athletic trainer can you give me the injury day log? And it was empty.

And I was like, man, this is massive. This is huge. And we're just like, you know, you tear up a little bit. And I get the staff together and I said, guys, we're going out to dinner. It's on me. Let's let's celebrate this moment. Cause these, I don't know how often these come around. Well, it seems like a lot of, a lot of this is determined both in the weight room and then at home by routine and having a routine that's replicable and that allows the athlete to recover and also accelerate and decelerate as they need to. And that's all well and good. And then there's a global pandemic. And all of our routines get wildly disrupted. And so, you know, I think if we look at the early season injuries that they had in the KBO and MLB, even some of the knock-on effects that we're seeing this year,

a lot of early soft tissue injuries. And I think that there was an instinct to attribute that to the stop and start nature of baseball and us all sort of being out of what would have been the normal ramp up to a season. So I'm curious what you attribute that to. And then if it is a matter of sort of being out of sync, how players and teams might adapt in the future if there are long layoffs like this. I mean, Meg, it's the $64 question today, right? And my belief is that we, when I say we, I would say a number of practitioners and a number of teams and a number of coaches really don't understand this thing

called human adaptation. It's the adaptation process that we really need to understand to offset injury. And when I'm talking about adaptation process, it isn't just getting bigger and stronger muscles. I mean, we could look back at an example of Noah Syndergaard. I think it was four years ago now. Maybe it could even be five years ago. I'm not sure. I was with Tom House when Noah was posting on Twitter, I've gained 17 pounds of muscle

and my goal is every fastball to be over 100 miles an hour this season. And I was with Tom and I looked at Tom and I said, mate, what's the bet? He goes, I said, yeah, what's the bet he's going to be injured? I said, what's the timeline? I said, I'll give you six weeks. You want the over or the under? Tom says, I'll take the under. I said, well, I'll take the over.

Now, bets normally are steak, dinner, and $1. And sure enough, Tom won that one because I think within three and a half weeks, Noah was down with a lat strain and a lat tear actually. And so when we talk about adaptation, we're not just talking about muscular adaptation. We're talking about neural adaptation, connective tissue adaptation, and even physiological adaptation. These things must all be considered. And to that point, Meg, to just lean on like a lot of the discussion I know that has been happening in this year is teams will look at pitches and say, well, how many innings

did they pitch last year? And an inning can be three pitches. It could be 33 pitches, right? It's not a really good indication of load at all. For an athlete, it's a horrible indication of load. I actually work with a company called Coach Me Plus who have a software that has been used. I don't know if it still is by the New York Mets,

actually back a couple of years ago. And they brought me in to look at some end of season reports. And I said, innings pitch, does all they want to understand for their pitchers? They go, yeah, it's it. I said, what other data do you have access to? And they said, well, we have pitch count. I said, well, that's a step better. Let's look look at pitch count on everybody and so we started looking at pitch counts i then had a theory i said hang on a second not all pitches are the same you know

it's like it'll be like being in the gym and saying okay i'm going to do three sets of eight without indicating what the weights are right i mean if you did three sets of eight with 10 pounds versus three sets of eight with 100 pounds, it's eliciting a totally different response. I also think that each pitch by individual pitcher has a certain degree of strain element to it, and that strain to the musculature, the connective tissues, and over the long-term and osteophytic or bony response to throwing that pitch and i remember having a brief discussion i was fortunate to be in the dodgers club i was having this discussion real briefly with clayton kershaw where i said clayton you can throw 100

pitches in game a 100 pitches in game b and they can fatigue you differently right he goes yeah he goes if i've got a heavy right-handed hitting lineup coming in and i've got to throw cutters you know a high percentage of cutters in i'm wiped i might push my ball pen back a day and that was kind of an impetus for me to turn around and say yeah strain per pitch is a metric we need to understand as it involves or as it pertains to adaptation and pitcher readiness and so i think fundamentally there has been this – pitching coaches have had this kind of, I guess, bullets in the gun approach. It's like being a fan of the baseball movies.

I remember I think it was Major League Two, Charlie Sheen threw like three pitches and said, yeah, that's enough for the day, right? And kind of walked off. And I'd have these discussions. I had Nolan Ryan chew my head off in houston because you know i talked i talked to him about tell me about you know pitch counts that you were on i said because i'm trying to understand strain and adaptation and he wanted to kill me when i mentioned the term pitch count and i think that is one of the key variables is it's not bullets in

the gun every time we throw a pitch prior to a fatigue state, we're creating some sense of adaptation. And while a pitch count buildup may be important, I think a pitch type and strain buildup is likely more important as a injury offset. And so it seems like there are a lot of teams that are just saying, well, you didn't pitch as much last year, either because you were in the majors and the season was shortened or because you got hurt or because there was no minor league season. And so we're going to cap your innings this year. And from what I've seen, I know JJ Cooper wrote an article about this for Baseball America recently, but it seems like the studies, the research that's been done out there don't really back up the efficacy of innings limits, at least used in that very simplistic way.

So what would you do? Because if you're a team, obviously you want to use your best pitchers as often as possible without endangering them. And so if you just have this one size fits all system where you just say, oh, well, you threw this many innings last year, so we're going to limit you to this many this year. Maybe you're not actually protecting the pitcher. You're just hurting your team. But how do you know that? How would you determine that going into an unusual year like this? Ben, awesome question. And look, there is evolution and de-evolution. There is adaptation and de-adaptation. And the process of throwing less because you threw less last year is on the pathway to de-adaptation. Is it going to get to a point where we use 12 pitchers per game because we've de-adapted them so much that they have that limit, that ceiling, that pitch limit?

Like where this 100 pitch limit came from, I'll never know, right? It's one of those things that you look at and say, yeah, the pitch counts and innings counts are somewhat irrelevant. I mean, we need to understand strain per pitch. We need to understand even pitch intent relative to velocity, relative to spin rate, relative to game situation, because there's so many variables that go into adapting a pitcher. What I would do predominantly is first and foremost, is look at a baseline performance to understand what a pitchers both power and endurance markers look like if i've got a pitcher that has sustained you know say he's thrown 200 innings on a standard year okay what was that total pitch count what was that pitch

distribution what did that look like and and was his fastball and was his location and his accuracy were those things all at their peak towards the end of the season if they were that's kind of like my baseline almost template for that athlete to say okay that's about you know that's that's where he sits for me I want to analyze that to recreate it in the following season so I'm going to want to ramp up, not by pitch count. I mean, a pitcher could be capped at, say, 75 pitches in game. And we actually did this in 2019 in Taiwan. In spring training, we would cap our pitchers. And based upon the pitch distribution, I would look at the charts and say to our head coach,

who was also a previous pitching coach with the seattle mariners i'd say to bud i said look mate i said i'm gonna take say nick adderton a left-handed pitcher i said he's only thrown you know so many so many pitches but the distribution i need more i need more sliders and cutters out of him i said so we're going to take him down in the bullpen he's he's he's got to throw 20 20 or 30 more of these with intent and that kept him really healthy throughout the course of the season we're actually doing more outside of the game you know if because sometimes there's so many other variables like coaches want to see a certain pitch a pitch in a certain situation or they want to see certain matchups and so the tactical side of the equation often gets in the way of the physical adaptation

side of the equation so my job is that physical adaptation side so i was fortunate that i had the you know trust of the athletes and the coaches trust to be able to add those things on at the back side but to answer that question briefly strain per pitch at an adaptive level of increasing that by depending on the elements that the pitcher has gone through depending on their off season certain percentages each week and looking at the qualitative nature of pitching not the quantitative nature of it combining those factors is my belief in terms of what is going to adapt and evolve that picture we've got to get on that path because and you're right the studies show it because this is a the human body is not linear

mathematics. It's chaos theory. You change one variable, you are at a new starting point. We need to be able to adapt pitches to become the machine that they are designed to become. So for a long time, we looked at major league organizations sort of post Moneyball and we could see a distribution of expertise in terms of their ability to put analytics on the field based on the size of their analyst staff, right? And there were teams that were really good at it, and there were teams that were less good. And there is still some variation across the league, obviously, but teams have largely caught up to one another, right? There aren't too many teams where we look at them and say, oh, they're, they're averse to sabermetrics. And I imagine that this is sort of the new frontier for teams when it comes to sort of advancing their players and their clubs, right? Is how, how good they are

at sports science, both in terms of the way they think about it and how they get their players to buy in and sort of adapt to it. And I'm curious, you don't have to, you know, we don't need to make anyone feel bad, but I'm curious sort of what your sense is of how level that playing field is at this point or how much variation there is at the major league level. Yeah. Well, when we say analytics, I think we've got to put them into a bucket. And unfortunately, we still have to bucket them now because it's not sophisticated yet to have integrated kind of understanding of these metrics. But tactically, when to put on the shift, who hits with a better launch angle, et cetera, et cetera. Those things from a tactical standpoint, to your point, Meg, I think they're all on par.

They equal one another. Where there is very little context is in the area of physical management of the athlete and i'll give you an example of this so following my time with coach me plus i'm looking at data from the mets i had this theory that um you know what pitch strength per pitch as i mentioned earlier that's the thing i wanted to kind of quantify here and i wonder if there's a method of quantification. So I started looking at all the TrackMan data that was readily available. And I even called TrackMan and said, I want to understand your interstadium reliability because I'm putting some metrics together here to really understand strain per pitch.

And the data scientist I talked to over at TrackMan said, hey, I'll get back to you. Well, he didn't get back to me, but the CEO at TrackMan did. And it was Hans over at TrackMan that said to me, you're looking at this, why? And I said, yeah, I'm trying to understand physically if your data will give me a marker of strain per pitch. And he goes, that's funny because we got asked that same question in Japan. Would you mind, you know, on our behalf, would you mind working with a couple of teams in Japan? And so I was fortunate to go over and do some work with the seaboo lions and the yokohama bay stars and we started to try to put together some strain data based upon two markers that trackman presented one of them was

velocity the first velocity point out of the hand i thought that's physically manifested the second thing is spin rate. And if I put those two things together, I could look at the strain per pitch based upon those two things, because mound in major league baseball, you know, the mound is very consistent. The implement is 100% consistent. Most stadiums are consistent, right? Distance is consistent. You know, there's only environmental variability and they don't affect those two points. So I started to look at that marker and then I got over to Japan I figured out anyone who throws a forkball kind of invalidates this marker and so many people in Japan throw a forkball it has massive strain on the arm and

especially on the elbow but it has no velocity out of the hand it has no spin out of the hand so the strain was inverted on that one pitch and it kind of screwed that up. So I dived into, I got introduced to a company called Zone 7. And this is a company out of Israel, actually two Israeli military guys that have been working in soccer for a long time using artificial intelligence to help identify patterns that could lead to injury. And I talked to them, I said, I'd really like to have a look and see if this works in baseball. And they were very excited about that opportunity as well and so one of the things we did we started looking and unpacking all the data sets that TrackMan have presented and the CTO Eyal Eliakim his name is over at Zone 7 came up with this thought he goes you know what

if I combine some of these metrics and the metrics he combined were maximal horizontal position of the arm maximal vertical position in the arm and release point looked at their time stamp he goes i can identify this thing let's call it arm acceleration as the athlete goes through i said yeah that's incredibly elegant let's let's do that let's put that those numbers together well lo behold, the arm acceleration metric became a leading indicator for us in terms of pattern recognition leading to an athlete's injury, a pitcher's injury. And when I was looking at this, I was like, oh my gosh, this is absolute gold. So I won't mention a team that we presented this to at the winter meetings, but we were with one of the leading

brands in baseball, one of the longest tenured quants in the game in an analytics department. And when he reviewed the data, he said, there's absolutely no way this data is accurate because if you've got arm acceleration A and pitch trajectory B, those things should always work in the same, they should always correlate and be exactly the same and couldn't get his head around i had to intervene and say you know a pitcher alters his grip on the baseball to absolutely have that arm acceleration be the same and alter the trajectory of the pitch and 10 years in baseball he was struggling to get his head around that and that really indicated to me that analysts contextually they're're so good at the spreadsheet, but they're

yet to put it over onto the human side of the equation and very reluctantly have dived into this area of sports, medicine, sports science, and performance science, which is where I think we'll uncouple longevity for our athletes. And could you explain a little bit about what has been confirmed or what hypotheses have been rejected because of the new proliferation of biomechanics and, you know, motion tracking technology, beginning with pitchers and then with hitters more often? I mean, how do having those tools, how does having those tools enable you to do that job better or, you know, actually figure out what you want to do? Yeah. And it's really interesting.

We're at a point in time where I think the technology is ahead of the practitioner's ability to use it, right? It's like having, you know, a supersonic plane and pilots that can only fly a Cessna, you know, because they've got a limited dashboard of knowledge. So that's kind of where things have headed. Technology is way ahead of the curve right now. And one of the kind of reference points for that is a company I work for is their senior applied sports scientist in my one hiatus from baseball. It was a company called Catapult Sports, an Australian company out of my hometown of Melbourne. And they were born out of the Australian Institute of Sport, made their mark in Australian rules football, they had these little GPS

monitors on the back of every athlete. And within the framework of that GPS monitor was an IMU, gyroscopes, and they would amass all this data on how an athlete, you know, how much workload that they had done, how much, you know, understand how far they would run, they had run in the game, what the running intensity intensity was like and so these little imu units and gps units were a phenomenal advancement in this area of sports science and we devised this metric we called player load and we thought yeah that's a really good indication to understand training and adaptation and injury reduction and it applies incredibly well to australian rules football it applies well in the nfl too because we introduced it i introduced it to Australian rules football. It applies well in the NFL too,

because I introduced it to 21 NFL teams and was able to work with practitioners right throughout the NFL on this, even the league office. The NBA worked with the league office and 17 different NBA teams through this technology. But during that learning period, which was a phenomenal learning period for me,

we'd get calls from baseball teams. And I'd say, guys, look, this technology really doesn't apply to baseball. I said, you'll get some information, but if you're looking for what markers are you looking for? And this was kind of problem one, they didn't have their questions prepared. They wanted answers before questions. So that was one of the negative kind of stepping stones of the introduction of that technology. But two, I kind of put it down to looking for that lightning in a bottle they wanted to strap something onto the athlete and be given a cause and effect relationship as to load an injury well there is one team in the major leagues that that bought over 200 of these units

would apply to everybody in spring training i've been doing this for five years at the cost of probably two to three hundred thousand dollars on technology and analysts to look at the data and have brought in analysts from soccer and rugby to analyze this information and they have made no change whatsoever to the way they manage their athletes because the load is derived from distance run in that technology. It's not derived from rotational events, nor is it derived from the amount of strain per pitch that that pitcher is going through. So the technology that's being applied is being applied incorrectly due to the rudimentary, I just want to look at this. Another problem set is there is not enough, you know, what we call in vivo technology, in field technologies that we can rely on that are non-invasive to the athlete. I'm actually doing some work with a

company out of Calgary, Canada called Kinetics that are an offshoot of Allpix Medical that have a sensory-based insole that is 100% imperceptible. That'll give us force algorithms. It'll give us some incredibly robust data that can pertain to fatigue on an athlete. And we'll know exactly when that athlete's fatiguing and exactly when we potentially could pull them from a game. So the technology, when we talk about tech, it's got to be put into context. That's the most important thing.

And I think you've got to start with the problem, know what problem you're trying to solve first before you throw technology at it. Now, I think that's been a failure uh within major league baseball is they throw technology at an unknown problem and try to let it guide the way and uh so to that end yeah there's a lot of technologies out there i still think there's an inherent amount of data inside of a track man system or you know hawkeye system which is used today, there's an incredible amount of data there that is still not being fully leveraged. So there are all these tools that are being

marshaled here to prevent injuries and bring people back more quickly, whether it is people like you who have this expertise and come from other disciplines, other sports, or other technologies, et cetera. Teams are pouring resources into this. So what is a realistic goal? Because a perfect season like the one you had, that's probably a lot to ask, and it's not going to happen often, especially over 162 games in the majors. But where can we get in a short-term

or medium-term timeframe? Can we see a significant reduction in injuries or is it just going to be faster, harder, and more hurt? Ben, it's a great question again. And look, to me, it comes down to people. Irrespective of the technology, it comes down to people. It's having all the horses pull the cart in the same direction. My friend, Adam Beard, who's over with the Cubs, he used an analogy once. I said, yeah, it's like get everybody in the boat rowing yours in sync and rowing in the one direction.

I said, yeah, mate, that kind of defines high performance. You've got to be the coxswain in that example who's just kind of lining things up. I think that's a significant problem that still exists in a lot of baseball teams today is they haven't embraced this sports science concept called high performance and high performance has oversight into athletic training it has oversight into strength and conditioning it integrates with data sets and

uses like instead of looking at you know did the athlete and this is concurrent today you know you walk into a weight room the strength and conditional coach will say to you, yeah, he pushed up his maximal amount of weight on the squat bar today. And I'd look at him and say, I don't give a damn what he did in the squat bar. What does his velocity and spin rate look like tonight? I don't care what numbers you're putting up at gym. Align the KPIs correctly, and that's getting all the horses pulling in the same direction. I used to joke when we'd have staff changes over with the brothers, like we had some coaching

staff changes. I said to my strength coach, Alan, the first year he was in, he goes, I said, so we're going to a meeting. We're going to get the coaches to agree on the KPIs, key performance indicators for each one of these athletes. He goes, okay. I said, great. I said, so we're going to drop that question on there. I said, you and I will come back tomorrow. I said, they'll still be fighting about it. They'll still be arguing about it because they can't agree on how many innings this pitcher should throw,

whether he should specialize on fastball, whether he should develop that change up further, what that distribution is. So until you know the direction and get everybody pulling in that same direction, that's where high performance comes in. It has that oversight to try to pull all those elements together. So it really comes down to people.

It comes down to coupling responsibility with authority. That is something that I see critically missing in a lot of organizations I've worked with. People operate out of fear, a tremendous amount of fear that they're going to lose their job if they do something different. And most organizations and sadly, most people in the sport are risk averse. So, I mean, to me, the bigger risk is right now, I think the number is something like 1600 IL days per team in Major League Baseball. If you looked at, say, an average salary, I mean, we're talking about $43 million loss per year on average in baseball due to injuries, right? And these are just the soft tissue injuries, not counting, you know, hit by pitch and, you know, the ballistic things we can't control. When we look at those numbers and we look at that, I mean, those numbers

get worse every year. I mean, the risk is staying where you are. The risk is not making change. worse every year. I mean, the risk is staying where you are. The risk is not making change. All right. Well, I will link to Joe's piece at Sport Techie about Gary and his work. I will link to that long LinkedIn page that I mentioned earlier, because we probably didn't touch on every stop along the way. And I will link also to Gary's Twitter. You can find him there at strengthcoach21. Thank you very much for opening your eyes a bit, Gary. Guys, thank you so much. Look, congratulations on your works as well. I mean, they were formative in my understanding of how you build a baseball player in an organization.

And I think you're doing tremendous work. So thank you very much. Thank you. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks, as always, for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pled some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get

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Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we'll be back to talk to you early next week.