Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2491: How Not to Get Hurt

Episode Date: June 13, 2026

Tarik Skubal is the latest athlete to return to play faster than anticipated thanks to a new surgical technique or technology. But there’s something even better than coming back more quickly from an injury: avoiding an injury in the first place. Can injury prevention be improved as much as injury treatment? In this themed episode, Ben Lindbergh talks to four guests about three potential ways to keep players healthy. First (5:14), Mariners biomechanist Cedric Attias joins to discuss how pitching mechanics affect elbow stress, whether injuries stem more from nature or nurture, and whether MLB teams are prioritizing injury research. Second (49:23), Daryl and Adam Moreau, the father-and-son inventors of FlexProGrip, explain how forearm weakness endangers the UCL, how they designed and validated their training tool, and how the device has been adopted in the game. Third (1:41:18), Steve Rowson, director of the Helmet Lab at Virginia Tech, shares how helmets have improved across sports, why dangerous impacts are different in football and baseball, and why catcher’s masks may need an overhaul to minimize concussions. Audio intro: Ian Phillips, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio interstitial 1: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio interstitial 2: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to NanoNeedle AP piece Link to NanoNeedle Athletic piece Link to Ben on protecting pitchers Link to Ben on pitcher roster limits Link to McGregor/ElAttrache article Link to MLB/ElAttrache article Link to article on Altuve’s return Link to article on Alvarez’s return Link to internal brace info Link to article on Tatum’s return Link to article on Mahomes’s return Link to article on Kittle’s return Link to summary of Cedric’s research Link to Cedric’s research paper Link to other research on lower arm slots Link to pulldowns explainer Link to Ben on team secrets Link to Rieekan quote Link to lower-arm-slots trend Link to video clip about the trend Link to Crizer on arm slots Link to Misiorowski game Link to FlexProGrip site Link to FlexProGrip article 1 Link to FlexProGrip article 2 Link to FlexProGrip article 3 Link to FlexProGrip article 4 Link to FlexProGrip white papers Link to Driveline research Link to The Layback Podcast Link to The Island of Doctor Moreau Link to Edward Scissorhands Link to Helmet Lab concussions research Link to helmet ratings site Link to Rowson’s faculty page Link to CNN Helmet Lab story Link to Ben on catcher concussions Link to Carlin baseball vs. football bit Link to risk compensation wiki Link to Helmet Lab testing footage Link to Marvin the Martian wiki Link to Great Gazoo wiki Link to Dark Helmet wiki Link to Torres protective cap article 1 Link to Torres protective cap article 2 Link to Torres cap footage Link to pitcher cap inserts info 1 Link to pitcher cap inserts info 2 Link to pitcher cap inserts info 3 Link to softball pitcher mask article Link to softball fielder mask article Link to softball fielder mask research Link to The Athletic on catcher nut shots Link to SIS on catcher nut shots Link to Knoxville incident  Sponsor Us on Patreon  Give a Gift Subscription  Email Us: [e-mail]  Effectively Wild Subreddit  Effectively Wild Wiki  Apple Podcasts Feed   Spotify Feed  YouTube Playlist  Facebook Group  Bluesky Account  Twitter Account  Get Our Merch! var SERVER_DATA = Object.assign(SERVER_DATA || {}); Source

Give me, give me, give me, Effectively Wild, Give me, Give me, Effectively Wild. Give me, Give me, Effectively Wild. This is Effectively Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2491 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, not joined today by Meg Rally of Fangraphs. She has the episode off,

which means, of course, that I will be devoting this episode to an in-depth, comprehensive, exhaustive, College World Series preview. Yes, this is the college baseball blowout you've been waiting for. No, no, it's not. I'm not doing that. I'm not mocking it. It's just not quite my baseball beat.

However, we will be talking about a blowout of sorts, the elbow variety. This episode of Effectively Wild is about how not to get hurt, not emotionally, but physically. And in some specific baseball-centric ways. So this weekend, Saturday, to be precise, Terik Scoobel is returning to the mound for the Detroit Tigers, where he will attempt to pitch the Tigers back to contention. and simultaneously audition for other potential employers. And as we've discussed, Scoople was something of a test subject by Big League standards. He underwent a procedure to remove loose bodies, or, as we learned, a loose body that had chipped

off of Scoople's elbow. And he underwent this procedure on May 6th, 38 days before he will be returning to the mound, which is incredible because his return was expected to take two to three months, or it would have been had he had the regular arthroscopic procedure. Instead, he was treated with the nanoneedle Scope 2.0, rebranded by Scott Boris, the scubel scope. And that appears to have cut his recovery time in half, if not better. And although his surgeon, Dr. Neil Alatrash, is in some slight hot water in connection with a somewhat suspect exemption request pertaining to UFC fighter and suspected PD user Connor McGregor, the procedure appears to be a triumph. And we'll see how he pitches.

We'll see how quickly Blake Snell and subsequent pitchers who receive this treatment are able to return. But as of now, this seems to be an example of a technological, methodological improvement, enabling a pitcher to make it back to the mound in a much shorter time. And that's something to celebrate. And it has been celebrated and will continue to be. As will other boundary pushing procedures. The nanoneedle 3.0 return of the nanoneadle is on the way. And we've seen a lot of advances like this in baseball and beyond. You have the internal brace repair, a potential alternative to Tommy John surgery that can hasten returns from UCL replacements. And look, we just saw Jose Altuve return from a grade two oblique strain. In 20 days, usually takes four to six weeks.

Francisco Alvarez was just activated about four weeks after a meniscus tear, and he's a catcher, no less. That subjects his knee to some strain. The estimate was six to eight weeks. He took the under. Both of those returns were described as miraculous or medical miracles. And maybe those guys were just fast healers. But we have seen improvements in procedures across sports. Jason Tatum beating estimates in his return from a ruptured right Achilles tendon.

Patrick Mahomes, appearing to be way ahead of schedule in his return. from tearing his ACL and LCL. You get the point. This is great. These are medical marvels. Even though I sometimes worry that making it easier to come back from injury makes players less likely to take precautions to avoid injury because they figure, well, if something happens, there is a remedy, so in the meantime, I might as well go all out.

But as we prepare for the spectacle of Scoobel, as we bow before Jacob Mizrowski and wait to see what Christopher Sanchez does on Sunday, picture a world where we don't have to worry so much about these aces springing in the first place. because the only thing better than coming back more quickly from an injury would be not sustaining that injury at all. And as athletes get bigger, stronger, faster, more forceful, it would be wonderful if we could come up with ways to protect players from themselves and from the systems set up to egg them on. Now, you know my preferred solution is to further limit the number of pitchers on the active roster, thereby forcing pitchers to pace themselves, and theoretically at least, leading to fewer injuries, fewer pitching changes, fewer strikeouts. But in the absence of additional rules changes, changes to pitching usage, what can pitchers do to protect themselves under the present system, which encourages max effort?

Well, today we will find out because I'll be talking to four guests across three segments about recent research and advances in the field of baseball injury prevention. First, I'll be joined by Cedric Adius. And he also did some work as a grad student at the Motion Research Group at the University of Waterloo that he can speak about publicly. So he will tell us about some ways that altering the delivery could help pitchers the mechanical solution. After that, I'll be bringing on Daryl and Adam Morrow, the creators and purveyors of FlexPro grip, a prophylactic device. Perhaps I should use another descriptor. Just in the sense that it's a preventive device. That's all I mean.

A device that's been adopted widely in the game with the goal of strengthening the forearm to take some strain off of the UCL. So the exercise slash training-based solution. And lastly, but not leastly, I'll be talking to, Stephen Rosen of the Helmet Lab at Virginia Tech about a potential revolution in catcher helmets and masks. Because, yes, we talk so much about pitcher injuries, but what about their battery mates? Won't anyone think of the catchers, the all too often battered backstops of baseball? As it turns out, we may have been going about baseball helmets all wrong. So we won't even take a break before talking about preventing bodies from breaking.

Let's tee up our first guest in our first segment now. All right, I am joined now by Cedric Attius. He is both a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Waterloo and a biomechanist, not biomechanists, I have clarified, but biomechanist for the Seattle Mariners. And I'm sure it's just a cinch to be both of those things at the same time. And in addition to those things, a guest on Effectively Wilde. Welcome, Cedric. Thanks so much for having you. Actually, I did finish my master's about a year ago, so I am a full-time biomechitis now. Oh, excellent. All right. Congrats. We've got to update the press release here about your research.

So you are doing your best to try to safeguard pitchers, prevent pitcher injuries. You have not been able to prevent yourself from contracting a cold, but you are pitching through it, podcasting through it, and we appreciate it. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you ended up getting these degrees and getting a gig with the Mariners and where your research interests lie. Absolutely. So I went to a small school outside of Toronto, just about an hour, hour and a half west, called the University of Waterloo, where I did my undergraduate studies in biomedical engineering. At that point, I had no idea that sports had a need for that sort of work, nor did I think that was ever really an opportunity for me. But towards my senior year in my biomedical engineering program, I had the great pleasure of coming into contact with professor at that school named Dr. John McPhee. I had approached him about doing a research project, which at that time was just supposed to be a credit that I was going to receive, and ultimately, it focused on disc golf botan mechanics. Never had played myself, but thought it was an interesting problem, and I really wanted that credit, so I went ahead and did that. I did that. It went well.

I really enjoyed research. I didn't know I would enjoy research, but he seemed to think that I had a bit of a knack for it, so he came to me with a very unique opportunity. The Seattle Mariners had approached him regarding some work. They were looking to outsource. And funny enough, you know, my research group at the University of Water has a bit of a history with the Seattle Mariners. We've had two graduates from that research group joined them as biomechanists, and they were looking to continue sort of that working relationship and wanted to outsource some work. So they had asked if we would possibly be interested in finding a... a graduate level student to do that. So John approached me with this opportunity and it was pretty

hard to say no. I would get to work with an MLB team. I would get to work with MLB data and ultimately kind of get my foot in the door of what I now knew was an opportunity for a pretty cool career. So this was not a lifelong aspiration at that point. It was just something you stumbled into. Yeah, absolutely. It was right place, right time. I thought I was going to end up working at a hospital, doing some biomedical device, you know, maintenance, creation, et cetera. But no, yeah, I was very fortunate to just be at the right place at the right time. And what was the research need or what was your mandate? What did you decide to look into and how did you go about it?

There's two difficulties with graduate school. First is defining a problem. A second is collecting data. Those are the most difficult parts, I think. Fortunately for me, I had the data provided and a clear research problem. So the hard part was done because of the support of the Mariners. And essentially what they were looking for is just kind of like a deeper dive into the relationship between pitching and ulnar collateral ligament or UCL stress and strain with the goal of trying to kind of identify, you know, what are the best ways to maintain performance without, you know, risking injury. Easier said than done.

There's a few steps there. But ultimately, where my mind went to with that is kind of an underutilized or under-research part in, sports biomechanics, which is this idea of optimization or forward dynamics, as they call it, in the industry. So ultimately, that's kind of where I went with it. There was a few precursors to that. But, you know, using this idea of being able to optimize a pitch, you know, especially given that it's such a static movement, you know, you're on the mound. You know, things are very controlled. You don't have to deal with too many external factors. It's kind of just like the pitcher versus the batter. It just seemed like a very good place to start. Yeah, you left out

student loans as maybe another difficulty of graduate school, depending on the person and the school. But once you're there, yeah, that's right. So was the understanding always that this research would be shareable, that you would be able to talk about these things and write about these things publicly? Because I always wonder how that works. Obviously, a lot of front office folks for teams are not sharing their research outside of the team. But it does seem like with health and medical research, there's at least a little bit of a culture of openness where it's one for all and all for one. And hey, if we can figure out how to prevent pitchers from getting hurt, then we should share that knowledge, even though in theory, if you want to be really cutthroat about it, that could be

the biggest competitive advantage for a particular team of all. So how did you and the school and the team navigate the transparency? Absolutely. It's a great question. First of all, there was some negotiations there. Yeah. Because ultimately, I was doing this to satisfy a thesis requirement through the University of Waterloo. So whatever came out of this research had to be shared. I had to publish a thesis about it and also a paper.

So, you know, that was definitely talked about extensively prior to that. But it is worth mentioning that, you know, the work that I did for my thesis is not necessarily the same work that I'm doing currently with the Mariners. There has been some changes and differences. And obviously I'm not going to, I'm not able to share everything that I'm doing currently with the Mariners. But it definitely looks very different than what I was publishing. Come on, it's just you and me. No one else is listening.

No one else will know. And your big group of listeners, many of which probably work in the front offices of the TV. Some of whom might be your coworkers and would immediately get you in trouble. So I will not try to do that. So how do you isolate? Of course, there are pitching labs where you can wire pitchers up with various trackable devices, and you've got many points of articulation, and you can measure the stress and the strain, and there are all sorts of dedicated facilities where one could do that.

And now there are many markerless motion capture systems, including the ones in MLB parks and minor league parks. So what were you working with and how do you isolate a particular part of the anatomy like the UCL and quantify the strain? being subjected to. So there's no answer to that question. There's so many... End of the interview. All right. Thanks for you.

There's so many factors affecting UCLA health, you know, even beyond just biomechanics. You know, obviously there's a big relationship and correlation there between how you're moving and how it's going to affect the ligament. But ultimately, things like rest, diet, you know, training, that those all have equal effects. Just much more difficult to quantify in that way. So I should preface that, you know, although my research was very indicative of some of the relationship between biomechanics and UCL health, it's not the end-all-be-all. There's so many factors that are just impossible to incorporate using research of this nature, but it's definitely a very important first step.

I just had a full suite of marketless motion capture data from in-games that was provided to me. And what were you able to discern, if anything, about what correlates with UCL strain? Is it just the harder you throw, the more strain there is, the more torque? Is it dependent on the particular pitcher and how close that pitcher is to their own personal maxed speed? How did you figure out that relationship? In short, yes, the harder you throw, the more you're going to strain the UCL. But that's not because of just velocity. Velocity is a factor, but the mechanics required to achieve said velocity are more indicative of the strain that you

might expect to experience in the UCL. In my research, you know, I went ahead and I built this musculoskeletal model, which basically represented the anatomy of an MLB pitcher in terms of their height and weight and all the proportions of the bones. And then also I went ahead and included all of the muscles and the throwing arm that you might expect to either protect or contribute some sort of load to the UCL. And in doing that, I was able to run a forward dynamics, optimized simulation, basically telling the model, you need to throw X amount in miles per hour, but also try and minimize the load on the UCL.

And depending on what that speed was, we were able to see differences in the output of mechanics. Some of them looked like very traditional throws. Some of them are things we have or have not ever seen. For the baseline, it was just a 93-mile-per-hour throw, very standard, traditional mechanics, and a peak UCL load of around 160. 17 Newton meters, which is very consistent with other published literatures measuring the sort of

stream. I then went ahead and pushed the model to its absolute max, telling it you have to throw 110 miles per hour. Never been done. Probably will never be done. I was going to ask, is that physically conceivable? Would you need some sort of freakishly strong? UCLA, like, is that within the realm of possibility? Because we keep seeing the average speeds rise and rise and rise, but we have not seen the peak speed exceed, say, Earl Tz Chapman. The way things are going, I'd be foolish to say that it's impossible. Yeah. The way things stand, I don't think it's feasible unless there's a whole revolution in pitching

mechanics, and that's kind of consistent with that simulation showed as well. You know, the characteristics associated with high-velocity throws, especially, you know, at that extreme contralateral trunk tilt, meaning you're leaning. away from the throwing arm with a really overhead arm slot and, you know, an arm that's basically fully extended at ball release. It looked like a cricket throw.

That's what it was. Except you didn't have the run-up. So the forces that would be dissipated because of the run-up and the overhead motion of a cricket throw would not be able to be mitigated because of the stationary nature of pitching. And, you know, to corroborate, you know,

those findings, we did see UCL loads reaching around 140 Newton meters, around 23 noon meters higher than your average throw, which does not necessarily exceed the strain that would cause the rupture of the UCL, but as you can imagine over time, that would cause some problems. Do you find that the injury risk, is it more about exceeding a certain threshold, just, hey, if there's this number of Newton meters, even one time, then that just breaks the max capacity? Or is it more about the repetition, and even if it's below that kind of crush depth, I guess you'd call it, if it were a submarine, but just that max sustainable

pressure, then as long as it's below that, you could keep safely repeating it, or is it just the wear and tear, and it's bit by bit and it's death by a thousand cuts instead of one catastrophic terror? It's definitely the repetition. In physics, we We have this principle called yield stress, which is basically when does an object deform to the point where it's not going to be able to recover elastically? In the UCL, it's much higher than anything I was able to create. You would basically need to take a machine and have it rip off your arm to reach that yield stress.

So in throwing any isolated pitch on its own, you're not just going to rupture it, but it's that repetition, time over time, putting your arm into compromising position. and achieving those velocities consistently in combination with the mechanics that I observed, that's really going to put a lot of strain on the UCL over time. It's probably going to create small micro-tares that compound over time, ultimately leading into what we now know as a UCL rupture

or a Tommy John's injury. And it sounds like you're sort of impressed by the UCL's capacity that it's as strong or elastic or durable as it is. because I'm often thinking, come on, UCL, just, you know, stop, stop failing, just stand up to the strain. And I think of it as the weak point where the flaw is exposed. It's the flaw in the design that is exploited by pitching. And I guess maybe ultimately it is, but it's being asked to do sort of a superhuman task, right? So it's actually maybe a pretty capable ligament.

It's just that it's being asked to do something that's no way. part of the body can do consistently unless you're really lucky. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a super capable ligament. It's just the things that we are asking you to withstand over time are unnatural. Like, people are not supposed to be able to throw this faster, you know, externally rotate their shoulders and apply the valgus torques that we would see in, you know, an average pitch. So in isolation, it's very strong. But like over time, like I said, it's just, it withstands a lot, a lot of torque.

Don't blame the UCL then. You're off the hook, UCL. It's not your fault. It's baseball and pitching's fault. So what did you find about how that risk can be mitigated? If you still have to pitch and you're still sort of conditioned and incentivized to throw as hard as you can, what can you do to reduce the risk? So I spoke about those two simulations I ran, right? So the 93 mile per hour, the average very traditional mechanics, then the 110 mile per hour with those extreme cricket-like overhead, extreme trunk tilt mechanics that result in high loads. But to better answer your question, I'll talk about the last case that I did, which I think ties in nice into your question. I ignored velocity, and I just said minimize UCL load.

What I saw was a sidearm submarine-like throw with severe ipsilateral tilt, meaning towards the throwing side, and it exhibited the lowest UCL load of around 20 new meters, but only achieved a 75 mile per hour top end speed. Right. So speaking of submarines, Tyler Rogers has the right idea, is what you're saying. He does, and, you know, he's never heard as UCL. Yeah. And in my thesis, I had a slide about the side-by-side comparison, you know, at the still frame, ball release, it's virtually identical to his mechanics.

I think he averages maybe 83 miles per hour, so I was off by a few miles per hour. I could have pushed the model a little bit more, I think, but you know, you're not going to be able to minimize the load without sacrificing something, whether that be your mechanics or whether that be speed. So ultimately, yeah, if you want to throw fast, you're going to have to put some sort of load on the UCL. But there are ways to mitigate that, but it just doesn't mean that I'm recommending people throw like Tyler Rogers. As entertaining as it is, it's not. something that everyone can do probably. Exactly. Yeah.

And so, yeah, without going to that extreme, is it just, well, the lower you go, the better all else being equal? So there's two things I could really point to. First, it's the arm slot. We've been seeing, you know, a lot of variation in arm slot recently. Some guys are kind of, you know, favoring a lower slot these days. Some guys, you know, Trades Savage comes to mind. He's nasty with the upper arm slot.

But what the research showed is that the higher the arm slot and the more extended your arm is, the more you're going to apply that valgus torque to the UCL. But also the amount of trunk tilt that you have, which I guess also influences the arm slot, but the further you lean away from the throwing arm, you know, at ball release, the more force you're also going to apply. So I think the two biggest takeaways are that you need to find a balance between both, you know, your arm position at ball release, you know, where the short. shoulder is, you know, that slot where your elbow is extended to, but also how far away are you

tilting from that throwing arm? Do you think that this is teachable, coachable? Is this something you're born with with your sort of natural arm slot? Obviously, we've seen some guys drop down often in many cases, and maybe that's for deception or something else, a different look, varying the arm slot. but is this actionable enough that you think that someone could go to a pitcher who has not gotten hurt yet and say, hey, you'd be better off long term if you've altered your delivery a little bit? Or is it just sort of a last resort when someone is more receptive to that and you kind of have to do something? Unfortunately, I think it's more of a last resort, as cool as it would be to say that. you know, my research kind of fixes the Tommy John's epidemic.

Yeah. But the case studies that I looked at were all extremes, pretty much, asking any pitcher who, you know, spent X amount of years with their life learning how to throw a certain way, asking them to change is just not feasible. But at the same time, you know, even a slight change in the arm slot, you know, my research would suggest that there is, you know, upstream effects to the UCL. And also, you know, the same could be said with the trunk. angle. So am I going to ask them to throw like a cricket player or to throw like Tyler Rogers all the time? Probably not. But, you know, any sort of meaningful change, you know, within their level of comfort without overhauling mechanics, in theory, according to this research, should have plausible and quantifiable effects on the UCL. Well, that's encouraging to some

extent. So I guess if you got someone in a malleable stage or if you were, say, a college coach or a high school coach, obviously the UCL strain epidemic, the wave of Tommy Johns, it's not just limited to the pros or the highest level. It's striking kids of all ages. So do you think that there's something to be said for changing the default? You know, if you kind of catch a kid early enough to say, hey, in the long term, of course, at that stage, most kids are not going to make it to the point where they're going to be pros, right? And so I guess it's kind of like you're sort of in a tough spot because either they're not thinking long term about a pitching career and then maybe it doesn't matter so much or they are. And if they are, then maybe they're going to be similarly resistant to change. But I just, I wonder if you can kind of get them young and maybe when things are still sort of reprogramable, and you could get that muscle memory set with perhaps safer mechanics, then it could be implemented at some point and have kind of a trickle-up effect.

Absolutely. I think you nailed it. You know, the UCL injury epidemic is, we're seeing it in, you know, teenagers and kids far more often than we used to. The rates are higher than ever. And, you know, that's also because, you know, development at that age is more accessible. and, you know, kids and parents invest a lot more time and energy into, you know, throwing as fast as they can. But at the end of the day, they're getting hurt because they are throwing as fast as they are at that age. Yeah.

So I think the target demographicness for this research is probably, you know, young adults, teens, who are, like you said, very malleable. I'm not asking a little league coach to preach this, but, you know, because all of these kids are now searching external help to kind of improve performance, you know, whether that be through camps or, other providers that provide these kind of consulting services for their mechanics. I think there should be a little bit more emphasis there, and I think that's where this research could have the greatest impact. Do you have any sense, I mean, you know, if everything worked out and you could kind of catch everyone early and you were the universal pitching coach for everyone and you instituted some safer mechanics?

What degree of injury reduction are we talking about here? Just all else being equal, you lower the arms. arm slot by X degrees, whatever it is. We're talking X percent reduction in strain and Y percent reduction in your odds of having your UCL tear. I'm sure that there are big air bars here, and it's tough to say precisely. But just trying to get some sense of what the range is, of how much can we safeguard guys, given the constraints that everyone's throwing max effort all the time. Are we talking just little tiny differences on the margins, or are we talking really appreciable improvements in long-term prognosis? Well, I wish I had a good answer for you, but I don't.

I mentioned earlier this is such a difficult injury to prevent, you know, and by no means do I think that this research will lead to the prevention of the injury. I think it just serves to better educate people about some steps you can take maybe earlier on to just have in mind about how your mechanics will affect it downstream. But in theory, you know, if you are throwing with the mechanics that I suggest, you know, lower arm slot, more ipsylateral than contralateral tilt, if you're able to achieve velocity at that point, I would expect over time the injury rates to go down. I can't say that conclusively. I have not studied that. But, you know, all those factors I mentioned earlier, like training, diet, sleep, etc.

those have, I think, an equally large effect on the outcome of the arm health. So I wish I could give you a percentage in theory. You know, if you're lowering loads, that repetition over time, you know, we could be expecting thousands of Newton meters over, you know, the course of a season or even a game, probably. So if on average you're throwing with less torque on the elbow, I would say that, you know, the amount of micro-tears and the amount of injury, you would be sustaining on a given throw would go down, but what does that mean long term? I don't exactly know.

Are there considerations for performance, too, because if you could sell this to a pitcher, not just as, hey, this might prevent you from sustaining an injury hypothetically that you're not guaranteed to suffer if you don't do this, that's kind of a tough sell unless the guy has maybe already had surgery or has fallen on hard times in some way. Is there any way that you can pitch this, so to speak, as this will perhaps help you pitch better in addition to pitching more safely, right? So can you kind of construct a scenario where if you make these mechanical changes, this might actually enhance your performance as well as your longevity and durability, or is that just, two, case by case, you know, tough to generalize and say, in a one-size-fits-all sense?

It's definitely tough to generalize. You know, I could make the case that if you throw with the extreme mechanics, that my simulation showed, I could argue you'd be able to throw harder, but I have no guarantee about what that's going to do to your elbow at the end of the day. To your question,

like the simulation completed, you know, at ball release, because anything downstream from that would require, you know, complex modeling of ball trajectory using the inputs of the biomechanical models, kind of like these initial conditions. So I wasn't able to see

if we're actually throwing strikes using these mechanics. In theory, my cost function for the optimisation was set up so that you're just maximizing velocity in the direction of the batter. You know, who knows we might have been drilling the batter with 110 mile per hour fastballs. Yes, then you protect the pitcher, but meanwhile, guys are getting beans. Exactly, exactly.

So to comment on the performance, no, but if we're just talking pure velocity, I could make an argument that adopting some of those extreme mechanics that I saw on the 110 and 10 mile per hour simulation, you know, in theory, could help you throw a little bit faster, but I have no comment on what that's going to do to your elbow, nor would I recommend it based on what I see. So it's sort of like a pull-down drill, as they call it, where it's just sort of max effort throw into a net in a general direction, basically. Exactly.

And so there has been research along these lines at some public facilities, so places like ASMI, the American Sports Medicine Institute, or maybe some of the training facilities and And obviously, teams are doing their own things, too. So how much information sharing is there among people in the biomechanical community? How much are you relying on other people's papers and they on yours? So in the professional space, you know, coming from my work with the Mariner's, you won't see anything published by an MLB team, nor is my research technically really affiliated with the Mariners. besides giving me the data, it's not too similar to anything you'd expect to happen in a major league organization. A lot of the research I do have access to is either from somebody else doing a thesis on this,

similar to the approach and pathway that I had, or it's, like you said, these academic institutes running these studies that, you know, definitely informed my own research and some of my day-to-day, like I will cross-reference them. But again, like the sample that they're going to be dealing with is going to be, you know, college pitchers, amateur pitchers, because they just don't have access to, you know, the major league arms, nor do teams want to send out their major league arms to kind of, you know, accumulate more load on the elbow for the sake of, you know, for the sake of science, essentially. Yeah, right.

I used publicly available research extensively. The Mariners do not provide me with any internal research that they had for this, but ultimately, you know, there is a big gap there for the exact same reasons that you were mentioning before. It's just we do not want to give anybody an upper hand. Unless, yeah, you want lower hands because you're lowering the arm slot. That's the secret. So without telling me what you're working on now, unless you want to, but you shouldn't, what is the advantage of being in-house other than the fact that, hey, you have a full-time job and benefits in a cool career?

But just in terms of the data and the resources that are available to you and presumably direct access to pitchers, not that they're all just volunteering to be your guinea pigs or anything, but you have whatever is gathered at various facilities or via statcast, et cetera, or kinetrax or whatever a team happens to have. What can you do with that information, you know, in a general sense? How does that improve your models or open up the realm of possible research subjects compared to what you were able to do or what other folks are able to do in the public sphere? It's just about the sample size of the data, you know.

It's just a lot more confidence in, you know, the claims that I can make, you know, whether that be to my organization or to my colleagues about, you know, the confidence that I have that what my finding state are actually true, you know. For my thesis, I think I had maybe 80 pitches to work with, you know, which is very insignificant. It is not enough data to wholeheartedly make, you know, generalizations and conclusions with the utmost confidence. But working in the space now, you know, every game I'm getting Hawkeye and or can attract data for both pitchers and batters for the entire league. And, you know, it's honestly overwhelmingly the amount of data we get. And deriving meaning from that, you know, has its own challenges.

It's a data science problem. But ultimately, in having access to all this data now, it just gives me the ability to have a lot more confidence in some of the conclusions I can make during my day-to-day work. And do you think that the priority for teams, and you don't have to speak specifically about yours, but just across the league, do you think that there's more effort and intellectual brain power being devoted to injury prevention or performance enhancement? And obviously those things go hand in hand or arm in arm at times. But do you think teams are focusing more on, hey, how do we change this guy's biomechanics so that he can throw harder? He can get more movement. He can pick up this pitch type. Is that taking precedent still over how do we ensure that this guy in the long run when he may or may not even be a member of this team? And someone else might benefit from our research.

I mean, if you're being self-serving about it, do you think teams are taking that long view? Or is it more myopic the way that it is with the pitchers themselves where they're just saying, hey, I'm putting one foot in front of the other and I'm trying to stay up here or get to this level, and I'll worry about what happens to my UCL down the road. Yeah, the whole league is in the business of winning games, and to do that, you need to throw as fast as possible.

So I think above health, for better or for worse, unfortunately, MLB just really prioritizes your output and performance. It's probably a little bit more than health at the end of the day. That's not to say that there aren't things being done to mitigate that. There is a lot of work and research being done there. But in terms of a primary focus from an R&D side of things or even from a player development side of things, I think we just want guys to perform as good as they can, given the circumstances. Injury is definitely a point of interest.

It is something that I strive to do, but I wouldn't necessarily say that that's happening all over the place. Yeah, the incentives just aren't really aligned in that direction, at least for teams and for pitchers, and that's why hopefully you need some third party, whether it's the league or public researchers, if they can with the data available to them, to step in and have a longer time horizon, because it'd be nice if someone were working on that. And I'd like to be able to make the case, you know, if you're a team with enormous resources, as some of them are, then it could make sense to basically have some sort of moonshot project where you're just like, hey, don't worry about Whether we win this year, we want to win in the long run.

And obviously, if you could keep your pitchers healthy, then that is also a huge advantage as well as just a humane thing to do. But every time a good pitcher goes on the IL, which happens constantly, and you have to go to the next man up, you're losing something, right? So if you could keep those first string guys healthy, I mean, put aside all the fan considerations and whether it's spectator friendly or not, and just the health and well-being of the players involved and everything, just from a pure dollars per war or whatever sense, if you could get through a season and have your rotation stay on track, which we've seen with some teams and the guardians lately and the pirates and the Cardinals have had some decent health.

And there's always a trade-off because I'm always thinking, gosh, well, if you could just have a rotation full of finesse guys, and they just wouldn't get heard, and even if they weren't as good, you just wouldn't have to dip down the depth chart quite as much, and maybe it would all work out. I don't know. I don't know if I can make that case credibly,

but I wish I could. I'd like to because just putting it in terms of, hey, it would be great and helpful if we protected pitchers. Well, our team's going to respond to that, but if you could put it in terms of, hey, this will help you win. Well, that's a different equation. Yeah, obviously keeping people healthy,

we'll always help you win. And, you know, commenting on my answer from, before by no means our teams being neglectful of the injury aspect I just don't always think it's you know front of mind because there is so much complexity to injuries that even my research or my day-to-day work is cannot encapsulate you know we need interventions for doctors kinesiologists psychologists psychologists nutritionists and it's such a complex problem that I just think the amount of effort and time required to really see the gains if they even exist, right, because it's so hard to quantify whether or not, you know,

any of the angles that would be taken to keep a bitch or healthy would bear any fruit. Like there's no guarantee because of the complexity of, you know, injuries in itself, not even the UCL, the whole body. There's so many factors. I just think it's such a hard problem to solve that it's not that we don't want to solve it. We as an MLB or, you know, biomechanists. It's just, it's so hard to quantify. I don't think anybody really does that.

But that's where the work of these, you know, public institutions and research institutions really comes into play. They have the goal of, you know, preserving health, first and foremost, because they don't have, you know, the dollar incentive of winning games. But their research really is instrumental, I think, in the long term. And over time, as more and more comes out,

I think the gains on health, you know, from a variety of different fields, whether that be doctors, nutritionist, psychologists, as I said before. I think, you know, the convergence of all of those fields together will really allow us to make bigger gains and understanding injuries. Because currently, it's just so hard to predict and understand injuries. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you next without speaking again specifically about the Mariners, but just your sense of the state of the art in the industry.

How accurate are predictions, forecasts, projections of injury risk? because there are some people who will sometimes claim that they can predict that, and you wonder, is that snake oil, or is it just so imprecise that it's hardly useful? There are some public systems out there that will maybe give a grade to guys, and based on various aspects of their stuff, or obviously their past injuries, which is pretty predictive, but by that point, maybe the horses out of the barn. So in the industry, do you get the sense that everyone is just guessing when it comes to, when will this guy get hurt?

Will this guy get hurt? Or is there actually some internal accuracy of that where certain pitchers are meaningfully more or less risky than others? I think it's very speculative, unfortunately. We just don't understand injuries in general enough to a point where, you know, we're able to predict with confidence that somebody will or will not get hurt, nor was that the point of my research at all. It's a predictive model in terms of being able to throw a baseball with predictive mechanics,

but the output on health is not predictive whatsoever. We can't imply that higher loads in general anywhere in the body will result in degradation of soft or heart tissue over time. But ultimately, I just don't think we are at the point in sports science where we can, with any sort of confidence, predict an injury. Well, get back to work then. What are you talking to me for? You're wasting time. You could be having a breakthrough right now. But I did have one more maybe, which is something that we've discussed on the podcast just as a hypothetical.

But let's say there were some big breakthrough. How quickly do you think that knowledge would circulate? And I mean, a team just comes up with one weird trick to prevent UCL injuries. First of all, how much time would you even need? to know that that's real, to start sort of raising eyebrows around the league? Because, hey, this team hasn't had anyone go under the knife in a while. I wonder if that's just chance. Is that fluke?

Is that luck? Do they know something we don't? Do people on teams talk about that? Do they look at other teams and say, huh, their injury rates seem low? I wonder if they're onto something. And if a team were at some point actually onto something, do you think they would ever share that information in any way, just for the good of the game?

and humanity, would they protect that secret tightly? And even if they did, would they be able to, given that the more people know it, the more vectors there are for that information to be shared, you know, people circulate, they move from one team to the next. Pitchers go from one team to the next. If there's some sort of amazing insight, you'd think it would be pretty tough to keep a lid on that. So, yeah, that's kind of a multi-part question.

And how quickly do you think it would even be discernible if a team had that edge? If a team did have that edge, would they just do everything they could to keep it away from everyone else? And if they did, how long would they be able to? So, yeah, I might have very limited experience in the industry. I would say that the team would, if they were onto something, probably would want to keep it as in-house as possible. You know, leaks happen all the time. Yeah. But I'm sure they would take the utmost precautions to prevent that from happening because there's

obviously a competitive advantage there with keeping your starters and rotation healthy. In the case that if it were to get out, I think everyone would be very skeptical at first because we just haven't seen enough work in that area to really be able to predict or prevent injury. Let's say a team caught wind of it, you know, I think there would be a lot of internal investigation before it was adopted blindly because there's a reason it hasn't happened. It's because it's so difficult to do. So there would just be some natural skepticism preventing, you know, you know, immediate adoption.

And I think it would be all hands-on-deck trying to figure out whether or not this is a reliable information. Do you have any sense of how long they could keep that secret, even if they tried their utmost? Because it just seems like that would trickle out one way or another, which is for the best, from my perspective. I have no idea. I mean, I would hope, you know, it's probably different. The structures, if it gets access to what information is different from organization to organization.

Yeah. I think anybody who had access to that information would try. try to keep it under lock and key as much as possible. Unless, you know, there's some really good Samaritans who bring it to the league as a whole and decide, like, we need a full-fledged MLB run study on this because it's just going to be good for the game, which I also do think, you know, is very possible, you know. People, you hate to see anybody get injured, nor do you want to win because the other team is injured. Yeah.

So, you know, it could go either of those ways. I would probably lean towards maintaining that competitive advantage to keep these in-house. But again, like you said, it's so hard to tell from work to org how that structure of information scarcity would be maintained. Yeah, maybe you'd get some sort of leak, maybe some whistleblower, whistelbo, whistelblower, that doesn't work. I don't know. I was trying something there. That was a good try. Yeah, thanks. And also, I guess, just in terms of how much responsibility mechanics have when it comes to injury risk versus just your kind of hard,

wired anatomical characteristics. Like, you know, is it nature or nurture? The answer is always both, obviously. And your mechanics might be your mechanics because of nature, because of the way that your body is put together. But if you could kind of artificially separate those things, do you think that one has clearly much more impact than the other? I would say probably nurture. Like, the way you're taught to throw probably has a bigger effect. You know, we've seen tons of different archetypes. You know, Mizorowski is this skinny kid,

or probably shouldn't call him the kid, but he's a skinny guy who just has a flamethrower. And, you know, I just, from like a physics and biomechanics perspective, like, if you showed me, like, just,

if you brought this guy in a lab, I would not think he would be able to throw that fast because, you know, he is very long, but I just think you need a certain amount of weight to really push the ball to those speeds, But, you know, ultimately, I think mechanics play a way bigger role than, you know, anatomy at the end of the day.

So, yeah, probably more nurture than nature. I do worry about the miss. I hope for the best. But I think you should maybe drop down, you know, take a cue from, just take something, take a page out of the Tyler Rogers playbook. You know, it might cost him 30 ticks or so on the fastball. But, no, if you're the miss, where are you not going to throw hard? I do always think when someone's throwing 103, it's like, okay. you could maybe just throw one at one or something,

you know, you'd still be really a flamethrower, but maybe slightly safer. Well, I wish you the best, and I'm glad you were able to share at least some of this research, and as General Rikhan says to Han in the Empire Strikes Back, you're a good fighter solo. I hate to lose you, so I hate to lose you behind the iron curtain of an MLB team. Everything is now proprietary, and nonetheless, I wish you well,

because we do need some sort of breakthrough here. So maybe you'll be the one to do it. Thank you very much, Cedric. I really appreciate the time. This is a lot of fun. And go Mariners. Meg would second that sentiment if she were here. All right.

So what we learned is, Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be pitchers. But if you do, teach them to throw like cricket bowlers. By the way, I have seen some research that suggests that arm angles are falling. Pitchers are using lower arm slots across the league by a bit. Probably less for injury prevention reasons than to operate. optimize approach angles to enhance pitch design, but perhaps it will have the effect of somewhat safeguarding those guys. Now, if you couldn't tell, that conversation was recorded before

Jacob Misrasky's start on Friday. So when I alluded to throwing 103, I undersold him. Make it 104. Make it, in fact, 104.5. And that was at the start of a complete game shutout. Put this version of the Miz in the bullpen, and maybe he'd blow by Chapman's Velo record and set a new high score. Not that I exactly get the sense that he's pacing himself. But my God, complete game, one hit shut out, 15 strikeouts in 95 pitches, the most strikeouts ever thrown in a Maddox, 74 strikes in 95 pitches. He has a 0.17 ERA in his last eight starts. And as Sarah Lings noted, lowest ERA in an eight start span, since earned runs became official in 1913, excluding openers. And normally I say fun facts lie, it's easier to set an ERA over a certain span record now because guys don't go as deep into games, which is.

true, but it wasn't true on Friday because the Miz went the distance. He is approaching the point of basically breaking baseball level of greatness. I know I said earlier this year that maybe if you needed one pitcher to throw one inning, Mason Miller might be the best of all time. I think perhaps he's been surpassed. Maybe Christopher Sanchez's run has too. Though we'll see what he has in him. Top that. This is a level of awe-inspiring where I almost don't stress about the entry risk anymore. I just sit back and say, I will marvel at this for as long as it lasts. Almost. But, Not quite. So let's talk more about protecting pitchers and UCLs. After a quick break, when I will be back with Daryl and Adam Morrow,

creators of forearm strengthening device Flex ProGrip. But whoever it is, they'll still be just a couple of baseball nerd. They'll still be speaking statistically, rambling romantically, pontificating pedantically, banter and bodily, drafting discerningly, Giggling, giddling, giddly, equalling effectively wild. Okay, well, I am joined now by the brain trust behind FlexPro Grip, the father and son team that designed the device. Darrell Morrow, who is the CEO, and Adam Morrow, who is the president. Daryl, maybe I will tee you up first.

Welcome. Thank you very much. Happy to be here, Ben. Super excited to spend some time talking about all things FlexProGrip related. Happy to have you and the junior morrow, Adam, welcome. Thank you as well, Ben, super excited for this. I have probably spent a little bit more time in the podcast community than Daryl has. So it's really fun to go from listening to a podcast and a platform for many years to now stepping up and being a guest.

This is super exciting for me. Yes, you host a FlexPro Grip podcast, The Layback Podcast. Oh, and I was even referring to just being a long time. listener of effectively wild and everything you guys do. So thank you so much. But I appreciate you mentioning the Layback podcast. Appreciate it. Of course. Always happy to give a plug to people. So I will try to direct traffic here. Maybe Daryl, could you go first and just explain what the device does? And then maybe we can throw it to Adam and we can hear a little bit about the origin story and we'll get into the research and the adoption of the FlexPro grip, et cetera.

But Darrell, take me back to the beginning. What was the impetus for the idea? And what does the device do in general terms? When we need to go back a little bit, and Adam will dig into more of the origin story as we go. But initially, we just wanted to understand why UCL's tear. We didn't start out saying, let's develop a device. It was really trying to answer a simple question of why.

And along the way, we felt like we could reverse engineer something in the form of a device that could dramatically reduce the risk that someone would end up tearing their UCL, the famed Tommy John surgery that we were trying to avoid. Over the years, as we've dug into this more, we've learned that there are additional applications. So while we initially started with a device that was aimed at either reducing the risk of injury or accelerating something, someone's rehab or recovery from a UCL or a UCL-related injury or a flexor-related injury. Over time, we've also recognized that there are significant performance benefits that we can use our device for. So in addition to that injury reduction piece, we can also now use our device to affect performance and performance for us as a pitcher is not so much that we would say that you can use our

device to increase velocity, although there are some pitchers who maintain that training on our device has helped them do that. We would never claim that. But we do have enough background evidence to suggest that training on our device might also, or it can also be used to alter the spin rate of a pitcher. And if we can increase a pitcher's spin rate, it doesn't necessarily mean that his movement will increase. But we certainly create the potential for a guy with enhanced spin to also create more movement. And with more movement becomes more deception. So in a nutshell, that's what we're using our device for, kind of three different aspects. Reduce the risk of injury, accelerate the recovery from someone who's already suffered an injury,

or alter performance in the way that we might impact spin rates for a pitcher. And tell me a little bit about your backgrounds, because I have also had the thought that, gee, wouldn't it be nice if we could help prevent UCL tears? But it never occurred to me that I could do anything about that. And so what is your background and what gave you the thought that perhaps you could help, and Darrell, you could go first and then, Adam. Well, as we like to say, we're not clinicians, probably the most sophisticated we get. We're dating ourselves with the old adage.

We're not clinicians, but we stayed at a holiday in once or twice. It's okay because, you know, Dr. Moreau has a bad rap as it is. Yes. The island of Dr. Moreau. How much I remember it. So for us, we never started out, I think, Ben, point to be made here is I think it would have been an incredibly daunting undertaking for us to think, and really probably the height of eubris for us to say that we were just going to start out to invent a

device to prevent UCL injuries. That wasn't our, that was really not the origin or the impetus behind what we were doing. We were really just trying to answer a very simple question of why. Now, I think we did have some, maybe I would say some help along the way in the sense that while I'm not a clinician. I worked in the health care industry for 25 plus years, and throughout my time there, I became friends with a number of physicians, surgeons who work in this space. One who has been very influential and helpful for us is an individual by the name of Gunner, Dr. Gunnar Brulenson, who works at Virginia Tech. And we would routinely consult with him and ask him questions about this concept of why people were tearing their UCL so frequently.

And most of the physicians that we interacted with know that I never like superficial answers, so they really wouldn't answer my questions very much. They would just throw research studies at Adam and I, and we would read them. And then we would routinely contact authors of those studies, we've been over to Birmingham and have had the wonderful fortune of being able to meet with Dr. Glenn Fleissig on numerous occasions to get input from him as well. It was really not for, I don't know, Adam, you know dates better than I, but I would suspect it's probably maybe a year, year and a half of really just pouring ourselves through articles to understand why before we ever even got the idea that we could invent something. It wasn't until we really understood the why that we started to say, well, if this is why this injury is happening so frequently, can we come up?

up with a way to train the muscular chore that plays such an enormous role in preventing this injury. And that really became the impetus behind the design. It wasn't so much, let's start from scratch and come up with a device that will stop this. Let's answer the question why. And we felt like if we just asked the question again and again and again to look at all aspects of it, to understand it, I think that really was the impetus and what really led us, ultimately to figure out how to go about doing this. With that, we had wonderful help. We had mechanical engineers who were very immensely helpful for us along the way. And we weren't so much the creative force of saying, here's exactly how to do it. We just knew what needed to be trained. So

with the team that we were able to assemble by Adam and I being able to give them the direction of what the device had to do, I think it just became a collaborative undertaking at that. that point. And Adam, you can add anything you'd care to to that and tell me about your background. Yes, I guess I can answer the question more directly and cover it for both of us. Neither Darrell or I are doctors, PTs. I know he said we're not clinicians. We have done nothing in the medical field or the formal research field. Both of us are possessed the most advanced degree of a master's of business administration. I played baseball throughout college, played one summer post-collegiate. Darrell was a basketball player. So we kind of like to say that it took an

outsider in the industry to look at the problem a little bit differently. We felt we needed to do something outside the box. When the industry was so focused on reduction, reduction, reduction, especially when it comes to let's improve mechanics to reduce exposures to torque. Let's get better at workload management. And let's try to throw less, make sure pitchers aren't competing as hard as often. All those things, yeah, they can reduce injury risk, but people want to play the game. And they want to play it to the best of their ability. So kind of the motivating factors of what Daryl said, enough.

massive piece to it was we wanted to create a system where athletes had a greater capacity to perform and could handle more, not be walking around in bubble wrap at all times and be scared of throwing the extra pitch or be scared of competing hard or be scared that the next throw might be the one that does it for them. If we created a system that can handle more risk or enables the athlete to do more on a daily basis, not only can we give the athlete freedom in their operation, we can give them peace of mind, but hopefully in the long run, we create a greater runway for performance, enabling athletes to get better. So I always like to anchor in the fact that Daryl and I are familiar with athletics. We were in it for a long time. I'm a strengthening

conditioning coach on the side. I do love that stuff. So it's not like we're completely new to this game and just kind of threw stuff on a sheet of paper and hoped it would work out. We definitely were familiar with it. But we just dedicated ourselves to doing something that truthfully anyone could have done. If they asked the right questions in the process and committed to reading the research in seeking out individuals who pave the way to even get to where we are, anybody could have done. what we did, but I guess we were just the ones that took it on. And Adam, for those who haven't seen it, and I will link to your site and the various literature, but can you just describe it, since this is a podcast, if you could give people

some sense of what it looks like, how you use it, how it works? I think we can start by first choosing what era of superhero we want to discuss. If we are dating ourselves a little bit, we even go beyond the superhero and we go Edward Cisorhands. We hear some people say, Thanos glove, if they're a little bit younger and more into, I guess, the current world of superhero movies. But really, we created a device that you wear on the back of your hand. It stretches from your fingertips up to about a third.

of the way up your forearm, maybe just a quarter of the way up your forearm. So a little bit past the wrist. It is kind of a black box in a sense. I'm just trying to do the best description I can for someone to see it before they Google it on their own. But there's extensions that go out over your fingers and a one inch thick kind of black contraption that sits on the back of your hand. And it houses effectively force plates, but truly load cells or force. transducers that are able to gauge not only how much force each finger can create in either flexion or extension or the wrist in ulnar and radial deviation, but also how fast that force can be created or over what period of time, which is where the force plate concept comes in.

So it's kind of a fancy-ish-looking superhero device that you wear on the back of your hand that is just designed to measure how much force you can create and how quickly you can create it. Then where all the kind of fancy background work comes in is in the mobile application, which functions on Apple products, so iPhone, iPad, or MacBooks. And that's where we put in the real programming. The device is, quote unquote, a stupid or a dumb device. It doesn't necessarily have a brain. but the app is what's smart.

And that's where the programming is taking place. And that's where all the principles from strength and conditioning and the sports medical fields are being put into place to ensure that athletes are training properly. And so tell me if I'm distorting or misrepresenting anything. But the basic idea, the UCL is often just the weak point, the failure point in the kinetic chain because there are all these forces and it's subject to this incredible stress and torque. during the delivery, and it's just not a very robust part of the anatomy. And so it will snap if subjected to sufficient force repeatedly. And so the idea is, let's try to compensate for that

and offload some of that strain by strengthening other parts of the process. And often the forearm can be kind of a precursor to a UCL issue. We see that all the time. Guys will go on the IL with whatever bird is a flexor strain or something, and sometimes you think, uh-oh, that's going to lead to bad things down the road. And so if you can strengthen one of the other potential weak points, then maybe you take a little strain off of the UCL without, I guess, subjecting it to additional strain, because, of course, you do more strength training. Maybe you can whip your arm around even faster, and then that stresses the UCL even more, which could potentially backfire on you. But the forearm, if you can kind of take some of the strain off the UCL,

then perhaps you will be a little less likely to get hurt. Is that the general idea, Daryl, or have I completely butchered it? No, I think you're very, very close. If you just look at the basic physiology bin, there are only three structures that can come into play to offload stress that a pitcher places on his medial elbow or the inside of his elbow when he throws a pitch. And those three structures are the UCLOR.

or the ulnar collateral ligament, the bones in the elbow, and then the muscles that overlay the UCL, of which there are only three physiologically that overlay the UCL. As Adam describes this Wolverine slash Iron Man slash Thanos type glove, it's not that we thought that was a cool design. We were far more focused on function than we were on form or design. And for us, it was really just a question of how can we come up with a mechanism or a device, if you will, to target the very muscles that are most responsible for protecting the UCL or shouldering some of this load. One of the early eye-opening, I think findings for us, and now I think the industry as a whole has come to understand this, certainly the baseball industry, and maybe they did all the long

and we were just novice to us, but I'd like to think that we helped educate an industry over the last, whatever, five, six years, is that the UCL alone is incapable of handling all of the stress that a high-level or high-velocity pitcher places on his medial elbow. So the musculature has to contribute in some way, shape, or form. Otherwise, a pitcher would tear as UCL every single time he tried to throw a high, high velocity pitch. So we know without question that the musculature has to play some role. What we've been able to do throughout all of the research that our device has been involved in, we now have a far, far, far better understanding of just how strong that musculature needs to be,

how stiff it needs to be, how fast it needs to be able to produce force. And as Adam said, that's where we use the smart side of the mobile app to better understand where pitchers need to be and to better train them to target that musculature in a way that it can reduce the stress placed on the UCL from ever reaching that tipping point, as you say, because at that point, then the UCL's going to tear. I like to use the analogy all the time. It's like going back to dating ourselves as little kids playing on a seesaw. There's nothing that can be done to increase the overall strength of the UCL, all you can do is increase the strength or the stiffness of the musculature that overlays the UCL. And if that muscular chore is too

weak, i.e. the seesaw analogy, if the musculature is weak, we increase the stress on the UCL. If we can increase the overall strength, or as Adam uses the word earlier in giving one of the answers. If we increase the capacity of the muscular short to handle more force, then we reduce the load that the UCL will have to bear. Yes, it's funny that you bring up the seesaw, because I guess one solution to that has been banned seesaws, because they don't tend to have those at a lot of playgrounds these days. I've noticed bringing my daughter to them, and I can testify that that might be wise because I broke my clavicle on a seesaw. And I was not looks maxing or anything.

I was five or six years old. And my grandma and I did not approach the seesaw in sync. And so one way to do it is just to ban pitching. I guess that would help with the UCL tears. But then we wouldn't have baseball. So that would be bad. That's unacceptable. So this is an alternative.

And I forget exactly when I became aware of FlexPro grip. I have heard about it for years. I started getting your emails at some point. And at first I was skeptical, just because I'm generally skeptical about anything. And I was somewhat reassured because you didn't seem to be making any preposterous claims. This wasn't some sort of infomercial style marketing where, hey, this is the miracle cure to every UCL strain. And I spoke to people in the game who seemed to vouch for this being a somewhat sensible approach. and also you seem to want to test it and to want to show your work and present some data.

So I'll ask you about that, either of you, but Adam, I guess you could take this. Just what validation have you done or would you like to do to make sure that this is not just something that makes sense in theory, but also in practice? Yes. Okay, well, this is super timely. and it's almost as if we could have flipped the question order because Daryl actually just got home from laying the groundwork for a research project we're involved with this summer, one of which is out in Salt Lake City. So we'll consider that me dropping some breadcrumbs for future research, but I will go backwards first. So our initial study per se was just proof of concept. and that involved Daryl getting stuck with needles for a fine wire EMG with a flex pro grip device on his arm. The reason it was Daryl is I am deathly afraid of needles.

And thankfully because he is my father, he will still look out for my best interest most of the time. And because I'm afraid of needles, Daryl was willing to do the fine wire EMG. I have gotten better with time. I am now 32 years old and the fact that my daughter has to get shots and I'm the one that holds her for those shots. It's certainly nerve-wracking, and it's forced me to be a stronger man just to handle it. Yeah, it is a little mad scientist coded to experiment on yourself, I guess, but it is selfless to take that needle for you. That is where we started, Ben. So first we needed to make sure that Fletchpro grip did actually target the muscles that we say it targets. And thankfully, to the, I guess the effectiveness of EMG work, we were able to prove that.

So check box in the right direction. Next, we went to make sure that athletes could make strength adaptations. The reason we care about strength adaptations is strength, although it is not ultimately what we're chasing. We're chasing muscle tendon tissue quality or ultimately stiffness and improvement in the Young's Modulus, which is where we get into the weeds of physiology and the changes to the mechanical properties and muscle tendon units. So I'll avoid that a little bit for the podcast's sake. But we started with strength. And the reason we care about strength is if we are training at a high enough level, we can make those adaptations to the Youngs modulus or to the muscle

tendon units, creating a tougher, stiffer, more resilient muscle tendon unit. And it a great way to see that because we can't always do ultrasound elastography and look at what is actually going on with the tissue quality. But a decent way to look at it much more rapidly is by looking at if guys are getting stronger. And that's easy to assess because we just look at a longitudinal training program. And thankfully, one of the early clubs we worked with, the San Diego Padres. We did that as kind of our beta in the Arizona Fall League back in 2021. Or I say the Fall League, I misspoke slightly, during their instructs camp in the fall of 2021. So we had 31 pitchers involved in that and lo and behold, they got stronger. What we were also able to assess during that time

is the cross-education principle. Where cross-education comes in handy, especially in the rehab world, is because athletes can't always do something on their injured limb. However, because the fingers and wrist are so undertrained or under targeted in the vast majority of athletes, there is a great benefit that can be made to the neuromuscular adaptations or the kind of nervous or neural firing patterns that occur just from getting the brain to trigger movement on the opposite side of the body. Thankfully, the fingers and wrist and elbow are relatively controlled in a similar spot in the brain for the left and right arm. So if an athlete injures their right arm, we can have them train in the early stages of their rehab on the left arm. And they might not make significant gains on the right arm, but we know we can train on the left arm to prevent losses or hold off the detraining effect that it can occur. So that was another early piece that we were able to validate.

which was awesome. Then we go to what Daryl mentioned on the performance side. So we started to validate what we can get in spin rate gains or what we care more about spin to velocity ratio because we do want to normalize it knowing that as an athlete throws harder, their spin rate is going to rise as well. However, if we can hold velocity constant or normalize velocity and still have an increase in that percentage of spin rate, that's fantastic. And we were able to see this. at the high school, collegiate, and pro levels in all internal non-clinical trials, but we did it with a group with the Padres during the season back in the spring of 2022 going into the summer. We did the following summer with different facilities training high-level high school and

college guys. So to participate in the study, you had to throw at least 80 miles per hour. The average velocity during this study was, I think, 86 or 87 miles per hour. So relatively hard throwers, especially for research in general. Most of the time you get guys throwing 76 miles per hour and you have to call them advanced throwers. Thankfully, we were able to overcome that a little bit. And what was pretty awesome is the professional guys in about 12 training sessions of FlexPro

grip focused on rate of force development specifically. So the speed at which you can create force saw a 4% gain in their spin-to-velocity ratio. Then we switched that to our high school and collegiate groups, which did 18 sessions over a six-week period, so three rate of force development sessions per week for a six-week period, averaged a 4.6% gain in spin-d velocity ratio. Now, what that means in actual inches of movement, because that means a lot more to a lot of people or the hard RPMs. The pro group with the Padres saw about 100 to 150 RPM gain on their primary fastball. The high school and collegiate groups saw about 150 to 200 RPM gain on their primary fastball, resulting in about one and a half to two inches of additional movement. So if it's a four-seem guy, we really focused on induced vertical break.

If it's a two-seam guy, sinker guy, we focus more on the horizontal movement associated with the pitch. So that's where things started. Those were non-clinical trials. We get that. Thankfully, we have since been involved in now two more formal trials that are in the pre-publication stages. One was performed at the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine to students who are well on their way to graduating, now entering their fellowships. But they performed an analysis, a retrospective analysis, analyzing, the use of FlexPro grip as kind of a chicken or egg assessment on did athletes get hurt because they were weak or did a weakness stem from athletes getting hurt? Regardless, the purpose of the study was to assess the strength that pitchers have in their flexor digitorum profundis versus their flexor digitorum superficialis, two of the three muscles best position to, dynamically stabilize or support the UCL. And what we found pretty cool is pitchers who got hurt or who were previously injured in this

retrospective analysis were, one, overall weaker than pitchers who remained healthy. And two, had a decreased ratio of strength between the muscle that controls the fingertip and the muscle that controls midfinger flexion. So two red flags there, which were super important as we look forward and have significantly influenced our programming. One more study to discuss before getting into kind of the future research that we hope to uncover, which is a study that pretty much validated FlexPro grip. And that was performed by Jess Geiger, who is a graduate of Wake Forest.

She worked under Dr. Kristen Nicholson there. and she basically analyzed a control group and a test group, 18 pitchers in each bucket. One group trained on FlexPro grip for 10 weeks. One group did not touch FlexPro grip for 10 weeks. She analyzed the amount of gaping that these pitchers had during a dynamically loaded ultrasound. So athletes under actual stress during this ultrasound to create gaping in their elbow. and what she found is the athletes who trained on FlexPro grip during this 10-week period

actually saw a decrease of over 40% in their medial elbow joint gaping. And when athletes throw, we expect an increase in joint gaping. And during this competitive season where these athletes trained on FlexPro grip, not only did the level of gaping, not only was it that they just didn't gap as much, they actually reversed the amount of gaping that they experienced. So in training on Flexpo grip, they did create a safer elbow, a safer arm for them to perform with. Then the exciting stuff that Daryl's getting into this summer is in partnership with the MLB Draft League, as well as the Marshalls League out in Utah, which is where Daryl just came back from.

We are implementing studies to assess how fatiguing an outing actually is. and hopefully utilizing that information to create more individualized workload metrics and tracking systems to go well beyond what we're doing with pitch counts these days or acute to chronic workload ratios. That way we can actually utilize this information to determine where the breaking point might be for an individual or when it actually becomes the right time to intervene. because all of us could have the same workload on-ramp program, and 76 pitches could be extremely different in the level of fatigue that it causes for each of us. So that's something that we're very excited to take on this summer.

I really apologize for getting so long-winded there, but it's just exciting to talk about the research. So thank you for that question, Ben. We love to discuss research on effectively well. And I will say I have been clocked throwing off a mound. I'll stick up for 76 being advance in my book. At this point, I'd like to throw 76. Yeah. And, you know, helpful, I guess, if you can, if you've gotten your sticky stuff taken away

and you've lost a few RPMs along the way, then I imagine some people will want to replace their spider tack or spider attack equivalent with something that is legal and that an umpire who is massaging your hand after you read the man cannot not detect and eject. So, Darrell, tell me a little bit about how this has been embraced and adopted. So Adam mentioned the Padres trial. I know you've done some stuff with Drive line. Give me some sense of the scope here in terms of how many teams at the major league level or below are using this. I don't know whether you usually work with teams or you work with individuals within teams.

But how many pitchers have been using a flex program already? At last count, I think when we looked at this, we were slightly over 3,000 pitchers. We have pitchers. If we look at Major League Baseball, we are working at some level with pitchers in all, but I would say three or four Major League organizations that we know of. And it's entirely possible we're working with pitchers in every organization. But we can certainly call to mind pitchers that we are working directly with. at least 26 of the 30. In terms of organizations, I think we have organizational agreements in place.

Adam, correct me if I'm wrong, but I want to say it's at about a third. Maybe it's like 11 or 12 of the organizations we have direct agreements with that we work with. And those organizational agreements might call for us to be going out to spring training to assisting the orgs with testing all of their guys on one of those studies that Adam mentioned earlier to assess guys that we would suggest might be at greater risk of injury because of weakness in their overall forearm muscular chore. In addition to that, I would say we're working with players in, I don't know the exact number, but I would say at least 100 colleges. And we have agreements in place with some of the highest level colleges people might think of that come to mind. I mean, the

Yellow Shoes, Vanderbilt's, Wake Forest, Ohio States, and I could TCUs, Dallas Baptist, I could just keep Ole Miss, we can just keep naming names, but, and we do kind of the same thing. We would walk in and help those coaches assess the current level of overall health of their players, and then from their program accordingly. You mentioned Drive Line, I think maybe two or three years ago. we started working with Drive-Line primarily on all of the players that were using Drive-Line to aid in their rehab. A year ago, we started working with Drive-Line universally to where now they've adopted FlexProGrip as part of their overall intake assessment. So if there's a player who goes to Drive-Line, he's likely going to be assessed on FlexPro-Grip.

We recently released even a white paper looking at overall testing data, and I think at the time, I can't remember the exact number, but it was well over 800 pitchers who have been tested on our device at driveline. And then we can use that data to help program. That's at the kind of team level, Ben, but we also work with hundreds of individual players, pitchers at the high school, the college, the professional level, who just reach out to us on their own. Some, it's because they've already been injured and they want our help in the rehab process and others because they recognize that the odds are if you throw hard today, if you don't do something, you're likely going to suffer an injury at some point in your career.

So some of those people reach out to us from a preventative standpoint. And that's great. I mean, we love to help those people because we can do in a very quick assessment. determine what we would assign to be their level of injury risk. Now, we can't predict anyone's injury, and we would never hold out that we could do that. But there are certain conditions that we've seen because of the extensive data we have now of those players that seem to be at a far, far higher risk of injury. And with, because of what we're doing, Adam talked about us having this, the mobile app being kind of the smart aspect of our technology.

The word that we haven't talked about much, but I think it's key to stress, everything we are doing with our device is objectively measured. There is no guessing. We have objective data that is being produced off of our device in a way that has never been produced in the industry before. So with that objective data, we are able to make, I think, very informed decisions, as are the coaches and athletic trainers

and physical therapists and clinicians that we work with on how they assess injury risk and how they go about training guys who use our device. And what would you like to do, pie in the sky, if you could set up the perfect study to test whatever you want to test? Adam mentioned a study with 18 pitchers in this bucket and 18 pitchers in that bucket. you've got to start somewhere, but presumably you would want a big sample where you do some sort of perspective. You're following people over time. You're adjusting for other injury risk factors, and then proof is in the pudding. You see what the injury rates are, right? So how far are you

from being able to do something along those lines, or how would you draw it up if you had your druthers? Well, that's challenging. I mentioned a while ago in this. podcast that Dr. Gunner-Brollinson has been very helpful for us. I can remember when we were very much in our embryonic stages of just doing device development before we had released it to anyone. But we had a high degree of confidence that based on the direction we were heading, our device could be what it's become. And I remember asking him, so Dr. Burlinson, what do we do here? Do we bring it to market, or do we just conduct a longitudinal study to demonstrate efficacy? And I remember I'm saying, well, if you're going to do a longitudinal study to demonstrate efficacy,

minimum you're going to need five years and it might be 10 years. And as you suggest, Ben, we're going to need to get a collection of pitchers. We're going to need a control group. We're going to need a training group. These guys have to be willing to be willing to train for long periods of time. And then we're just going to watch injury rates to see whether or not we can make a difference. And he said, but the flip side is, we already know what the current state of the industry is. We know it's not getting any better.

And we can just look at decades of research, which is all proven the efficacy and importance of training for our muscular chore to reduce injury risk. He said, so I think it would be in some ways inappropriate for you guys to hold off on bringing it to market when there's so much secondary evidence. to support the efficacy of what you're doing. So for us, it's really, Ben, let's just move forward with what we have, with what we know, and we just continue to try and push what we're doing with our device to learn more and more as we go. I don't think, Ben, that there's a perfect study. I think what we do is typically either on our own or with our partners, whether they be partners in Major League Baseball, with the colleges we work at,

work with, with the clinicians we work with, we just consistently ask questions to better understand at a granular level what's going on and why injuries are happening. Adam mentioned two forthcoming studies. So as Adam said, one we're doing is with a collegiate league. We're going to end up with over 50 pitchers, might approach 60, 70 pitchers, all collegiate pitchers, high level throwers in this Marshall's Salt Lake City League. And we're going to do the exact same thing later this summer in the Major League Baseball's Draft Lake. And we'll get extensive data there. And when I say we, I want to make clear, this is, our device is being utilized. We, meaning Adam and I are flex program. We're not controlling the narrative of the research here. The clinicians have written

the methodology. We're just supporting them with our device because we have a group. group of clinicians that have really bought into what they think our device can become. So collectively, we're just trying to better answer those questions. And on this particular one, as Adam mentioned a bit earlier, going back in some of the research, Dr. Andrews, for quite some time at ASMI, has been highlighting the role and the impact of fatigue and how that influences injury rates. And when you ask the quite, when you talk about fatigue, the question become, okay, what is fatiguing? What's fatiguing is this for a muscular chore that's responsible for aiding or assisting in protecting the UCL.

With our device, we, and with these two studies that we're undertaking, we feel like we can better assess fatigue in ways that the industry has been unable to. The purpose of the study then is to do just that. after every high-intensity outing now, we will measure the rate at which these pitchers are able to produce force, and we can measure that against baseline. And once we have those two informations, we can better understand how throwing impacts fatigue of pitchers. And we don't think it's going to be universal. I mean, any injury becomes multifactorial. You can't always point to one thing, but we think we can better understand kind of the nature.

or the ideology of this injury when it happens so that hopefully we can train it better on the guys who use our device to reduce that risk. And Adam, even if you guys haven't taken the Hippocratic oath, I assume first do no harm, you don't want there to be unintended consequences of any of this. So I assume the validation that you did was enough to assuage any concerns or concerns of your partners or have you had any cases where, say, someone overtrains? with this. Maybe that contributes to fatigue. Maybe suddenly they start getting carpal tunnel instead of a UCL strain or something along those lines, right? Or, you know, it didn't always work smoothly for

Edward Sizzarhans either. So have you had anything go wrong or happened that you had not anticipated? There certainly have been learning moments. Unfortunately, the people do sustain injuries while concomitantly training with FlexPro grip, but it's not it's not while they are training on the device. To date, we have had one athlete ever cite an actual issue while training on the device. And what's actually really coincidental timing is I was talking to this athlete's former teammate yesterday on the phone. And we were actually really really, really, you know, telling the exact story. This is an athlete who I'm going to guess a lot of people who are listening to this podcast have actually probably seen pitch before. And this guy 100% balls to the wall

with every single thing that he does. In the wording that I just got from his teammate yesterday was pretty hilarious to me. He said that he liked seeing the dial on our app go up and he like seeing the numbers increase. So it was really hard for him to not just one rep max every single time he picked up the device. That's how pitchers end up throwing too hard sometimes too. Which is really funny, right? It's the same thing that kind of can be demonized with radar guns is by having more data and more information, you should be able to make more informed decisions, but also sometimes you always want to chase that shiny thing. And that becomes really important for how we program and how we get involved with athletes. Because if an athlete is

literally trying to go pedal to the metal every time they use FlexPro grip, they are going to sustain the potential fatigue-related injury that we're trying to avoid anyways. We say this time and time again. Everything that we do with FlexPro grip is not new. We didn't reinvent the wheel. We are not finding a new way to train athletes. All the principles of this device have been laid out in the past 30 years of elbow injury research. And on top of that, even further, with all the research that has ever been performed in the human performance and strength conditioning world. So that's why I'm trying to be really careful with all my wording.

that if you misuse FlexPro grip, just how you can misuse a plio ball, misuse a baseball, misuse an Olympic bar in a weight room, those things can result in injury. However, if you follow proper training principles or if you follow the recommendations laid out by us and laid out by our medical advisory team, you're going to be in a good place. Now, what does become really important, and we are extremely passionate about, for every single athlete that we talk to and every team that we talk to, at the end of the day, it is their choice. But we are willing to have as many people involved in our process as the athlete or is the patient or whatever you want to call the actual subject using the flex pro grip device once involved. because if we have more people involved that are on the care team or are on the support team of the individual, then we know everyone is on the same page and we can make better, more informed decisions along the way to hopefully avoid those potential injuries that we kind of giggled about at the beginning of the question. Okay, so Darrell, last question maybe.

Give me some sense of your hope or realistic expectation. for the magnitude of the difference that this might work. Let's say that this just becomes standard issue to every pitcher in pro baseball, and that would probably be pretty lucrative for you, so congratulations. But everyone's using it from day one, and they're using it the way that you want them to use it, and it's pervasive. What do you think, all else being equal? You know, you haven't eliminated and eradicated UCL strains yet, so you still have some work to do here. And I assume that you're not advertising this as the magic bullet, that body parts will fail and that there's only so much you can do preventatively speaking.

So what are we talking in terms of, okay, we can potentially cut UCL's tears by X percent. Do you have any sort of figure in mind? We've never operated with a figure because this is the classic response of it takes a village. UCL injuries, as I said earlier, they're multifactorial. And I'm not avoiding your question. I'm going to come back and answer it ultimately, Ben. But I think it's important to anchor around injuries are multifactorial. A guy can do everything perfectly on flex pro grip.

But if he goes and throws at 100% of his max on velocity every single day and throws at 100 pitches, eventually he's going to hit a point of fatigue and he's going to tear is UCL, and there's no amount of FlexPro grip training that would stop that. So workload is a factor. Recovery is a factor. Sleep is a factor. All of these things have to work together, and that's where I say it takes a village. So because of that, we love working with our major league and college partners to design overarching programs to create the best opportunity for a pitcher who doesn't have to throw scared, as Adam says early. We want pitchers to throw with confidence and to be able to push the limits as to what they can do,

knowing that they've done everything possible to give their elbow the greatest degree of protection. Equally, I would say, we will never be satisfied, certainly on a player who is trained on flex pro grip. If a player trains on FlexPro grip and he does exactly what we would prescribe him to do, our expectation, and you could say perhaps you or your listeners might consider this to be incredibly unrealistic, our expectation and goal is that no one will tear their UCL. Because we think if we can create an environment in which we can prevent a single pitcher from tearing as UCL,

then our view is why can't we replicate that? I think the bigger challenge becomes just the simple fact that baseball creates for its pitchers such an incredible stressful environment for so many factors that have to be taken into account. I mean, Major League Baseball, just think of the level of travel, how often times a pitcher has to get hot, particularly if he's a relief pitcher, how much he has to throw, and all of the stresses that go along with it. The data today, Ben, and I'm sure you've validated this if you looked at some of the online data sites. At last count, I think we were approaching 40% of all Major League pitchers, active Major League pitchers, have torn their UCL at some point. And of those who haven't, those who have been imaged would suggest that at least half of the remaining probably are operating with some level of a partial UCL or flexor strain.

So at that point, add those two up, and now we're probably approaching 65 to 70% of all pitchers have either already suffered this injury or might be a pitch away. I would like to think that if we can get players to follow the protocols that we think to date have been most effective, and we can do that and build around a solid workload management program and recovery and all of the things associated with it. I'd feel like we would certainly hope we could reduce the injury rates and risk by half. Maybe that's aggressive, maybe it's, but even if it's half, we're not satisfied because we feel like for the one pitcher that was unable, then our view is would fail. There's something we miss. We look at every soft tissue injury of the elbow, flexor or UCL, as a system failure somehow. Either the musculature wasn't strong enough to support that level of activity or something about what that guy did in terms of his workload and usage caused him to reach that tipping point.

And that's where we don't necessarily claim to have all of the answers, but we would like to think that based on the last now eight years of 365 days a year that this has become our passion, we've learned a lot in the process. and I would like to think we've earned a seat at the table where we can have very informed discussions with others to figure out exactly what might need to be done to significantly reduce that risk of injury for the player moving forward. Imagine there's no UCL strain. If you try.

Actually, it's incredibly hard, just like playing first base. So you may say that Adam and Daryl Morrow are dreamers, but they're not the only ones. and I wish you well with your mission. And so people can check out the product at FlexProgrip.com or they can stream Edward Scissorhands on Disney Plus, I believe, either way. Daryl, thank you very much. And Adam, thank you as well.

This was an incredible opportunity. So thanks for the invite. Ben, thanks so much. Okay, we've given pitchers and elbows plenty of pod time. How about catchers and brains? Those are pretty important, too. And hey, we'll even talk about pitchers' brains at the end. After one more quick break,

I will be back with Stephen Rosen, director of the helmet lab at Virginia Tech to talk about protecting catchers from concussions. Effectively, it's the zombie runner, Bobby Shands, Bobby Shams, Bobby Shenz, Bobby Shamed. Joey Manessus, no. Walk off three-run digger. Stop it.

Walk off three-run shot. Oh, my God. Meg, he's the best player in baseball. All right, I am joined by a guest now who is not himself hard-headed, though he does devote a lot of time and effort to encasing our heads in hard objects. His name is Steve Rosen, and he is the director of the Helmet Lab. And we will, of course, explain what the Helmet Lab is. Steve, welcome to the show.

Happy to be here. So you have been at Virginia Tech at the Helmet Lab since its inception, which I think was about 20 years ago now. So for those who don't know, tell us what is the Helmet Lab. Sure. Well, our general background is injury biomechanics. And what that means is that we figure out the forces that cause injury to the human body. And the idea is if we could understand those things, we could start to design interventions to prevent injury from occurring. And we do this for a range of different applications. We're most famous for sports, but we do aviation, military, automotive safety, consumer products, even like nerve guns. So we study and test all. kinds of products to make sure people aren't getting hurt. Do people need helmets for Nerf now? Is that? Should I? Sometimes you need eye protection. Oh, yes. That is probably important, I guess. Hopefully it's soft enough that you don't need the full helmet, but who knows? I haven't used a Nerf gun in a while. Maybe they have upgraded them since I was a kid. So give me some sense of some innovations that

have happened or some discoveries that you have made over the years. It could be, you know, other sports in football and soccer and whatever it is, or bicycles, or what have you discovered, how have you improved helmets and improved outcomes over the years? Sure. Well, you know, in the early 2000s, we were the very first group to start sticking sensors and athletes and measuring head impacts. So we worked with the Virginia Tech football team, and there was this empty space inside the football helmets.

And we had these sensors we could put in there, and it would communicate wirelessly with the computer we had on the sideline. So for every game in practice, we are collecting data on how hard the football players are hitting their heads. Over time, we were able to capture data on the impacts that caused concussion. So we were able to create relationships that would take the head acceleration we're measuring and compute a probability of injury. So we learned all kinds of things. We learned how hard football players hit their heads, how frequently, what locations on the helmet, and in which impacts are most likely to cause concussion.

One day, our equipment manager at Virginia Tech asked us to help them pick out new helmets. And we said, well, there's no data. So we'll buy some helmets, test them, and let you know it's good. And we started doing that, and we saw huge differences between the helmets that were available in the market. They're all safe, meaning you're not going to die wearing that helmet, like brain bleed, skull fracture, catastrophic head injury. But there are big differences in the ability of those helmets to reduce concussion risk. So we let the team know it's good, and they replaced all their helmets. but we felt everyone should have that information.

And out of that, the Virginia Tech helmet ratings were born. And since then, we've expanded into all different kinds of areas. We've replicated what we did with Virginia Tech athletes and studied kids, youth football players, age 6 to 14. And we saw that it takes less force to cause a concussion in a kid than an adult, which was suspected, but whatever really shown before. We saw they don't hit their heads as hard or as frequently, but they still get injuries. And it was the first kind of data that suggested maybe a youth football helmet should be designed differently than an adult football helmet. And that's what we see today.

And obviously there has been so much attention paid to head injuries in football and CTE, etc. And so the state of the art, whether for amateurs, kids, or professionals, adults today, compared to when you started this, how much have things changed in terms of the efficacy of the best helmets of it? It's night and day. There's been more progress in football helmets in the last 10 to 15 years and there were in a previous 40. And the reason is the people who make these helmets are engineers and they're designed to a standard. And the standard is the only design criteria they really had outside of non-safety criteria like aesthetics, weight, materials. So we gave manufacturers a design tool. When I talk about the helmet ratings, I really always talk about we have two goals.

Our first goal is to let people know which helmets are best so they can make informed decisions. But our second goal is to work with industry and give them design criteria so that they can optimize their design based on the head impacts that people are seeing in the real world to make helmets safer. So it's this like closed circle, right? Consumers start buying only the best helmets that incentivizes manufacturers to start. developing better helmets. Consumers start buying those better helmets. And it's just like this cycle that keeps on going where head protection has, over the last 10 years, has gotten incrementally better to the point that if you looked at a helmet today and you compared it to what our football players were wearing in early 2000s, you wouldn't believe it. They're thicker.

There's better materials. They're softer. The shells deform. And is that more about the technology, about the materials that are available, or is it more about the design? That is, could you have created today's helmets 20 years ago if you had had the same knowledge or have some of those advances relied on innovations in the actual manufacturing and the materials? The answer is both. So there's been material advances. We're starting to see more additive manufacturing, like 3D printing, be integrated into head protection. But with that said, the fundamental principles of preventing injury,

remain the same. We want to design helmets so that they can deform as much as possible. So by making the padding inside helmets thicker and softer rather than thinner and stiffer, you're able to reduce forces on the head over the whole continuum of head impacts that people are experiencing. So we're seeing better performance in football helmets that the every down head impact players are seeing to the big blows they're causing concussion. And thus, not only are we having a reduction in concussion risk, but cumulative head impact exposure that may or may not lead to issues later in life. And this will be relevant to our baseball topic, too. But when you're gathering data, okay, if you can just stick a sensor in and gather that data in a natural setting as games are being played, great. Are there times, though, where you want to gather data that you can't gather just in the field or if it was,

would take too long, and obviously you don't want to have people budding heads for science any more than they have to. And so I've seen some videos where you have essentially crash test dummy heads, right, and you're just ramming them against each other. So can you replicate real-life conditions in the lab or is testing these things out in the wild still an essential component? We always prefer to start in the real world because we need to understand how people are getting hurt. The big thing we want to make sure that's not happening across this entire research field is that we're picking arbitrary conditions in a lab to evaluate products. We need to understand the impact conditions that people are experiencing. What's the velocity of the head during

impact? What's the location? What's the direction of force? Where are they hitting? Is it compliant? Is it hard? Does it have high or low friction? We need to really understand these things before we can ever do a laboratory test. With that said, it's not always possible to put sensors on people and measure the exact injuries. So we use all kinds of methods depending on what application we're studying. And I can give you a couple examples. Sure. So when we look at bicycle helmets, we couldn't stick sensors on a ton of cyclist and predict when they're going to fall off their bike and hit their head. So we did a reverse engineering or forensic biomechanics approach where we found people who got admitted to the ER because of a bike crash.

When we were notified, we were able to do an interview and collect their helmet. And then we would look at their helmet and we'd take a CT scan of it and create a 3D model. And then we'd buy a brand new hot helmet of the same exact model and size and take a 3D scan of it and create a model. And we could essentially do is subtract those two models from one another. And it would show you where they differ, which is the damage pattern in the house. helmet. And then we could figure out in the lab what we need to do to match that damage pattern. And we could pretty much compute backwards the impact conditions that occur to the cyclist. Another example is sometimes we do video analysis where we're looking at videos of accidents.

And we did this with the U.S. ski and snow team where we were going to big air events and looking at their crashes. And then we do video analysis. We'd have multiple cameras set up on the landing area, and we could triangulate in 3D space where their head was in each frame and calculate impact speeds into the snow and ice. And then we could use that information to feed into a laboratory test. So our general approach is the same. We study in the real world and we translate it to the lab, but depending on what we're studying, changes the way that we understand biomechanics. I'm sure athletes very much appreciate the protective improvements that have been made as a result of your research, but is it ever awkward when you show up and you just camp out waiting for them to

wipe out so that you can gather data? Is it like kind of gulish when you're just sort of spectating and waiting for the crash? Well, we never want anyone to get hurt. We know injuries are going to occur. So when we do see an event like that, we just hope we have the data. So that you can mitigate the damage at least the next time it happens. So you've gained all this insight from football, but baseball and football are very different, and I won't go into the whole George Carlin routine here. But as it pertains to helmets, in football, typically you have impacts between big but slow-moving objects, and by objects I mostly mean people, and they're not that slow-moving because football players are fast, but relative to a pitched ball, they are.

Whereas in baseball, you have these high speeds, but small. low-mass objects that are causing the impacts for catchers, at least. And so what gave you the inkling that that might lead to an entirely different mechanism for injury? Because obviously the balls are small, but they are still moving quite quickly. So there is still some serious force there. It hurts when you get hit with them. So how did you know that this might possibly require a different kind of helmet?

Sure. Well, about 15 years ago, we actually started studying concussions in baseball. And we were specifically interested in like foul tips to catcher masks and umpire masks. And at the time, our general knowledge in this field all came from football, right? What causes a concussion and an athlete? We have football data. And we use these statistical models we built to estimate risk in other scenarios. The automotive industry uses our risk curves.

The military uses our risk curves when they're looking at protective. equipment. So we traditionally apply that to a wide range of applications. And initially, we were doing this for baseball too. So we were recreating concussions in catchers and umpires due to foul tips in the lab. So we'd have like the ball tracking data, impact location, video of the event. And we would precisely match that in our lab with her pitching machine and a dummy set up. We're in the same type of equipment. And when we took all these measurements, what we would see. is that the head accelerations, the forces that we're measuring, were really low. They're much lower than what we would typically associate with a concussion. We started to ask the question,

well, what's different about these type of impacts? These players are seemingly getting hurt at head accelerations that football players regularly experience and don't get hurt. So at first it was a question. We're like, well, you know, maybe these catchers and umpires aren't used to getting hit in the head like a football player. Like football players are a self-selected population. The people who can't take head impact stop playing football, right, by the time they get to college. Yes, or never start in my case. Right, exactly.

So, you know, there's a difference in tolerance. There's biologic variance. Like, everyone has their own tolerance to head impact, and maybe there's just population-based differences. And we didn't think that explained at all, and I still think that's part of the answer. but as we continued to study it over the years, we would use different head forms and do different types of experiments. And what we started to notice is that there was what we would call high frequency noise in our signals on a certain head form that we used. What that means is that the head's vibrating in some way. And traditionally, in injury biomechanics, we're not interested

in that. When we think about a concussion, this is our classic understanding of it, right? Your brain is not rigidly attached to your skull. You hit your head. Your head has linear motion and rotational motion that occurs due to that head impact. The linear motion produces a pressure gradient in your brain tissue and the rotational motion stretches your brain and that's because the skull rotates around the brain and the brain's own mass makes it lag behind. So it creates a little stretching. It's small, it's less than a centimeter that your brain stretches or moves relative to your skull. But it's enough to produce an injury. When we look at these baseball impacts, that stretching just doesn't occur because there's not enough head motion. So we started to think about, well, what's different about these

events. And you said it. When we look at a football impact, I would call it a high mass, low-speed impact. And when we look at baseball, it's a low-mass, high-speed impact. And there's fundamentally different physics associated with those two types of events. It's hard to think in terms of a frequency domain, but it's really the answer of it. So if I had to simplify the whole process, when we have a high-mass low-speed impact, the response to the head's rigid body. So we could treat like your head is one solid block that's moving. When we look at the baseball impact, it's more like a little ping on the head. And there's a combination of that rigid body movement.

But the skull doesn't actually act as a rigid body. And what we get is skull vibration. And what we're starting to think is that skull vibration is really important. So when we look at football impacts, we don't see skull vibration. And when we look at baseball impacts, that skull vibration is really unique. And it's present in all these ball impacts. And there's a couple pathways that we think that this might be producing the injury. So we have a theory, and we're working to test and prove it or disprove it at this point.

But I think it's the missing link. as to why we're still seeing concussions in these baseball players. And it turns out that maybe the broadcasters were onto something all along, because if you've ever watched baseball and a catcher gets hit by a foul tip, inevitably the broadcaster will refer to it as getting his bell rung. And in the past, people used to kind of chuckle about that before I think the risks of head injuries were really understood. Now they don't say it with the same sort of lighthearted tone.

typically, but they might still use that expression. And maybe it's an apt one, because if it really is about that vibration at certain frequencies, then it really is about that, right? It's about having your head inside a bell for all intensive purposes and the vibration that results from that. It's a spot-on analogy, I think. It's really short, so your head doesn't continue to ring like a bell. But during the impact event, it's the same thing.

And that could partially explain why there's a loss of balance because it's stimulating the inner ear. And you have a loss of balance due to that. And your ears ring. Like, it all makes sense. And do you think that this applies just to ball impacts or would this also extend to bat impacts? Because we do seem to be seeing that at potentially an elevated rate just because you have catchers scooting forward to frame pitches. You may or may not have batters moving back to the back. of the box, as I have advised them to do, because those pitches keep coming in faster.

You need every millisecond you can get. And so we are seeing more follow-throughs when the bat goes around. Sometimes that will impact the catcher's helmet. Do we know whether that's the same mechanism? I would suspect so. There's probably a combination of rigid body motion and vibration that occurs to that. But if we take a step back when we think about what's causing that vibration, it's really how long the impact lasts. So because there's high mass in football, you can think of it about being slow, so it has a really long impact duration. And when I say long, I'm talking like 15 milliseconds.

Yeah. Like it's short in how we generally think about time. But if we compare that to a baseball impact, that's less than five milliseconds. And that's partly due to the low mass. and some of it has to do with the padding. So like in injury prevention, we extend durations by adding padding because as they deform, it makes the impact event longer. So when we think about a bat hitting the back of a helmet

where there's not a lot of padding to begin with, you're still going to have a really short duration. So we're still going to excite those frequencies that would result in the skull vibrating. So I know you're doing testing now and you'll be releasing your ratings of existing masks and helmets and how protective they are, maybe by the end of the summer. But if this is an entirely different mechanism of injury, that suggests I'm sure that the

existing helmets will vary in terms of how protective they are, but that maybe the whole thing needs to be rethought and sort of you got to start from the ground up. And I know that you're working on a prototype of the helmet that would be designed to address this baseball-specific mechanism of injury. So what is your sense without giving away your actual specific ratings prematurely? But is that your sense that really this could be a whole paradigm shift when it comes to the design of catcher helmets? And that's a few years down the road or however many years we might be looking at just an entirely different design. Yeah, I think over the next five years or so, we're going to see some differently designed catchers masks.

With that said, when we look at today's helmets, I think, there's going to be a range of performance when we get through all the testing. And some, knowing what we know about injury risk factors, some are going to perform better than others. So I think we have a range in performance of what's available now. But with that said, knowing what we know about, well, how do we stop the skull from vibrating? The answers, if I had to put it super simply, just extend the impact duration. So we developed a proof of concept that does exactly that, where just to kind of highlight, look, from an engineering perspective, this is an extremely well-defined problem. In no other sport or impact scenario is it's so well-defined.

We have a ball of known mass traveling over a relatively narrow range of speeds, hitting you in a specific orientation. We can design things to be specific to that type of impact. So if we can make a mask that extends the duration and takes it from three milliseconds to 10 milliseconds, that's going to have a big effect on skull vibration. And I think we're going to start to see masks that take that into consideration. They might look a little different. Mainly it's going to be how do we change that interface between the metal cage and the helmet itself. Catchers and hockey goalies are kind of close cousins, and catchers will sometimes even wear hockey-style masks. And a slap shot, the fastest slap shot might be about as fast as the fastest pitch in baseball.

Have you done any research on hockey masks, on goalie masks? Do you expect that your findings about baseball might be extendable to hockey as well? Or has that research already been done? Well, we're in a process of building a hockey puck shooter at the moment. So that's in queue. But with that said, there's all kinds of applications that, this skull vibration theory likely applies to. We just completed a study on lacrosse helmets, both men's and women's,

where we're looking at ball impacts and stick impacts, and we see the same things that we see in baseball. For those type of head impacts with the current headgear, there is a range of skull vibration that we're witnessing. And that plays a role. Military, pretty much any sport, there's a projectile. anytime you have an unhelmeted sport, that also plays a role when there's no padding. You have really short impact durations and short impact durations will excite more frequencies than long impact durations. And because there's no padding in unhelmeted sports,

I think we're going to start seeing the same thing in those now that we know what to look for. And you're working in coordination with MLB in some capacity on your catcher helmet ratings, right? So when you work with leagues or with teams or with manufacturers, how does that work? Are you working with them? Are you working for them? Are you getting grants from them? Are you fully independent? How does the research get funded and released?

Sure. Our funding comes from a variety of sources. Those vary, whether it's organizations like NIH for classic research funding to understand injury mechanisms to invested organizations like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety who funded all our bicycle work. You know, they came to us and said, a thousand people die on a road each year. We test cars, but we don't do helmets. Can you develop a helmet rating system for us? And that's exactly what we did. We worked with for our construction study, safety organizations within the construction sector. One thing we don't accept funding from

is helmet manufacturers themselves. And the reason for that is we need to be independent of helmet manufacturers, because if we start having helmet manufacturers funding specific projects, and then all of a sudden their helmets are at the top of our rating, it looks a little fishy. It's a perceived conflict of interest, right? So we've been very careful to remain independent of manufacturer funding, and so that our ratings are viewed as objective and independent.

The last piece of funding that comes to the lab is through donations that we do receive. Have leagues also done that, or are you partnering with them in a non-financial capacity? It varies. Some leagues have, some haven't. We're not always working with the specific industry. We view ourselves working for the consumer, for the athlete, and trying to make things better for them. Do you anticipate that whatever advances are made here, what kind of implementation? improvements or what's the potential scope of them because we've been talking earlier on this episode about arm injuries and we're talking about injury risk mitigation and you can tweak your mechanics or you can strengthen a certain muscle and maybe you can reduce the risk that your

UCL will snap. But there's never going to be a way to make that foolproof. And I assume that there's no such thing as a fully concussion proof helmet even in the best of times, even in your wildest dream. there's always going to be something that slips through, and it's just about making it as harmless as possible. Is that right? That's exactly right. You know, the helmet in my mind is always the last line of defense. So if we can eliminate high-risk scenarios from sport that don't change the game,

you know, that's going to have a bigger effect than having better helmets. But there's always going to be head impacts. So at that point, the helmet becomes real. important, but it's never going to get rid of all concussions. No helmet is concussion proof. There's a lot of factors other than a single hit at these test conditions that can contribute to injury risk. There's individual differences between people, their own concussion history. There's probably genetic predispositions that we're trying to understand now. There's sleep plays a role into it. Uh-oh. It's bad news for me. There's all kinds of factors, right? And we can't

control for all those. But what we can do is encourage better helmet design that reduce the forces and that will have a net risk reduction that will show in less injuries over time. And to give people some sense of the scale of the improvement, though, and I don't know if what has happened in, say, football is applicable to baseball, but all else being equal, same impact. And you have today's best helmets versus the best helmets of when you started, say, What sort of percentage reduction in sustaining a concussion or the long-term damage are we talking about? You know, when we looked at the best helmets way back in 2011 and compared them to the worst helmets in 2011, we were talking about an over 50% reduction just based on what was available then.

If we compare what it's available today to the best that was available then, I haven't exactly quantified it, but it would be well over 75%. Wow. Okay. Do you think that that's on the table for baseball, that that's within the realm of possibility? It'll depend. I think we can get there because it's such a well-defined problem. One of the things we need to do is validate that, you know, this skull vibration is important. That's one of the things we're going to be working on this fall. Unfortunately, it's difficult to remove the risk. In some respects, catching has gotten safer just because of rules changes and fewer impacts, plays at the plate potentially. On the other hands, People are throwing harder. People are swinging harder. As I noted, catchers, batters may be in closer proximity than ever. So hard to prove, but I'm going to guess that the impact is greater force than it used to be, right? Because it just stands to reason, given everything we know. Yeah, I would think so. Ball speed is going to be the dominant factor there. And I've always been fascinated by it's sometimes called the Peltzman effect or risk compensation. And it seems to me this would be,

your worst enemy. This would be the most frustrating possible thing for someone who works on making helmets safer is the idea that people might compensate, even if subconsciously, for that greater protectiveness by taking greater risks themselves. Because they feel safer, and maybe because they are safer, they will then not take as many precautions themselves. And so if you're a bike rider and you've got a great helmet on, maybe you'll weave in and out of traffic. Maybe you will not be as careful as you would if you felt like your head was fragile and exposed. And that's got to be for you. You put all this work into these things.

And you must be thinking, this is not a license to now undo all of my great work by taking greater risks and becoming a daredevil. So I wonder how you think about that, whether you've observed that, whether it is, in fact, a source of some frustration for you. Sure. This is a question we get all the time. And I put a lot of thought into it and done a lot of research into it. There is some evidence that people can behave a little differently when they're wearing protective equipment versus not. With that said, there is no evidence in the scientific literature looking at injury rates and incidents and patterns in the data that has shown that when we add protective equipment to a scenario, that there is an increase in a number of injuries. there's always a decrease.

And what that suggests that, even if people are behaving a little differently, the benefit of adding head protection so far outweighs the minor differences in behavior that there's a net reduction in the total number of injuries. And we've seen this historically. There's some really interesting data points. When we start looking at sports like football, for example, you know, before the 1970s, there was not a helmet standard, right? They were starting to wear helmets,

but they didn't really have padding inside. And then Knox, the standards organization for football helmets, said, okay, if you're going to wear a helmet, it needs to pass this test. So force or head acceleration needs to be below this level. So you drop a head form with the helmet on, and you see if it passes or fails. Well, people are still dying on the field back then in the 1960.

playing football, like at an astronomical rate that it was a huge problem, and that's why this whole standard got developed. Well, they implement the standard and say all the helmets have to pass this, and you know you have better head protection on at that point. And there was an instant reduction in a number of fatalities that you saw. Over 50% of fatalities were reduced in just that one year changeover from no standard to a standard. and helmets have continued and continued to get better. There's also a lot of evidence in like when you look at the cycling world.

I think New York has the best data, but, you know, all the deaths that they're seeing are from people not wearing helmets versus wearing helmets when you control for all the different factors. There's a narrative out there that people who are opposed to things changing will point to risk compensation. But there's no hard data to suggest that there's actually a negative of. effect to it. Well, that's good to know. And yeah, better safe than sorry, everyone, if you're listening to this. Steve is not working hard so that you can wear his super protective helmets and then go out of your way to endanger yourself. So wear the helmet and also be careful and then you will be as protected as possible. One more thing, have you turned your attention to or will you turn your attention to protective headwear for pitchers, which has not been,

adopted very readily. And, you know, we've seen various attempts and some of them were more ineligent than others. And pitchers just basically rejected them because they didn't look good or they didn't feel good. Some guys will wear the liners, the cap liners, and maybe there's some protection there. And I understand that you're not getting the same number of head injuries for a pitcher as a catcher is, let alone a football player. But can be catastrophic if it happens. And so we're always hoping that it's not going to take someone getting really seriously injured to get pictures to adopt those things. And we've seen in soft mall people wear face masks, et cetera. So I don't know if it's sort of a macho thing, a comfort thing, or whether the right mask slash helmet has not quite come along yet.

But what have you seen in terms of innovations in pitcher protective headwear? And what do you think we will see, if anything, at the MLB level or below? Sure, I'm very interested in that, and we've done a lot of testing on those types of pieces of protective equipment in the past. We've tested stuff in the early 2000s looking at this. They can be effective if designed correctly, and I think there's a lot of good reason why pitchers might want to wear them, for example. You know, the issue is how they look. They're to be effective. They generally have to be pretty thick, so it looks like they're wearing a giant helmet on their head or a giant hat. And you could be effective. You could be effective. They're generally have to be pretty thick, so it looks like they're wearing a giant helmet on their head or a giant hat. Yeah. And you could find the clips online, but you'll have players wearing it. And the announcers of the baseball game will be essentially teasing the pitcher or making comments throughout. Yeah. It's always the Marvin the Martian, Great Gazoo or Dark Helmet comp, right? Right. And then they won't wear it the next game. So I think the key is partly material. So how do we make this in a way that it doesn't look so large so that there won't be that stigma of wearing it? Or, you know, at some point, if it becomes a mandate and everyone has to do it, no one looks different at that point for pitchers and, you know, maybe that's a path forward too. But, you know, those injuries can be really catastrophic and there is a way to prevent them from occurring. It's just, it's not too glamorous at the moment. And the timeline for catchers, then you're still thinking later this summer. Hopefully

you'll have ratings of existing helmets and then after that, but this year you will hopefully have something to share about a new prototype? Yeah, we'll be continuing to work on this for the foreseeable future. So our first ratings will come out at the end of the summer. That's the goal. So we've got a large team working on the project now. But this line of research is going to continue. We're going to add other types of head impact scenarios that catchers might see.

So imagine seeing bat impacts in the future. Pitchers, another area. We'll also look to translate this to softball. So looking at softball catchers mass, but also fielder masks. So just like the pitcher, you know, we're worried about facial protection for softball pitchers and infielders. Same types of risks that we see in baseball. Well, I appreciate your labors.

Thank you very much. I'm a big fan of catchers. And so we must protect catchers at all costs. And I am glad that you are out there doing that. So best of luck with the rest of your research. Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Now, speaking of protecting catchers, you may have seen this week that Zach Meisel at The Athletic and Mark Simon at Sports Info Solutions published pieces and research on an uptick in the number of groin shots, nut shots suffered by catchers as a result of the ascendance of the one knee down catching stance, leaving some parts exposed. This is perhaps not life threatening, but it is potentially threatening to future life, as well as quite painful. This is probably beyond the purview of the helmet lab. We got to get the cup lab on the case. I'd like to like to see the laboratory testing set up there. Maybe they can get a grant from Johnny Knoxville. Catchers have it hard, man. All right, everyone, stay safe out there. Protect your elbows, protect your heads, protect your hearts. And please protect this podcast, which you can do by going to Patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pled some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going.

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