← Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Effectively Wild Episode 2491: How Not to Get Hurt
02:18:56
Loading summary
Transcript202 lines
- [00:01]
A
Gimme, gimme, gimme.
- [00:02]
B
Effectively wild.
- [00:03]
A
Gimme, gimme, gimme.
- [00:04]
B
Effectively wild.
- [00:05]
A
Gimme, gimme, gimme.
- [00:06]
B
Effectively wild. This is effectively wild.
- [00:09]
C
Hello and welcome to episode 2491 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fan graphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer, not joined today by Meg Riley 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, Tarek Skuble is returning to the mound for the Detroit Tigers, where he will attempt to pitch the Tigers back to contention and simultaneously condition for other potential employers. And as we've discussed, Skubal 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 Skubal's elbow. And he underwent this procedure on May 6, 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 Nano needle scope 2.0, rebranded by Scott Boris, the Skubal Scope that appears to have cut his recovery time in half, if not better. And although his surgeon, Dr. Neil Alatrasche, is in some slight hot water in connection with a somewhat suspect exemption request pertaining to UFC fighter and suspected PED user Conor 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 nano needle 3.0 return of the nano needle 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. 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 your 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 Skubal, as we bow before Jacob Misrowski 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 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, 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 FlexProGrip, 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 training based solution. And lastly, but not leastly, I'll be talking to Steven 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 Attias. He is both a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Waterloo and a biomechanist. Not biomechanist, 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 Wild. Welcome, Cedric.
- [05:38]
A
Thanks so much for having me. Actually, I did finish my master's about a year ago, so I am a full time biomechanist now.
- [05:45]
C
Oh, excellent. All right, congrats. We 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.
- [06:15]
A
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 a 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, biomechanics. 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 Waterloo 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 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.
- [08:00]
C
So this was, this was not a lifelong aspiration at that point. It was just something you stumbled into?
- [08:06]
A
Yeah, absolutely. It was, 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, etc, but no. Yeah, I was very fortunate to just be at the right place at the right time.
- [08:20]
C
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?
- [08:27]
A
There's two difficulties with graduate school. First is defining a problem, and 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 researched 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 seems like a very good place to start.
- [09:37]
C
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?
- [10:34]
A
Absolutely. It's a great question. First of all, there was some negotiations there.
- [10:38]
C
Yeah.
- [10:39]
A
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 gonna. I'm. 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.
- [11:14]
C
Come on, it's just you and me. No one else is listening. No one else will know.
- [11:18]
A
And your. And your big group of listeners, many of which probably work in the front
- [11:23]
C
offices of mlb, some of whom might be your co workers 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 it's being subjected to?
- [12:05]
A
So there's no answer to that question, there's so many.
- [12:10]
C
End of the interview. All right, thanks for talking.
- [12:12]
A
There's so many factors affecting UCL health, you know.
- [12:16]
C
Yeah.
- [12:16]
A
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 and the 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 markerless motion capture data from in games that was provided to me.
- [12:55]
C
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 Mac max speed? How did you figure out that relationship?
- [13:16]
A
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, I went ahead and I built this musculoskeletal model which basically represented the anatomy of in a 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 in 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 4 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 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 117 Newton meters, which is very consistent with other published literatures measuring the sort of strain. 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.
- [14:43]
C
I was going to ask, is that physically conceivable? Would you need some sort of freakishly strong ucl? 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 speeds exceed, say, Aroldis Chapman.
- [14:59]
A
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, high velocity throws, especially you know, at that extreme would be extreme contralateral trunk tilt, meaning you're leaning away from, 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 some see UCL loads reaching around 140 Newton meters, around 23 Newton meters higher than, you know, your average throw, which you know, does not necessarily exceed the strain that would cause the rupture of the ucl. But you can, as you can imagine over time that would cause some problems.
- [16:11]
C
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 you know, 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, you know, death by a thousand cuts instead of one catastrophic terror?
- [16:50]
A
It's definitely the repetition. In physics 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 be recovered 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 that will, you're not just going to rupture it, but it's that repetition time over time, putting your arm into compromising positions and, you know, achieving those velocities consistently in combination with the mechanics that I observed, that's really going to put, you know, a lot of strain on the UCL over time. It's probably going to create small micro tears that, you know, compound over time, ultimately leading into, you know, what we now know as a UCL rupture or, you know, atomic Jones injury.
- [17:44]
C
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 a, maybe a pretty capable ligament. It's just that it's being asked to do something that's no part of the body can do consistently unless you are really lucky.
- [18:27]
A
Yeah, I mean it's definitely a super capable ligament. It's just the things that we are asking it 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 and 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.
- [18:53]
C
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?
- [19:16]
A
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, you know, 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 nicely to 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 Newton meters, but only achieved a 75 mile per hour top end speed.
- [19:55]
B
Right.
- [19:55]
C
So speaking of submarines, Tyler Rogers has the right idea is what you're saying.
- [20:00]
A
He does. And you know, he's, he's never heard his ucla.
- [20:03]
B
Yeah.
- [20:03]
A
And, and in my thesis, I had a slide about the side by side comparison. You know, at the still frame ball release, it's, 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 I just doesn't mean that I'm recommending people throw like Tyler Rogers.
- [20:42]
C
As entertaining as it is. It's not something that everyone can do, probably.
- [20:47]
A
Exactly.
- [20:47]
C
Yeah. And so, yeah, without going to that extreme, is it just. Well, the lower you go, the better, all else being equal.
- [20:57]
A
So there's two things I could really point to. It's, first, it's the arm swot. We've been seeing, you know, a lot of variation in arm swot recently. Some guys are kind of, you know, favoring a lower slot these days. Some guys, you know, Trader Savage comes to mind. He's, he's nasty with the upper arm slot. But what the research showed is that the higher the arm swot and the more extended your arm is, the more you're going to, you know, 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 shoulder is, you know, that slot where your elbow is extended to. But also how far away are you tilting from that throw?
- [21:50]
C
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 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?
- [22:31]
A
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.
- [22:38]
D
Yeah.
- [22:39]
A
But the case studies that I looked at were all extremes. Pretty much asking any pitcher who, you know, spent X amount of years of 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, 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, their level of comfort without overhauling mechanics in theory, according to this research, should have plausible and quantifiable effects on the ucl.
- [23:25]
C
Well, that's encouraging to some extent. So I guess if, 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 John's, it' 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 reprogrammable 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.
- [24:41]
A
Absolutely. I think you nailed it. You know, the, 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're throwing as fast as they are at that age.
- [25:06]
C
Age.
- [25:07]
D
Yeah.
- [25:07]
A
So I think the target demographicness for this research is probably, you know, young adults, teens who are, who are, like you said, very malleable. I'm not asking a little league coach to, 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, emphasis there. And I think that's where this research could have the greatest impact.
- [25:35]
C
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, what degree of injury reduction are we talking about here? Just all else being equal, you lower the 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 error bars here and it's tough to, 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?
- [26:36]
A
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 ipsilateral 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, you know, 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.
- [27:53]
C
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 too case by case, you know, tough to generalize and say in a one size fits all sense?
- [28:42]
A
It's definitely tough to generalize. You know, I could make the case that if you throw with the extreme mechanics that, you know, 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 strengths using these mechanics. In theory. My, my cost function for the optimization was set up so that you're just maximizing velocity in the direction of the batter. You know, who knows, you might have been drilling the batter with 110 mile per hour fastballs.
- [29:28]
C
Yes. Then you, you protect the pitcher, but meanwhile guys are getting beans. Exactly, exactly.
- [29:35]
A
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 in the 110 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.
- [29:54]
C
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, yeah. And so there has been research along these lines at some public facilities, places like asmi, the American Sports Medicine Institute, or maybe some of the training facilities. 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?
- [30:28]
A
So in the professional space, you know, coming from my work with the Mariners, 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, it's not too similar to anything you'd expect to happen in a major league organization. A lot of the research that 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.
- [31:23]
C
Yes, right.
- [31:25]
A
I used publicly available research extensively. The Mariners did 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.
- [31:40]
C
Unless, yeah, you want lower hands because you're lowering the arm slot. That's the secret. But 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 in benefits and a cool, 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?
- [32:37]
A
It's, 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 findings are 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, every game I'm getting, Hawkeye and or Kin attracts data for both pitchers and batters for the entire league. And you know, it's on say, overwhelming 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.
- [33:34]
C
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 precedence 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?
- [34:40]
A
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, I think above health, for better or for worse. Unfortunately, MLB just really prioritizes your output and performance 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 being and research being done there. But in terms of a primary focus from an R and 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.
- [35:27]
C
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 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, 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, a rotation full of finesse guys and they just wouldn't get hurt and even if they weren't as good, you just wouldn't have to dip down the depth char 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.
- [37:25]
A
Yeah, obviously keeping people healthy will always help you win. And you know, commenting on my answer 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 from doctors, kinesiologists, psychologists, nutritionists, and it's such a complex problem that I just think the amount of, 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 pitcher 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 and 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, they have a 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, nutritionists, 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 in understanding injuries. Because currently it's just so hard to predict and understand injuries.
- [39:10]
C
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?
- [40:08]
A
I think it's. It's very speculative. Unfortunately, we just don't understand injuries in general 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. Is not predictive whatsoever. You know, we can't imply that higher loads in general, anywhere in the body will result in degradation of, you know, softer hard 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.
- [40:53]
C
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, huh, 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. 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.
- [42:36]
A
So yeah, I might have very limited experience in the industry. I would, 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.
- [42:46]
C
Yeah.
- [42:47]
A
But they, 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 unhealthy. In the case that, you know, 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, you know, there's a reason it hasn't happened yet. It's because it's so difficult to do so. There would just be some natural skepticism preventing, you know, immediate adoption. And I think it would be all hands on deck trying to figure out whether or not this is reliable information.
- [43:29]
C
Do you have any sense of how long they could keep that secret even if they tried to their utmost? Because it just seems like that would trickle out one way or another. Which is for the best from my perspective.
- [43:39]
A
I have no idea. I mean, I would hope, you know, it's probably different. The structures of who gets access to what information is different from organization. Organization.
- [43:48]
C
Yeah.
- [43:49]
A
I think anybody who had access to that information would 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.
- [44:14]
C
Yeah.
- [44:15]
A
So, you know, it could go either of those ways. I would probably lean towards maintaining that competitive advantage, keeping things in house. But again, like you said, it's. It's so hard to tell from work to org how that structure of information scarcity would be maintained.
- [44:29]
C
Yeah, maybe you'd get some sort of leak, maybe some whistleblower Whist, elbow whist, el blower. That doesn't work. I don't know. I was trying something.
- [44:37]
A
That's a good try.
- [44:37]
C
Yeah, thanks. But, and, and also I guess just in terms of, of how much responsibility mechanics have when it comes to injury risk versus just your kind of hardwired anatomical characteristics, like, you know, is it nature or nurture? The answer is always both, obviously. And, 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 one has clearly much more impact than the other?
- [45:11]
A
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, this skinny kid, or probably shouldn't call him a kid, but he's a skinny guy who, who just has a flamethrower and yeah, you know, he just, I just from like a physics and, and biomechanics perspective, like, if you showed me like, just if you brought this guy in the lab, I would not think he was, he would be able to throw that fast because, you know, he is very long. But I, I just think you need a certain amount of, 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.
- [45:56]
C
I do worry about the miss. I hope for the best, but I think he should maybe drop down, you know, take a cue from, just take something, take a page out of the Tyler Rogers playbook. You know, just might cost him 30 ticks or so on the fastball. But no, if you're the Miz, what 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 101 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 Raikan says to Han in the Empire Strikes Back, you're, 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.
- [46:52]
A
Yeah, I really appreciate the time. This is a lot of fun. And go Mariners.
- [46:56]
C
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 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 Misarowski 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 shutout, 15 strikeouts in 95 pitches. The most strikeouts ever thrown in a Maddox 74 strikes and 95 pitches. He has a 0.17 ERA in his last eight starts and as Sarah Langs 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 and 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 injury 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 devices Flex Pro Grip.
- [48:59]
B
But whoever it is, they'll still be
- [49:01]
D
just a couple of baseball nerves.
- [49:06]
B
They'll still be speaking statistically rambling, romantically,
- [49:11]
C
pontificating pedantically bantering, bodily drafting, discerningly giggling, giddily, equaling effectively while. Okay, well I am joined now by the brain trust behind FlexProgrip, the father and son team that designed the device. Daryl Morrow, who is the CEO and Adam Morrow who is the president. Darrell, maybe I will tee you up first. Welcome.
- [49:40]
B
Thank you very much. Happy to be here, Ben. Super excited to spend some time talking about all things Flex Pro Grip related.
- [49:47]
C
Happy to have you and the junior Morrow. Adam, welcome.
- [49:51]
D
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.
- [50:10]
C
Yes, you host a Flex Pro Grip podcast, the Layback Podcast.
- [50:14]
D
Oh and I was even referring to just being a one time listener of Effectively Wild and everything you guys do. So thank you so much. But I appreciate you mentioning the Layback Podcast.
- [50:25]
C
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 FlexProgrip et cetera. But Darrel, take me back to the beginning. What was the impetus for the idea and what does the device do in
- [50:54]
B
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 UCLs 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're 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 someone's rehab or recovery from a UCL or Flex 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. Effects 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.
- [52:53]
C
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?
- [53:12]
B
Well, as we like to say, we. We're not clinicians. Probably the most sophisticated we get. We're dating ourselves with. With the old adage we're not clinicians, but we stayed at a Holiday Inn once or twice.
- [53:24]
C
It's okay, because, you know, Dr. Moreau has bad rap as it is.
- [53:28]
B
So, yes, the island of Dr. Moreau. How much I remember it. So for us, we never started out. I think, Ben, the 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 hubris for us to say that we were just going to start out to invent a device to prevent UCL injuries. 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 healthcare 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 Gunnar, Dr. Gunnar Brolinson, 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 Fleisig 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 with a way to train the musculature 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, 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. 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 point.
- [56:35]
C
And Adam, you can add anything you'd care to to that and tell me about your background.
- [56:40]
D
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 possess the most advanced degree of a Master's of Business Administration. I played baseball throughout college, played one summer post collegiately. 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, another 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, 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, I always like to anchor in the fact that Daryl and I are familiar with athletics. We, we were in it for a long time. I'm a strength and 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 and seeking out individuals who paved 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.
- [59:25]
C
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.
- [59:40]
D
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, we even go beyond the superhero and we go Edward Scissorhands. We hear some people say Thanos Glove if they're a little bit younger and more into to, 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 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 1 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 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 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.
- [62:02]
C
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, 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 illness with whatever it is, a flexor strain or something, and sometimes you think, 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. Cuz 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, Darrel, or have I completely butchered it?
- [63:22]
B
No, I think you're very, very close. If you just look at the basic physiology, Ben, 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 pin pitch. And those three structures are the UCL 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 Wolverineiron 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, us and now I think the industry as a whole has come to understand this, certainly the baseball industry, and maybe they did all along and we were just novice to us, but I, 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 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 we, our device has been involved in, we now have a far, far, far better understanding of tr 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 is 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 musculature is too weak, that is 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 musculature to handle more force, then we reduce the load that the UCL will have to bear.
- [66:42]
C
Yes, it's funny that you bring up the seesaw because I guess one solution to that has been banned seesaws. They don't tend to have those at a lot of playgrounds these days, I've noticed, just 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, 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 FlexProgrip. 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?
- [68:18]
D
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 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 at, better with time. I'm now 32 years old old. And the fact that my daughter has to get shots and I'm the one that holds her for those shots, it's. It's certainly nerve wracking and it's forced me to be a stronger man just to handle it.
- [69:27]
C
Yeah, it is a little mad scientist coded to experiment on yourself, I guess, but. But it is selfless to. To take that needle for you.
- [69:36]
D
That is where we started, Ben. So first we needed to make sure that Flex Pro 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 tending units. So I'll avoid that a little bit for the podcast 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 young's modulus or to the muscle tendon units, creating a tougher, stiffer, more resilient muscle tendon unit. And 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 so 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 under trained or under targeted in the vast majority of athletes, there is a great benefit that can be made 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 reaction 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 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 spinning 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 it 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 the study was I think 86 or 87 miles per hour. So relatively hard throwers especially, 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 FlexProGrip 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 you we switch 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 to 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 100-150 RPM gain on their primary fastball. The high school and collegiate groups saw about 150-200 RPM gain on their primary fastball resulting in about 1 1/2 to 2 inches of additional movement. So if it's a four seam 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, 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 Flex Pro 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 have in their flexor digitorum profundus versus their flexor digitorum superficialis, two of the three muscles best positioned 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 1 over a 1 weaker than pitchers who remained healthy and 2 had a decreased ratio of strength between the muscle that controls the fingertip and the muscle that controls mid finger 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. Cover, 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 Flex Pro Grip for 10 weeks. One group 10 did not touch Flex Pro Grip for 10 weeks. She analyzed the amount of gapping that these pitchers had during a dynamically loaded ultrasound. So athletes under actual stress during this ultrasound to create gapping in their elbow. And what she found is the athletes who trained on Flex Pro grip during this 10 week period actually saw a decrease of over 40% in their medial elbow joint gap gapping. And when athletes throw, we expect an increase in joint gapping. And during this competitive season where these athletes trained on Flex Pro Grip, not only did the level of gapping, not only was it that they just didn't gap as much, they actually reversed the amount of gapping that they experienced. So in training on Flex Pro Grip, they did create a safer elbow, a safer arm for them to perform with. Then the exciting stuff that Darrell's getting into this summer is in partnership with the MLB Draft League as well as the Marshals 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 where it's 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. 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.
- [79:10]
C
We love to discuss research on effectively Wild. And I will say I have been clocked throwing off a mound. I'll stick up for 76 being advanced in my book. It's at this point I'd like to turn 76. Yeah. And. 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 tack equivalent with something that is legal and that an umpire who is massaging your hand after you leave cannot not detect and eject. So. So, Daryl, 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 Driveline. 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 Flex Pro Grip already?
- [80:15]
B
At last count, I think when we looked at this, we were slightly over 3,000 pitchers. We, 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, we can certainly call to mind pitchers that we are working directly with in 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 musculature. 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 LSU's Vanderbilts, Wake Forest, Ohio States, and I could. TCU's 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 Driveline. I think maybe two or three years ago we started working with Driveline primarily on all of the players that were using Driveline to aid in their rehab. A year ago, we started working with Driveline universally to where now. Now they've adopted FlexProgrip as part of their overall intake assessment. So if there's a player who goes to Driveline, he's likely going to be assessed on FlexProgrip. 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. 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. 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. 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 with on how they assess injury risk and how they go about training guys who use our device.
- [84:41]
C
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 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. 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?
- [85:19]
B
Well, that's challenging. I mentioned a while ago in this podcast that Dr. Gunnar Brolinson 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. 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. Brolinson, 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 him 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 are going to be, will have 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 injury the industry is. We know it's not getting any better and we can just look at decades of research which has all proven the efficacy and importance of training the forearm musculature 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 doing. So for us it's really been, 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, that 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, this Marshall Salt Lake City league. And we're going to do the exact same thing later this summer in the Major League Baseball's draft league and we'll get extensive data there. And I, 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 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, 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? Well, what's fatiguing is this forearm musculature that's responsible for aiding or assisting in protecting the ucl. With our device 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 this is, this is. Any injury becomes multifactorial, you can't always point to one thing, but we think we can 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.
- [89:52]
C
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 some, someone over trains 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 Scissorhands either. So has, have you had anything go wrong or happened that you had not anticipated?
- [90:31]
D
There certainly have been learning moments. Unfortunately, the people do sustain injuries while concomitantly training with FlexProgrip, 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 retelling the exact story. This is an athlete who, I'm gonna 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 liked 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.
- [91:46]
C
That's how pitchers end up throwing too hard sometimes too. So.
- [91:50]
D
Which is really funny. Right? It's the same thing that kind of 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 Flex Pro Grip, they are going to sustain the potential fatigue related injury that we're trying to avoid anyways.
- [92:27]
E
Right?
- [92:28]
D
It's, we say this time and time again, everything that we do with Flex Pro 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, 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, 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 plyo ball, misuse a baseball, misuse an Olympic bar in a weight room, those things can, 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, 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 FlexProGrip device once involved. Because if we have more people involved that are on the care team or 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.
- [94:14]
C
Okay, so Darrel, last question may be 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 tears by X percent. Do you have any sort of figure in mind?
- [95:12]
B
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 to and answer it ultimately. Ben but if we 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 maximum 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 as ucl. And there's no amount of Flex Pro 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 FlexProgrip, if a player trains on Flex Pro Grip and he does exactly what we would prescribe him to do, our expectations, 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, 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, how oftentimes 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. 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, 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, for the one pitcher that was unable, then our view is we fail. There's something we miss. We look at every soft tissue injury of the elbow flexor or UCLA 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.
- [99:52]
C
Imagine there's no UCL strain. If you try, it's actually it's incredibly hard, just like playing first base. So you may say, say that Adam and Daryl Morrow are dreamers, but they're not the only ones. And I wish you well with your mission. And people can check out the product@flexprogrip.com or they can stream Edward Scissorhands on Disney I believe. Either way, Daryl, thank you very much. And Adam, thank you as well.
- [100:21]
D
This was an incredible opportunity. So thanks for the invite.
- [100:24]
B
Ben. Thanks so much.
- [100:25]
C
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 Steven Rosen, director of the Helmet Lab at Virginia Tech to talk about protecting catchers from concussions.
- [100:42]
B
Effectively wild.
- [100:45]
E
It's the zombie runner. Bobby Shanes.
- [100:48]
B
Bobby Shanes, Bobby Sham.
- [100:53]
C
It's the zombie runner, Bobby Shanes.
- [100:56]
B
Bobby Shane.
- [100:57]
D
Bobby Sham.
- [101:03]
C
Joey Menesis.
- [101:04]
B
No.
- [101:04]
C
Walk off three run digger. Stop it. Walk off three run shot. Oh my gosh, Meg, he's the best player in baseball.
- [101:14]
B
Effectively wild.
- [101:17]
C
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.
- [101:36]
E
Happy to be here.
- [101:37]
C
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?
- [101:48]
E
Sure. Well, our general background is injury biomechanical. 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 Nerf guns. So we study and take test all kinds of products to make sure people aren't getting hurt.
- [102:20]
C
Do people need helmets for Nerf now?
- [102:23]
E
Is that, Should I sometimes you need eye protection.
- [102:26]
C
Oh yes, that, 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 in 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?
- [102:57]
E
Sure. Well, you know, in the early 2000s, we were the very first group to start sticking sensors on 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 they would communicate wirelessly with the computer we had on the sideline. So for every game in practice, we were 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 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 him 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. 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 aged 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 never 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.
- [104:52]
C
And obviously, there has been so much attention paid to head injuries in football and cte, et cetera. And so. 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 available?
- [105:15]
E
It's night and day. There's Been more progress in football helmets in the last 10 to 15 years than there were in the previous 40. And the reason is the people who make these helmets are engineers. And they design to a standard 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 is 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 the early 2000s, you wouldn't believe it. They're thicker, there's better materials, they're softer, the shells deform.
- [106:38]
C
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?
- [106:58]
E
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 at the every down head impact, players are seeing, seeing to the big blows that are 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.
- [107:52]
C
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 it would take too long. And obviously you don't want to have people butting 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?
- [108:33]
E
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 do 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 could give you a couple examples.
- [109:19]
C
Sure.
- [109:20]
E
So when we look at bicycle helmets, we couldn't stick sensors on a ton of cyclists 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 take a CT scan of it and create a 3D model. And then we'd buy a brand new 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 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 cycle. Another example is sometimes we do video analysis where we're looking at videos of accidents. And we did this with the US 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 mice. 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.
- [110:59]
C
I'm sure athletes very much appreciate the protective improvements that have been made as a result of your research. Was 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 ghoulish when you're just sort of of spectating and waiting for the crash?
- [111:17]
E
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
- [111:25]
C
the data so that you can mitigate the damage, at least the next time it happens. So you've gained all of 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, 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?
- [112:30]
B
Sure.
- [112:30]
E
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 in 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, 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, the impact location video of the event, and we would precisely match that in our lab with our pitching machine and a dummy setup, 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.
- [114:08]
B
Right.
- [114:08]
E
By the time they get to college.
- [114:10]
C
Yes or never start in my case.
- [114:12]
E
Right, exactly. So, you know, there's, there's a difference in tolerance, there's biologic variance. Like everyone has their own tolerance to head impact. And maybe, 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, 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 headphone 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 explain 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 of the head's rigid body. So we could treat like your head as 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.
- [117:10]
C
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 light hearted 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, about having your head inside a bell for all intents and purposes. And the vibration that results from that.
- [117:55]
E
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 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 ear just ring like it all, it all makes sense.
- [118:17]
C
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, 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?
- [118:52]
E
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 and 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 could think of it being slow. So it has a really long impact duration. And when I say long, I'm talking like 15 milliseconds. Like it's short in how we generally think about time. But if we compare that to a baseball impact that's less than 5 milliseconds, and that's partly due to the low mass and some of it has to do with the pass. 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.
- [119:54]
C
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 a 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 a few years down the road, or however many years, we might be looking at just an entirely different design?
- [120:50]
E
Yeah, I think over the next five years or so we're going to see some differently designed catcher's mask. 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, you know, knowing what we know about, well, how do we stop the skull from vibrating? The answer, if I had to put it super simple, 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 so well defined. We have a ball of known mass traveling over a relatively narrow range of speeds, hitting you in a specific orientation. Right. We, 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 3 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 mat, the metal cage, and the helmet itself.
- [122:16]
C
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?
- [122:43]
E
Well, we're in the 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 the 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 and 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 projectile. Anytime you have an unhelmeted sport that also plays a role. When there's no padding, you have really short impact duration. And short impact durations will excite more frequencies and 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
- [123:43]
C
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, working for them? Are you getting grants from them? Are you fully independent? How does the research get funded and released?
- [124:07]
B
Sure.
- [124:07]
E
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 1,000 people die on the 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. Yeah, 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 other, the last piece of funding that comes to the lab is through donations that we do receive.
- [125:21]
C
Have leagues also done that or are you partnering with them in a non financial capacity?
- [125:27]
E
It varies. Some leagues have, some haven't. We're not always working with the specific industry we view ourselves as working for, for the consumer, for the athlete, and trying to make things better for them.
- [125:38]
C
Do you anticipate that? Whatever advances are made here, what kind of improvements or what's the, 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, your wildest dreams, there's always going to be something that slips through and it's just about making it as harmless as possible. Is that right?
- [126:23]
E
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. Helmets, but there's always going to be head impacts. So at that point the helmet becomes really 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.
- [127:08]
C
Oh, it's bad news for me there.
- [127:11]
E
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.
- [127:26]
C
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?
- [127:51]
E
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's available today to the best that was available then I haven't exactly quantified it, but it would, it would be well over 75%.
- [128:12]
C
Wow. Okay. Do you think that that's on the table for baseball, that that's within the realm of possibility?
- [128:19]
E
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.
- [128:30]
C
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 hand, 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.
- [129:00]
E
Yeah, I would think so. Ball speed is going to be the dominant factor there.
- [129:04]
C
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 safe 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. Like your head was fragile and exposed. And that's gotta 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.
- [130:09]
E
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 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 is 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. 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 noxa, 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, drop a head form with the helmet on, and you see if it passes or fails. Well, people were still dying on the field back then in the 1960s, 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 is an instant reduction in number of fatalities. Fatalities that you saw over 50% of the 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 and 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 versus 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 effect to it.
- [132:36]
C
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, so 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 inelegant 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 pitchers to adopt those things. And we've seen in softball people wear face masks, et cetera. So I don't know if it's sort of a macho thing, a comfort thing, or whether it's the right mask helmet has not quite come along yet. But what have you seen in terms of innovations in picture protective headwear and what do you think we will see if anything at the MLB level or below?
- [134:05]
E
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, they're to be effective, they generally have to be pretty thick, so it looks like they're wearing A giant helmet on your head or a giant hat.
- [134:34]
C
Yeah.
- [134:34]
E
And you, you could find the clips online but you know, they'll, you'll have players wearing it and the announcers of the baseball game will be essentially teasing the pitcher or making comments throughout.
- [134:45]
C
Yeah, it's always the Marvin the Martian, Great Gazoo or dark helmet comp.
- [134:48]
E
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, everyone has to do it. 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.
- [135:22]
C
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. Prototype.
- [135:35]
E
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 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, catcher's mask, 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.
- [136:14]
C
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 much.
- [136:29]
E
So Steve, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
- [136:31]
C
Now, speaking of protecting catchers, you may have seen this week that Zach Meisel at the Athletic and Mark Simon at SportsInfo Solutions Published pieces and research on an uptick in the number of groin shots nutshots 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 gotta get the Cup Lab on the case. I'd 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 effectivelywild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners Joseph Lajoice, Evan Singer, Brian Nangle, Nathan Pacini and Bennett Osterweiss. Thanks to all of Patreon. Perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, three full weekly episodes, a monthly bonus pod, exclusive live streams, shout outs at the end of episodes, potential podcast appearances, personalized messages, prioritized email answers, Fangraphs memberships and more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com effectivelywild if you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcasts and fangraphs.com youm can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, and other podcast platforms. You can join our facebook group@facebook.com group effectively wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at R Effectively Wild and you can check the show notes in the podcast, posted fan graphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance distance. That will do it for today and for this week. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Effectively Wild it's war with a smile. Effectively Wild. It's the good stuff.
- [138:46]
E
It's baseball nerd stuff. We hope you'll stick around for a while.