Baseball fans remember that, back in the Seventies, Mike Marshall was a rubber-armed reliever for the Expos, the Dodgers and the Twins. He was the first reliever to win the Cy Young award.
Now, Marshall had a doctorate in kinesiology, and spent years trying to train young pitchers in a new method he’d concocted that he claimed would put far less strain on the arm and that would drastically reduce pitching injuries.
Marshall pitched his idea to major league clubs for many years, but never found any takers. He was and is widely regarded as an obnoxious crank. And having heard the guy interviewed, it’s easy to see why. He IS an obnoxious prick who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else, so it’s no surprise that nobody wanted to listen to him. Anyway, Marshall eventually gave up trying to teach or sell his formula.
But what I’ve never seen or heard explained is
Just what his new pitching technique involved, and
Whether there was any validity to it.
Does anybody here know what he was teaching?
And was Marshall an unappreciated genius or just an arrogant crackpot?
I would suggest that a guy who holds both the National and American League records for games pitched knows a thing or two about keeping your arm healthy.
I am not a doctor and can’t speak to the science of things, and if Marshall is a big jerk (which I cannot speak to, either, as I’ve never met him) then obviously that would not help his cause. What I do know, though, is this:
It is indisputably the fact that whatever teams are doing NOW to keep pitchers healthy, it is not working and is probably making teams worse. Pitchers are being handled more carefully than ever, with a team’s best pitchers working fewer and fewer innings, to the extent that teams might well have lost playoff series in an effort to reduce pitcher workload (see: Strasburg, S.) and yet pitcher injuries and lost time are as high as they’ve ever been. There is no evidence I am aware of that the five-man rotation, pitch counts, elimination of complete games and all that is reducing pitcher injuries. The must-ballyhooed pitch count, especially, doesn’t appear to me to be worth a good goddamn. Some pitchers stay healthy but most do not and if there’s any connection between those things and pitch count I have not seen it.
Baseball is insanely, ridiculously conservative in its approach to the way the game is played. There is no area in the science of playing baseball, developing talent, game management or team management in which baseball has not had to be dragged kicking and screaming. The absolute default reaction of baseball in the fact of ANY good idea that would cause even the slightest doubt amongst the panel of a sports radio call-in show is “No way.”
The acceptance of rudimentary sabermetrics - and I’m not talking about weird, ten-things-removed-from-a-counting-stat stuff like WARP, but stuff like “On base percentage is more important than batting average” and “If a pitcher is doing okay but walking as many guys as he strikes out he’s just getting lucky” - is the obvious one everyone knows about. But that’s just the beginning. It took DECADES for baseball people to begin asking players to actually engage in strength training and physically fitness routines, and it’s as recently as the 1980s that players were discouraged from trying to be stronger. Look at how long it took for infield defensive shifts to become common despite overwhelming evidence they worked. Teams tried stealing bases even when people like Gary Carter or Lance Parrish were catching - basically, the baseball equivalent of setting fire to money - for years and years. There is virtually no variation from manager to manager in terms of the rudimentary strategy they apply.
My guess is, therefore, that Marshall is essentially correct, even if he hasn’t worked out every detail yet since he’s basically a team of one. It is hard for me to imagine the handing of pitcher health could get any worse.
That said, it would be very hard for Marshall to change a lot because there’s only one Mike Marshall but ten million kids out there pitching, and how you get to them all and reteach them how to throw, I don’t know. A young person’s throwing motion is set very early in life, and if they have the arm strength to pitch, they have by age 13-14 a pitching motion that is usually not going to change much. Furthermore, success discourages change. It’s fine to try to go back in time and tell a young Mark Prior “dude, you’re gonna blow your arm out” but Prior was rewarded every year of his career from Little League on for the way he pitched. He was the dominant pitcher at his level every year, year after year, and changing his motion could itself have ruined that, so he and his coaches would be understandably loathe to change that. In the few cases where a pitcher has changed the way they throw and been successful, it’s because they suddenly found themselves ineffective and had to try SOMETHING or else they were doomed; examples include Roy Halladay, Dennis Eckersley, or most knuckleballers.
For anyone who wants to see the Marshall technique, here it is:
It looks strikingly unusual and yet it visibly works. The subject is throwing VERY hard, and he's throwing a screwball with absolutely terrifying movement. He's not doing it perfectly - the speaker noted his hand is too far to the pitcher's left in the rearward load position, and "Jeff" habitually looks away from the target before the moment of release, which isn't ideal. But would you want to hit the smoke he's throwing? In addition to protecting the arm from excessive torque, it's maximizing the height of release without detracting from velocity.
I’m already on record as saying Mike Marshall is an obnoxious jerk in person. That DOESN’T mean he’s wrong. MAYBE his innovations are as brilliant as he claims, and MAYBE they’d really help. But I’m wholly unqualified to judge, not least because I have no idea what his techniques are supposed to be.
Hence, I’m asking the technical questions: what was he teaching? And does it really work?
Even if his methods were absolutely brilliant, Marshall was bound to face an uphill battle. As you say, most baseball execs and pitching coaches are extremely conservative. And it doesn’t help that Marshall is a terrible salesman- he’s the type who’ll pretty much TELL people to their faces, “Everybody except me is an ignoramus.” Which pretty much guarantees that, even the few people who MIGHT have been receptive to his ideas will tell him to take a hike.
But sometimes obnoxious cranks ARE geniuses. I’m open to the possibility that Marshall is one of them.
So, do you know what he was teaching? Do you know if he’s made any videos demonstrating his techniques? Hasn’t there been at least ONE “Moneyball” style GM willing to give the guy a listen?
See: Nen, R. :smack:
And FWIW, I don’t know that I care to live long enough to see baseball become another hyper-scientific, programmatic, by-the-numbers sport.
Well, it’s ALWAYS been a by-the-numbers sport. WHat’s changed is WHICH numbers people use. Wins and losses, strikeouts and ERA are numbers, too.
And it’s always been a “scientific” sport in the sense that players (ESPECIALLY pitchers) have always been taught certain formulas and techniques. When a pitching coach tries to show a young pitcher how to throw a curveball, he THINKS there’s a science to it.
The question is whether there MIGHT be a better way, one that could lead to fewer arm injuries.
It certainly SEEMS as if pitchers get a lot more arm injuries now than they did in my youth, when they were throwing a lot more pitches for a lot more innings. IF that’s true, another approach may be called for. Marshall’s may or may not be the right new approach, but I was interested in learning what it involved.
I’m not surprised that MOST teams are hesitant to look at a new method, but I thought SOME team (like Billy Beane’s A’s or Bill James’ Red Sox) might be more open-minded.
The choice of science and numbers that are used comes from the same gut hunches and superstition that drove John McGraw and Connie Mack. If baseball ever loses that “hunch player” underpinning, the more-than-numbers thinking that tries wild strategies and best-guess options, it will cease to be baseball and become another wind-up automaton of a sport. It will have to go to a “September madness” endless-playoffs format to engage any further interest, and then only among the pool-bettor crowd.
Ditto for any kind of “perfect” umpiring or pitch analysis. Working around the “players in black” is part of what make the game a game.
I can. It is questionable whether defensive shifts provide “overwhelming evidence [that] they worked.” BABIP’s over the last 15 years, the period over which shifts have become commonplace (going backward, 1st being 2014):
Yes, there are undoubted confounding factors at work here-note that overall batting averages have fallen close to 20 points during this time period, some of which should be expected to be seen here (and it is). But, if shifting is such a powerful strategy, it should show up here first, right? And it really doesn’t.
I’d guess that most MLB coaches are reluctant to get a pitcher to change his style by the time he’s been signed. If these techniques aren’t started sooner (assuming they work) there’s not much chance for adoption.