Strasburg Sans Rust
Stephen Strasburg entered the Spring baseball season as the consensus number one selection for the upcoming MLB draft in June. Many people were quick, and correct, to point out however that there was still a lot of baseball to be played until June 9th arrives and that there was still a couple roads that would lead to a different name being called first by the Nationals.
One of those roads is an injury. That hasn’t happened yet and despite what some people will try to sell you, injury prediction based on pitching mechanics is a science in its infancy and if anything, that’s granting it more credibility than it warrants. While it is certainly possible to grade mechanics for things like deception, repeatability and the like, predicting injuries is unreliable. It hinges so much on the physiology of the individual and has yet to be subjected to enough scientific testing that any attempts at it should be at best taken with enough grains of salt to fill the Grand Canyon and probably is best just ignored.
Signability might play a factor, but that’s incredibly difficult to predict all the factors involved. Therefore I feel it best to box it up with injury concerns, something we can only react to in retrospect.
The other main divergent to Strasburg being named first overall would be some other player emerging on the scene. That would require someone to either eclipse Strasburg, Strasburg to struggle, or some combination of the two. Well, three starts into his season and Strasburg’s star certainly isn’t dimming and in fact is only getting brighter (supernova jokes here not applicable). Here’s the pertinent stats in chronological order of starts:
23 BF, 11 K, 2 BB
26 BF, 16 K, 1 BB
29 BF, 18 K, 1 BB (against top 20 team)
I don’t have good batted ball breakdowns so I cannot report on his groundball percentage and other assorted numbers of note. Frankly though, the above is enough. 78 batters faced and 45 have been struck out. 45 of 78. Stephen Strasburg has struck out 58% of all batters that he has faced so far. Oh, and he’s done that while walking just 5%. Oh, and he’s been better with each start. Oh, and he was reportedly clocked at 102mph in in second start.
Good gracious.
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Is that good?
It’s hard to do GB/FB on such a small sample size (balls in play, that is)…last start, 3 gb, 1 ld, 1 fb outs
Are those guns believable? I’ve never heard of even a reliever hitting that on a reliable gun, let alone a starter who should be pacing himself.
That was reportedly a stadium gun. On average 2-5 mph over. Even in the WORST situation he threw that ball 97. Probably 98-99.
The Nationals will draft him, pay him $15m, and then find out he’s a 37 year old plumber from Ohio.
hehe
or maybe the Nats will think he costs too much, and the Pirates draft him
Do they fail to sign him, or do they sign him illegally?
Umm, remember Bullington over Upton? Pirates certainly like to be cost effective!
Littlefield is out of office.
6MM++ to Alvarez. I think that was the highest draft bonus last year (it was either him or Posey who had the highest, although I may be wrong). I think the Bucs are willing to pay.
The Mariners have the second pick.
Didn’t you guys hear, Bowden is out.
I expect him and Boras to make a pre-draft announcement that he won’t sign for anything less than a record $20-25 million signing bonus.
I don’t see why he has any incentive not to. He’s talented enough and mature enough that he might be on the major league roster of the team that drafts him by August, so the drafting team would see immediate dividends on their money. And he’s the best prospect in recent memory, arguably in the past decade.
Obviously this scenario won’t happen, but bear with me for a moment: If Stephen Strasberg fell all the way down to the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole compensation pick near the end of the first round…would they be willing to offer him $20-25 million? Yes.
So why should he set a bonus demand for anything less?
There’s going to be a tremendous game of chicken played with Strasberg and the Nationals or Padres next spring. It’s going to be more annoying than Manny Ramirez-Dodgers has been for the last 3 months.
There’s no way Strasburg falls all the way down to the Yankees.
Right. I wrote exactly that. The point was, there is at least one team that would be willing to pay him a sum that would dwarf any signing bonus in history. Therefore, Boras and Co. should set that dollar figure as their barometer in pre-draft announcement…in hopes of scaring off teams with less deep pockets.
If Matsuzaka can command a posting fee of more than $40 million from two teams, then Strasberg is worth $20 million to at least those same two teams…and probably a few more.
There would have to be something monumentally insane happening for two teams to pass on Strasburg for him to fall to the Padres.
Genetics play a part in injury, but why would you ignore mechanics? This is not related to Strasburg, but it seems like something well worth considering. It’s not just mechanical errors in injury prevention either, it’s mechanical errors that might lead to future productivity problems. It’s like in Dave Cameron’s example with scouting college players and taking their statistics with a grain of salt.
Seems like cognitive dissonance or something, and all because it isn’t exact yet. Neither are fielding metrics, but we love to use those.
But what theory of mechanics do we have that has shown any real predictive ability?
A good deal of people who specialize in it agree on certain indicators that lead to injury. What do you mean?
But what theory of mechanics do we have that has shown any real predictive ability?
The predictive power of mechanical laws is immeasurable… the problem comes when you try to apply it to human motion… most throwing-related injuries are chronic in nature, that is they don’t happen over the course of one game or a single pitch… a pitcher with poor mechanics might survive several years of high level pitching before an injury arises that is due to poor mechanics…
biomechanics research (up to this point) has focused primarily on two things, the factors the lead to increases in velocity and injury identification and prevention… i’d recommend reading any article published by James Andrews and Glen Fleisig at ASMI in Alabama for a better understanding, specifically the one titled “kinetics of baseball pitching with implications about injury mechanisms”
Yes, that’s precisely my point. There are indicators that make injury more likely, but like most people have said, there’s a certain genetic aspect to it as well. Still, I don’t see why people are so quick to dismiss mechanics as something unimportant.
Read my original reply, i’m only asking why mechanics should be IGNORED. I’m not saying “well you’re all idiots because Strasburg and all pitchers with this and that indicator are going to have arms that blow up”.
I’m just saying that it shouldn’t be tossed aside as trash just because this “metric” is going to involve the human body, and thus genetics, and thus naturally having a lot more variance.
I wasn’t really disagreeing with kensai, it sounded like joser was completely disregarding mechanical data… as a biomechanist I have a lot of faith in the science behind pitching while still acknowledging some of the shortcomings
It’s more like a comparison to defensive metrics 10 years ago. In Moneyball, DePodesta talked about not paying much attention to it because there wasn’t enough information to go on in order to make a sufficient evaluation; so while they were interested in exploiting a possible market underbelly, the tools to do identify it with just weren’t available. They recognized this, kept tabs on it, and moved on for the moment.
That’s exactly what we need to do with predicting injury through mechanics.
I agree, like I said, it needs more exploration, but to ignore it as a factor is foolish. And like I said, this is not just injury specific.
It’s not that it isn’t exact, it’s that it isn’t even general yet. Biomechanics doesn’t have an answer about what kind of motion diminishes the stress of repetitive motion on joints. The idea that baseball talent evaluators have some sort of knowledge about good mechanics and bad mechanics that’s anything resembling objective truth is laughable.
So you’re saying it doesn’t matter how a pitcher throws?
That’s laughable.
Reading comprehension is awesome. Look into it. We have a general idea that certain throwing mechanics make people more prone to injury. The problem is that the general idea isn’t supported by scientific data. Arm actions that look funky to scouts can work, and picture perfect mechanics can lead to injury.
We don’t have anything remotely resembling certainty in analysis of pitching mechanics.
My reading comprehension is fine, thanks for your concern though. My point goes back to the original thought by Matt that mechanics should be “ignored”. Most can admit that there are things pitchers do that make them more of a risk to injury, yet because there’s variance, then it’s something to disregard as “laughable”. I don’t follow that at all, just like I don’t see why it should be “ignored”. It’s like everybody can admit that certain mechanics are more condusive to control, throwing the ball harder, and injury prevention, but because there’s always going to be more inconsistent scientific data due to the nature of the human body, then it’s something that we should just disregard completely.
It’s not my assertion that everybody with certain indicators would have arms that blow up. My only assertion this whole time is that it shouldn’t be a factor that’s just ignored completely like author infers it should.
Why pay attention to something when the entire body of knowledge about a subject could be entirely, completely worthless? The author is saying we should ignore mechanical analysis because there is no evidence that “perfect” mechanics are any better than “funky” mechanics at preventing arm injuries. If science advances to the point where looking at mechanics has predictive value, I imagine you’ll see a shift in the analytical community.
Right now, it’s all voodoo and conjecture. It’s not a data point, because you can’t draw a conclusion from the data that’s defensible as anything more than a hunch.
scientific data DOES support this… i’ll gladly provide you with myriad papers discussing injury mechanisms in overarm throwing… the fact is that even if you correctly identify these mechanical flaws you might have to wait five years before the guy really injures himself… but if you diagnose a guy with a mechanical flaw and his elbow doesn’t explode immediately, guys like JH will claim that this means a failure in the model… it’s not a failure in the model because the model is designed to assess risk…
and as far as freaks, let’s look at tiny tim… scouts said he’s going to blow out shoulders and elbows left and right and that his longevity is seriously at risk… but when someone (biomechanists/sports scientists) took the time to actually assess him mechanics, they discovered that he happens to be a genetic freak who actually possesses very efficient mechanics for his build…
and yeah, this is a problem when you try to diagnose guys by just watching them… you can’t eyeball mechanics and say “this guy is going to get injured”… you need high speed digital data so you can find joint torques… because it’s the forces that cause these torques that lead to torn UCLs and torn shoulder labrums
when you try to speculate about mechanics you’re bound to fail because your eye can only discern so much about a pitcher… but when you break it down at 300 Hz frame by frame you get a bigger picture and you’ll see things that you couldn’t see in real time
I was at the game yesterday and sat next to the radar gun dude. There was another gun in front of me so I was checking both.
He never hit lower that 95 with his fastball. The fastest recorded was 101 in the 1st inning. He was throwing his slider between 80-84 MPH.
Here is the write up with photos/vids from the game: http://www.minorleagueball.com/2009/3/5/782651/stephen-strasburg-3-5-09
If the Nats don’t draft him based on the bonus they’d have to offer, I’m convinced they don’t care about ever building a winner.
The Nationals management are under an extreme amount of pressure to sign their #1 pick this year after failing to do so with Crow last season and the recent DR scandal. They will sign whoever the top player is in the draft and as of now that is Strasburg. It is ridiculous to think that Boras is going to “price him out of” the Nationals range so that the Pirates (!?) or Padres will be able to sign him.
If the Nats don’t take him (and they will), he won’t fall past the Mariners. The Mariners need to recover from Bavasi’s savaging of their farm system, and they have the money to pay Strasburg what he wants.
What’s with this talk about the Padres and Pirates? Why would he fall past the Mariners at #2?
I agree, a realistic (though unlikely) scenario would be for Boras to announce a bonus demand so high the Nats pass and get the Mariners to pay it. Ms have bit more payroll flexibility and you can’t expect San Diego to pay big dollars, even for a home town kid.
More realistic scenario is that Boras is not only pushing for a big bonus, but wants to get Strasburg signed earlier rather than later. This is counter to normal practices, but because of the declining economy he doesn’t want picks 2-10 signing for slot and then have to justify paying way above market for Strasburg. Also, if he wants that dollar amount he’ll probably want to sign a big league deal with guarantee of being on the expanded September active roster, a 5 year, $25mil contract is probably a good deal all around, but I have to admit some ignorance on how exactly a big league deal vs a signing bonus works.
Anyone know the details of how Delmon Young’s contract is structured?
I’m just so used to the Rays at 1 and the Pirates at 2…I didn’t check the draft order but I knew the Pirates had to somewhere from 2 to 4.
Are we sure his name isn’t really Sidd Finch?
Ok, but how much would be too much?
What dollar figure prices out the Nationals? $20 million? $25?
The non-thinking response is to say, “They’ll do what it takes to sign him.” A more interesting discussion is, what is the financial threshold that they – or the M’s – would find prohibitive. Obviously every team has one in any negotiation. What do each of you suspect that threshold would be? If it’s, say, $14 million for the Nationals, is it $18 million for the Mariners?
Please, throw out some hypothetical numbers. It takes just as much time as it does to write a post dismissing an idea.
The Nats offered Teixeira just under $21mil/yr ($188mil/9yrs), I would say that Kasten and the Lerners would view Strasburg as that 1 in a generation type player worth paying a ridiculous amount of money.
Hopefully post Bowden the team will be making more moves like going full boar for Teixeira and Strasburg vs wasting money nickle and dime for players like LoDuca, Estrada and Lopez (and Kearns, WMP).
If a team thinks Strasburg is going to be on a Lincecum track (arriving in mlb within 12 months) and will be a top starter for a few years after he gets there, then a 5/25 doesn’t sound out of line. Give him $5m up front, then buy out his arbitration years. If he pans out the team will probably save money in the end.
I could see him riding the Lincecum track but I think it’s going to be more like the Prior Express. He’ll be dominating in the major leagues in no-time only to blow out his arm in a few years. His mechanics are pretty awful. His arm motion and finish are atrocious.
Mark Prior supposedly had perfect mechanics. It’s pretty much impossible to predict injuries based on pitching mechanics.
Some mechanics are more likely to lead to injuries than others. It isn’t a science or anything, but there is some correlation between guys who throw a baseball like Prior, Pedro, Wood, Zumaya, Reyes, Wagner, BJ Ryan, Peavy, Bonderman, Burnett, etc, and arm injuries. You look at all their arm actions and you can draw out some commonalities. None of those commonalities are present in guys like Clemens, Maddux, Halladay, Nolan Ryan, Pettitte, Verlander, Schilling, and others, even though their throwing motions and stuff is all very different.
The guy who said Prior had perfect mechanics was…his coach.
There are people all over the internet who point out his flaws.
Not going to say whether Prior did or didn’t have “perfect” mechanics, because I honestly don’t know, but with Dusty Baker Verducci-effecting the shit out of that staff, I don’t care if he repeated his motion as well as a BP machine, he was going to suffer.
Prior is the posterchild for what most “experts” refer to a poor mechanics. Far too much stress on the shoulder and elbow…
the only person claiming mark prior had perfect mechanics was tom house
I’m glad someone said the name! He’s at the root of many “mechanical flaws”!
i said it earlier, but i’ll repeat it again… the big problem with guys who exhibit poor mechanics is that they might last years before they ever get injured… in the meantime people cite them as examples of a huge flaw in using mechanics to predict future performance… using mechanics to predict performance or injury records is just like any of the projection systems guys use for stats… you get means and confidence intervals… some mechanical flaws are more potent and could develop into more serious injuries much sooner than others.
you have to weigh the risk and reward with guys who have big red flags… if you knew strasburg would most-likely be injury free up through his arbitration years, would his production for only a limited time be worth the huge signing bonus he’ll command? if you’re washington and you probably won’t be competitive in that period, than no…
but i’m not saying strasburg will get injured… so this is all probably moot
There are poor mechanics, and then there is Stephen Strasburg. No, you can’t predict exactly when injuries will flare up, but there is a high likelihood that Strasburg experiences future elbow problems because of his Mark Prior-esque mechanics. Rick, there are very few pitchers that pitch years, as you say, with horrible mechanics. They’re so rare, that I can’t name an active pitcher that has done so. I invite you to give me a guy that is the exception to the rule. Saying you can’t predict future injuries is like saying you can’t judge a fielder based on metrics. Your style of thinking is outdated. There are certain tendencies the most durable pitchers (Maddux, Clemens) have in common just like there are certain tendencies the train wrecks (Prior, BJ Ryan) of pitching mechanics have in common. The sooner you begin realizing this the better.
I understand where you’re coming from Pat… but i’m not sure if you understand what goes into making a good biomechanical analysis… there are myriad reasons why it fails at this point… i’m a biomechanist and working on a ph.d right now, so speaking from experience and knowledge of the field I can give you a few good reasons why making truly great predictions are some time away:
1. joint torques are derived from location data… i don’t know your physics background, but torques are second-order derivatives, so any noise in the location data (and there’s always some) gets amplified to large degree by the time you get around to calculating torque… so even if you get joint torques who knows how good they actually are
2. pitching injuries ARE due to repetitive stress… so finding a red flag doesn’t mean you’re on the track to overnight blown UCLs
3. Going back to the torque data: trying to find these red flags in that mess of data is nearly impossible
4. C.C. is not Pedro… all pitches are created differently… maybe C.C. has tendons that can support the golden gate bridge and can handle different loads than pitchers with slighter builds
5. and the worst one… i’m not going to mention names… but certain internet “biomechanists”/”pitching coaches” find these commonalities in a group of guys who get injured. And sure, maybe there is something to it. But correlation does not mean causation. And the guys who are making these predictions do very little to back up their data anatomically or mechanically other than to say that “we see a lot of guys do this and they get injured so it’s probably bad”… and to add to this, they’re evaluating (for the most part) images they tivo-ed… at 30 frames/sec try to figure out where an arm is when the guy is throwing… you see a smudge… you need to get up to around 200 Hz before you can even see what’s going on…
So yeah, there’s huge promise in this field… but to try and say that we can accurately predict injuries is wrong… otherwise every team would have an expert biomechanist on their payroll and sitting in the draft room advising them… mechanical evaluations of pitchers simply aren’t at the point where they can really provide more than speculation.
sometimes speculation is good enough, because it is based on fact to some degree, but hazy truths that are surrounded by a cloud of doubt.
so instead of reading o’leary and driveline and believing everything they write, do some research into where they get their “facts”
And as examples of guys who have lasted a while before getting injured… think of all the guys you say had poor mechanics that led to an injury… what year did they first get injured? the fact that they ever made it to the major leagues usually means no less than 10 years of baseball (and presumably pitching) before they ever got injured… if their mechanics were SO terribly flawed shouldn’t they have been injured once they picked up a baseball and played for a whole summer? how do some of these guys last as long as they did if they have such terrible flaws? And if you say that it’s because they never accumulated enough innings then you’re simply proving my point. Injuries are a result of repetitive stress due in part to poor mechanics… in fact, you can get injured even with perfect mechanics, there is a huge genetic factor… maybe you can get your arm to move fast enough to throw 98 mph but your connective tissue fails before 40 Nm of torque… you won’t be throwing 98 for long even with good mechanics
There may not be years and years of scientific data to support some of the poor mechanics claims listed above. However, if you talk with MLB medical and pitching staffs you will see a very common denominator with many of the arm injuries suffered by pitchers…..Tom House.
Tom is notorious amoungst the baseball community for being more of a marketer than a teacher. His “mechanics” have changed many times over the years in an effort to keep his customers coming back for more ($$$).
My son works with a current MLB Rehabilitation Coordinator/Pitching coach and his data (a large enough sample size to make educated assumptions at the very least) shows that almost 75% of the pitchers he works with on injury rehabilitation suffer from poor mechanics. To further the argument, during his fourteen year professional pitching career he spent ZERO days on the DL and has never seen a surgeons knife. Nine of those years were at the MLB level.