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”

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.

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