Stopping Tommy John

Via Dodgers Digest, Jeff Passan posts the first installment of his book, The Arm. Dodgers Digest concentrates on a hire for the Dodgers who just might figure out how to reduce the need for Tommy John surgery. That’s Dr. James Buffi:

Buffi’s initial research confirmed the importance of the flexor-pronator muscles in the forearm. Perhaps they were what enabled R.A. Dickey to pitch without a UCL. Maybe they explained why some pitchers stayed healthy and others didn’t. To further test his hypothesis, Buffi worked with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital’s biomechanics lab, which captured the throwing motions of 20 college pitchers with markers as well as ground­-force data collected with force plates. Buffi’s optimization algorithm fit the markers in the model as close as possible to those on the real pitchers. “The goal,” Buffi said, “is to get the model to move in exactly the same way the real pitcher moves.”

Of the 20 pitchers, 13 had no previous major arm injuries and seven did. Blinded to the results, Buffi correctly identified six of the seven injured pitchers and 12 of the 13 without injuries based solely on the model’s data. Buffi then used inverse dynamics, the standard method, to assess all 20 pitchers. It could not tell the difference between who had been injured and who hadn’t.

“I don’t want to say I can fix elbow injuries, but I think I can compensate for the thing that I found with training,” Buffi said. “It’s a really, really hard problem to solve. Hopefully I’m making some good steps toward solving it.”

Now that he is working for the Dodgers, his research will help the Dodgers prevent injuries. In a way that’s too bad. This research could help all pitchers at all levels if it proves correct. It’s too bad someone at MLB didn’t offer this person oodles of money to find a way to prevent these injuries, much like the way rotator cuff injuries are a thing of the past.

Maybe if successful, the Dodgers will be willing to sell the research to the other clubs.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/22Mf72N