It was as soon as commonplace in Main League Baseball for a beginning pitcher to go seven innings and throw 100+ pitches. Turning on a Sunday Evening recreation, you’ll count on to look at two workhorse aces duel for eight innings earlier than relinquishing the ball to the bullpen. These days, it’s a rarity to see starters surpass 100 pitches in a recreation, with fewer eclipsing the 200-inning mark. On a maybe considerably associated be aware, MLB has additionally skilled a spike in pitcher accidents, particularly UCL tears and subsequent Tommy John surgical procedures.
The arm damage paradigm has been a sizzling subject for greater than a yr now. Many are fast to level to the year-over-year rise in common fastball velocity, suggesting that an elevated intent to throw laborious is the first wrongdoer behind the rise in accidents. Oddly sufficient, these of us doubtless aren’t totally mistaken—throwing is innately worrying and throwing laborious requires an immense manufacturing and switch of power. If you wish to achieve success in in the present day’s Main League Baseball, throwing laborious is non-negotiable.
Nevertheless, simply because greater pitch speeds correlate with greater damage danger doesn’t imply we should always forgo that danger totally. As a substitute, we have to higher perceive it, optimize it, and implement coaching strategies that preserve pitchers on the sector whereas nonetheless permitting them to throw tougher.
Other than damage, usually misplaced in conversations in regards to the “good ole days” of beginning pitchers working deep into the night time is the affect on their effectiveness the subsequent outing. On those self same Sunday Evening Baseball broadcasts, you may hear the announcers point out the starters’ heroic full recreation shutout 5 days in the past and to be looking out for a “hangover outing.” In a FanGraphs Neighborhood Analysis articlePaul Kasinski explores this concept and had comparable findings to what we intuitively know—there’s a residual impact of longer outings impacting future ones.
This could not discourage pitchers from eager to rack up innings, those that know the way to put together for the season and navigate the times in between outings accumulate a good-looking reward. The aim, as a substitute, is to grasp the components that contribute to peak efficiency, perceive the way to keep it by means of a season, and recreate it throughout different athletes. Lower luck. Eradicate guesswork.
That is the place PULSE creates house within the discourse.
Enable Me to (Re)Introduce Myself
You’ve in all probability seen the images and movies on Instagram and Twitter of MLB pitchers with black straps round their higher forearms—that’s PULSE. PULSE is Driveline’s personal wearable throwing workload monitor designed to present athletes and coaches unparalleled perception into what stress a pitcher is experiencing.
This concept of workload administration just isn’t distinctive solely to baseball, nor to Driveline. It’s a idea as previous as coaching. As coaching enters the fashionable age, GPS screens used to trace the gap lined and pace reached by athletes have gained prominence in different sports activities, similar to soccer, basketball, and soccer. Throughout the school {and professional} ranks, groups have acknowledged the significance of monitoring workload and fatigue, utilizing know-how to make smarter selections about how athletes practice and get better.
The distinction in baseball, nonetheless, is that accidents are overwhelmingly targeting a single joint: the elbow. Whereas different athletes cope with normal put on and tear throughout a number of areas of the physique, pitchers face a extra localized downside. Almost each throw made applies stress to the UCL, which is now essentially the most talked about ligament in skilled sports activities. Understanding how stress accumulates is vital, but most throwing applications nonetheless depend on obscure estimates and incomplete knowledge to gauge workload. If the aim is to maintain pitchers wholesome whereas permitting them to throw tougher, extra precision is required.
Conventional approaches to monitoring throwing quantity depart a big majority of throws unrecorded. If a pitcher throws a 25-pitch bullpen, that’s sometimes understood to be a “excessive effort” day with 25 excessive intent throws. It’s simple to take a look at that quantity and assume that it represents all the workload for that session. However what in regards to the plyos to heat up, catch play to get the texture for the baseball, and throws on the mound earlier than the bullpen begins?
The bullpen itself just isn’t the one throwing accomplished, however these throws traditionally are the one ones tracked. And not using a system like PULSE, all the extra throws are invisible. A day that reads “Bullpen – 25 Pitches” can have 5 instances the variety of throws listed, not accounting for the depth of these throws.
For the times between mound periods, most coaching plans assume that pitchers execute their prescribed exercise precisely as supposed. Nevertheless, that’s hardly ever the case. The hidden stressors accumulate and, in the event that they go unchecked, unaccounted for fatigue can result in a decline in efficiency and even damage. The distinction between feeling your greatest and needing a day usually lies within the unseen reps that occur outdoors of a bullpen or recreation look.
PULSE eliminates the guesswork. Fairly than counting on estimates or assumptions, it offers an entire, goal document of how a lot a pitcher is throwing, the overall load they’re underneath, and the way their workload fluctuates from daily. This permits pitchers and coaches to assemble extra exact coaching plans and extra knowledgeable changes all through the season.
