Rangers' Max Scherzer wants elevated conversation surrounding pitcher injuries - The Dallas Morning News

techsooper.blogspot.com

He’s got a point, you know.

Max Scherzer usually does. He’s curious, competitive and innovative. And currently: Concerned. Perhaps you tuned in here last week when Scherzer, still on the injured list, pleaded with Major League Baseball to do something to improve grip on the baseball. No, not to create magic spin, but to help curtail the injury epidemic. MLB might not be able to do anything about how much biomechanical effort pitchers put into reaching 100 mph, but it can give them a baseball that might lessen the strain on the muscles and ligaments along the kinetic chain associated with throwing.

“We need to elevate the conversation,” Scherzer told The Dallas Morning News last week while dealing with a nerve issue in his shoulder that has sidelined his most recent rehab.

His point: Baseball is awash with technology (now we have bat speed metrics available at our beck and call); let’s use it for good for a change.

Give pitchers a baseball with more tackiness. It’s possible. They created one in Japan.

Or create a better grip enhancer than rosin “and sweat,” which is the excuse anybody uses now if they get caught with sticky hands, like Houston’s Ronel Blanco did earlier this week. Blanco was ejected and suspended 10 days after umpires, doing a routine check between innings, felt it was “the stickiest stuff I’ve felt on a glove since we’ve been doing this,” umpire Eric Bacchus said.

We’re still not sure where exactly the line between sticky, kinda sticky and stickiest lies. Neither are the pitchers. Is it like the Scoville scale for peppers?

Scherzer would love to see technology, at least in part, used to police things. Though, at some point, that can go too far, too. It’s how we ended up with the whole Terminator series.

An example: We get real-time measurements on spin rates, perhaps the easiest tell-tale sign if a ball has been, shall we say, over-served. Use it as a checkpoint. A guy who averages 2,500 rpm on a curveball suddenly lights up the sensors at 3,000, he probably hasn’t unlocked biomechanical easter eggs. He’s probably got some help. Forget the glove check, get some sirens and synch it up.

In the meantime, let pitchers do what they need to grip the ball a bit better and lessen stress on the flexor tendon, the ulnar collateral ligament and up into the rotator cuff and along the shoulder. The harder you have to grip the ball, the more you exert stress on muscles to improve that grip and the more you stress those muscles, the more fatigued they get.

Seems sensible enough, right?

Even Dr. Glenn Fleisig, director of biomechanics at the Andrews (of orthopedic pioneer Dr. James Andrews) Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Ala., and an MLB advisor on injury risks, doesn’t discount it. It’s not as simple as Scherzer sometimes sums it up, because, Fleisig said, his biomechanics studies suggest that the firing of muscles helps protect the ligament, not damage it. But, to improve the grip means to fire the muscles more often, and firing muscles more often, means fatiguing them.

“What we’ve found is that a pitcher is more susceptible to injury when more fatigued,” he said. “And if you are gripping it so hard, the muscles begin to fatigue sooner.”

So, this should be easy, right? There are means for a tackier baseball. There is technology to help detect, enforce and deter abuse.

It’s baseball, though. Nothing is easy. I mean this is the sport that somehow messed up pants.

Any rule or equipment change would require negotiation with the MLB Players Association. Have you paid any attention to negotiations between the MLBA and MLB over the years? Like the lockout two years ago, during which Scherzer sat on the Executive Subcommittee trying to negotiate a settlement. These things are tedious.

MLB has presented different versions of a tackier baseball to players going back to an experiment in the Arizona Fall League in 2016 and with MLB players since 2019. So far: No changes. The see-through pants issue will be solved in the span of one year. The baseball: Still talking.

In the meantime, injuries continue to mount, including the string of them that has sidelined one of the most durable pitchers of this century. It’s left him to do more thinking about what can be done.

He’s got a point.

Twitter: @Evan_P_Grant