emmett16

Haha. My bad. Rubber tubing. Surgical tubing. You use it to pull apart in a variety of directions to build strength in the “brake” muscles in your arm & to get blood flowing to arm, shoulder and chest pre-workout and on recovery days.

Bauers RPMs didn't drop suddenly after the ban. It was Gerritt Coles RPMs that did (Bauer's intended target - along with the rest of the Astros).... Gerritt Cole ridiculed Bauer at UCLA for the way Bauer trained because they were all 'outside of the box techniques' and different from 'what pitchers should be doing' : using rubber tubing , wrist weights, plyo balls, underload & overload balls, intense long toss work and pvc tubing to stretch and warm up his shoulders.....all of these things are now common place in baseball....along with the Edgertronic cameras he used to design pitches and introduced to baseball.... In 2018 out of all pitchers that threw at least 50 five-fastball innings Bauer ranked 169th out of 178 pitchers in spin rate change from first fastball of the inning to the last (ie. determining if a player was applying sticky stuff between innings and that was slowly coming off their hand through-out the inning). Cole ranked 27th....*Bill Petti HardBall times* Wonder why Cole has bad things to say about him? Like I said, he is a disruptor. He is not a natural athlete, not tall, and not incredible strong. He made himself. When put around other freak athletes who don't push themselves to the max, he doesn't do so well. I agree, he might not be a good fit for many organizations and might not be a good fit for the O's. I'll leave that up to Elias to decide. But from what I've read about him and his training, he would do very well in a high-achieving/pushing the boundaries group of players. But there is obvious risk, and you can't ignore the fact that the other 29 teams have passed on him so far. So there may very well be some facts I'm unaware of and a very good reason he isn't signed. But to call him lazy or bad teammate is complete and utter BS. There are dozens of other players, coaches, and trainers that would refute those accusations wholeheartedly.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Don't know what to tell you. It's well documented. You can go to his game logs and look at his spins rates and see that the aberration was only one inning and done so on purpose to prove a point. Which is why he told the commissioner's office about it in an attempt to get spider tack banned from baseball. But if you want to let your emotion cloud your judgement and grab a pitchfork, have at it. I'm not going to try and stop you. Seems about par for the course these days.

He “cheated” to prove a point. And that was that other pitchers were using sticky stuff. He did it for one inning of one game to show that spin rate increased significantly by design . Inning 1 he was normal, inning 2 used the sticky stuff to prove he could artificially increase spin rate mid game, inning three back to normal. And guess what, that finally got MLBs attention (after his consistent clamoring people were doing it) because he was able to prove that adding 200rpm + by simply using sticky stuff was so easy. He’d a disruptor who has been ahead of the curve and pushed teammates that don’t hold themselves accountable and give max effort. That is why he was unpopular. You put him with a group of overachievers and he will fit right in.

Yes. He and Burnes were arguably the best 2 pitchers available this off-season. If we landed both it would be a coup.

Fingers crossed. I'm hoping for the best, for sure. If he's completely shut down so that he can heal, he is going to need a 4-6 week throwing program once the injury is 100% healed. If he gets back and able to start training in 2 weeks, an expedited 4-week program gets him in the starting lineup right in time for opening day and likely limited play for the first couple of weeks until he is 100%. If they take the more conservative route, let him heal for 3 weeks (or more), and then he goes on a full 6 week build up that has him back to 100% 3 weeks after opening day. It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Clevinger is supposed to be a world class cocky & rude D Bag. Bauer got a bad rep because he was a "disruptor" and did his own thing because he did his own research, experiments, and worked with other outside disruptors; and didn't like being told to do 'the wrong thing', by so called professional coaches, that would hamper his performance. Now all the things he was doing to train himself and make himself a better pitcher are being implemented and taught by all the best organizations. He's never gone out and bragged that he was the first, or the best, or the reason the entire pitching industry has changed. He's reportedly not a cocky or arrogant guy who doesn't get along with others but is someone who will figure out what is the best way to do things and if you go against the science, that he's studied, will stick up for what he believes. I have a sneaking suspicion the people who have bad things to say about him (in the baseball world) were people who didn't work as hard as he did and were called out for their lack of effort. I think he'd thrive in our system. Seems like he'd be the perfect Baltimore chip on his shoulder type of guy.

Precisely. That doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy.

The worst part is, we aren't getting the entire story. We are getting the PR version of what's actually happened to the players. I get no reassurance from Hyde saying, "I'm not worried about it" or "this is pretty normal stuff" or "they are in a program and should be back soon". All of the injuries reported today are serious and significant and they are trying to sell us the opposite.

Thats right. The O’s have a history of being transparent with their Injuries . With an oblique injury I wouldn’t expect him to be at 100% and ready to plan full time by opening day. I’d like to be wrong. But with an oblique you can’t do anything. You have an arm injury, you can train your lower half. Oblique/core injuries effects everything. You have to shut down until it is 100% healed, then start from scratch.

I had a sneaking suspicion Means would not be 100% this year. I've been waiting to see him pitch and see how he rebounds, but it looks like that will be a while. The Basallo thing is a fairly typical growing body injury on a pro athlete. The Gunnar situation is a bummer. I wonder if he took a little too much time off after the long season and ROY victory parade circuit and just came back too fast and tweaked something. Easy to do. Maintaining their Ferrari engine bodies at optimal performance is a massive challenge. I hope he takes the proper time to let it heal and then takes the proper time to build it back up so he comes back 100%.

With Ortiz gone and Gunnar down, sure doesn't look like we are 'hoarding' IFers anymore. If you trade Westburg (which is who you'd have to trade for a Cease or comparable pitcher) you go into the year with Urias 3B, Mateo SS, and Holiday 2B and zero depth outside of Norby who a questionable fielder.

He'd be able to show the youngens how to take care of their arms. That's for sure.

I'd be curious to know what his off-season workouts were, when he started, and where he was in the ramp up process coming in to camp. There's a growing school of thought out there that taking time off after the season is a bad idea and recipe for disaster. The studies point to the vast majority of UCL injuries occurring in the first two months of the season and in spring training. Rest and recovery are important, but long periods of inactivity can be detrimental and lead to injury. If you do take an extended period of time-off you have to build back up very slowly and over a very long period of time.

Zyn Park at Camden Yards? Hmmmmm

They really like that move. I think I heard talk of MLB not allowing that in the future.

I don't follow. The idea of the sensor is to gauge how much work load you've built up over time and how much you use each day. The work volume with fluctuate and grow with time. It also differentiates between a 'high effort' throw. It's more so for use in practice and training than in game. In game is much easier to tally accurately. But think for a second about the workload of a 5 and dive pitcher who throws ~100 pitchers per game. Between warm up plyo routines, long toss, and their bullpen they are throwing ~100 times. Add in ~7 pitches in between innings and you have a total workload of ~235 pitches with ~150 of those being a high effort throw. All of that is super hard to keep track of and assess w/o tech helping you out. What you think you've done and what you've actually done could be galaxies apart.

I’m sure it would work. It’s not just the pitchers who run in to over use. All positions but even more so catchers get stuck with a crazy workload no one really realizes.

Blows my mind all coaches don’t mandate their players use Pulse sensors. Such an easy and informative tool to manage acute and chronic workload. Keeping the darn things charged is another story. Can’t wait for the next generation to come out.

Absolutely. I would almost be shocked if they hadn't picked up a former Driveline employee or someone who had worked at a similar less popular lab. But a lot of this stuff deals with athletics and body motion in general. You don't absolutely need a 'baseball' guy. You need folks that understand how the body works most efficiently, technology to capture motion, and plans/paths to achieving that desired movement. Since the new executive team took over in November 2018, led by GM Mike Elias and AGM Sig Mejdal, the Orioles have built out a robust group of coaches and analysts to modernize the franchise’s then-lagging baseball operations. Now, they’ve assembled a management team can interpret and apply such data sources, rather than contracting out some of that work to biomechanics consultancies such as provided by Reboot Motion or Driveline Baseball. “Fully in-house. We've hired the people that we feel are necessary to process the data at every step of the way,” Blood says. “And then we've got coaches who are hungry for that information and will put that into play on both the pitching coach side and the strength and conditioning side.”

I think the whole idea of the lab is try and do better than what Driveline is doing all while keeping your secrets in house. If you are simply sending your guys to Driveline you don't own the data and you also aren't creating a competitive advantage, because anyone can go there. The other piece is to save some money by doing it in house and also aligning your entire system, so they are hearing and practicing the same things from the top to the bottom. It is curious that some of their players do go to Driveline (Tate for example). I'd love to hear an interview with him and see what he has to say about both labs, why he chose to go outside the org, and which labs he preferred (at least as much as he can say w/o breaking an NDA).

Thanks, I hadn't seen that yet. I also hadn't heard about the Qualisys cameras before. Those things are crazy. They are like the Edgertronic cameras on steroids. I read a funny anecdote on the Astros and their cameras. When they were well ahead of the curve and using the Edgertronic cameras to scout and to analyze their players, they put tape over the branding of the camera so other teams didn't catch on and find out what they were doing. The company got pissed, made them take the tape off the branding, and then other teams started to copycat what they were doing. Before the Astros started using them, only two people where employing them for baseball purposes; Kyle Boddy (driveline owner) and Trevor Bauer(came across the technology on his own in his quest to be the best pitcher ever).

Talent is great, but today’s athletes are made. The idea that someone was born with a little something extra and that alone will be their path to a professional career is a misnomer. The technology provides the map and the tracking of progress. “Deliberate practice” and self motivation do the rest. The human body’s ability to adapt and change is still being pushed higher every day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak:_Secrets_from_the_New_Science_of_Expertise

https://www.fangraphs.com/players/cole-irvin/19244/stats?position=P