I’m no expert in the human anatomy and particularly not regarding hands, arms and shoulders.  But, as a baseball fan, we have seen a rash of pitching arm and shoulder woes; ulnar collateral ligament injuries necessitating what has now become commonly known as Tommy John surgery for former Dodger, Yankees and Angels pitcher Tommy John who, in 1974, was the first professional athlete to successfully undergo the operation.

Here are a just few of the current name pitchers who have been diagnosed with ulnar collateral ligament injuries, who have just had the surgery or are currently recovering from Tommy John surgery;

1. New York Yankees pitcher Carl Pavano — click here.
2. Toronto Blue Jays pitcher B.J. Ryan — click here.
3. Minnesota Twins pitcher Francisco Liriano — click here.
4. Phillies rookie pitcher Scott Mathieson — click here.

But former journeyman reliever and Ph.D. in exercise physiology Mike Marshall asserts that he has perfected a pitching delivery which “injury-proofs” pitchers while increasing pitch speed.  Yahoo sports illustrates what Marshall calls Maxline delivery in a short video.

Yahoo sports, Jeff Passan explains and gives background, in a great article worth reading in full, on Marshall’s technique;

Marshall is 64 years old, impish and hyperkinetic. At 5-foot-8½, he looks more Ph.D. than ex-ballplayer. He still holds major-league records for games pitched in one season (106), relief innings pitched (208 1/3) and consecutive games for a pitcher (13), all set with the Los Angeles Dodgers in his 1974 Cy Young season. Everyone around baseball figured Marshall some kind of genetic freak, or maybe a masochist.

                                   

He was just ahead of his time. Almost 40 years ago, when he started the studies toward his doctorate at Michigan State, Marshall had questions about how to throw a baseball without injuring himself. Millions of pitches, thousands of feet of high-speed film and hundreds of adjustments later, he believes he knows the answers better than anyone in the world.

“I’m a researcher,” Marshall said. “People forget that about me. That’s where my heart is. I pitched baseball, really, as the lab experiment of my research to see if it worked. Turned out it did. I don’t need any more validation that I know something about baseball.

“I know what works. That’s the greatest truth there is. I have a responsibility to give it back. Nobody wants it? Hey. That’s not my problem.”

Marshall likes to tell the story about how he diagnosed Tommy John with the torn ulnar-collateral ligament that led to John’s eponymous surgery, and how Marshall’s suggested regimen – exercises with an iron ball, like a shot put – strengthened John’s arm enough to pitch another 13 seasons after the surgery.

“We would just look at him and go, ‘He’s kind of wacko,’ ” said John, Marshall’s teammate for three years with the Dodgers. “Yet you saw these feats. What I saw him do, there had to be a reason for it.”

Fixing teammates inside the clubhouse wasn’t enough for Marshall. His findings were too important. So on Christmas Day in 1999, he opened his training center, fenced in by a fading white picket, off U.S. Route 301, where trucks rumble and drown out the grunts of his students.

Marshall is convinced these actions can help save baseball from one of its great scourges. The rest of the motion is simple. No leg kick. No rotating the hips back toward second base. Facing the hitter, the pitcher steps with his glove-side foot and rotates his other leg with such fury his back almost ends up parallel to home plate.

One of Marshall’s students, for lack of a better description, said “we kind of throw like a girl.”

The motion comes straight from the laboratory. Following Marshall’s rookie season in 1967, when his poor delivery caused shoulder pain, he used high-speed film to analyze himself and noticed that if a pitcher pronates his forearm, it protects his elbow and shoulder. Marshall continued to refine the motion, adding the pendulum swings, where musculature prevents elbow-ligament damage, and the step forward, to prevent the arm from flying out and locking up. Marshall’s theory: Apply all force toward home plate instead of wasting it laterally with complicated wind-ups.

Whatever Marshall’s students thought they knew he makes them forget. They learn a new vocabulary to complement the new motion. Maxline is a pitch that comes in on the arm side of the plate, a torque pitch to the other. They know a lat is really a latissimus dorsi, plus the proper names for the other 35 muscles used in the pitching motion.

In one week with Marshall, a pitcher throws more than he would in a month with an affiliated team. It’s every day for 90 minutes, with the wrist weights, the iron ball and weighted lids from 4-gallon drums or footballs to help learn the release of a pronation curveball. Sometimes the lids go flying like Frisbees, so every inch of the 16-by-12-foot nets is necessary. Then it’s at least 50 pitches with real baseballs, usually more.

More than 100 students have gone through Marshall’s 280-day program, and he claims not one has left injured. Williams was cut by the Mets in 2006 after they told him a magnetic resonance imaging revealed a torn labrum in the shoulder. A week after starting Marshall’s program, Williams’ pain disappeared.

“This is Jeff Sparks,” Marshall said. “He is the most highly skilled pitcher in the world. And nobody will hire him.”

Jeff Sparks, 35, temples graying, scowling like Billy Bob Thornton, is Mike Marshall’s greatest student and greatest success. Right now, he sells home-and-garden products at Lowe’s. He also goes to firefighter school. In December, he’ll take EMT certification training.

In the meantime, Sparks keeps showing up at Marshall’s facility, just to throw on an undersized mound covered by gnarly turf.

“Just watch,” Marshall said, “and you’re going to see a curveball that if the baseball world ever uses hitters will have no chance. Nobody throws a better curveball than Jeff Sparks.”

Seven years ago, Sparks started the season in the Tampa Bay Devil Rays bullpen. His reputation was well-established: Sparks was a malcontent, like Marshall, only 30 years younger. The Cincinnati Reds drafted Sparks in 1995, tired of his act and, a few weeks after he punched a wall and broke his hand in ‘97, released him.

To have made the major leagues, then, was a testament to Sparks’ ability. He played at West Texas A&M University when Marshall coached there in the ’90s. At first, Sparks shunned the wrist weights, the iron ball, the fancy medical terminology, Marshall’s whole shtick. When he saw his teammates gain 3, 4, 5 mph on their fastballs, Sparks felt sorry for himself, drank too much beer and returned to his dorm room at 3 a.m. to do a set with the wrist weights.

He hasn’t stopped. Not after the Devil Rays released him despite striking out 41 over 30 1/3 innings and not after he got released from an independent league for challenging his manager to a fight and not after his wife left him.

Over his career, Sparks averaged almost six walks per nine innings, and in his last outing before the Devil Rays shipped him off, he threw balls on 12 of 14 pitches and found himself on the Everlast end of a verbal beating from his frustrated catcher, Mike DiFelice.

But Marshall has hit brick walls trying to sell his concepts to major league baseball.  And those who have followed the history man have observed that whether it be baseball or any area of life; new, revolutionary concepts have difficulty becoming mainstream as man is resistant to change. 

In preparing this post, I have viewed the short clip showing Maxline’s delivery technique for fastballs, curves, sliders and have viewed the major league stats for both Marshall and Sparks, his most prominent disciple.

Firstly, not being an expert in pitching, but a sports fan for decades, I see as a glaring flaw in Marshall’s technique that the pitching hand comes out of the glove followed by the arm going behind the back with the grip, i.e. fastball, splitter, curve, slider clearly visible to anyone with binoculars (provided the caps are off).  This makes for open season amongst sign thieves.  The same guy sitting in the centerfield stands with a direct view of the catcher’s signs, would now be able to flash the pitcher’s grip of the ball to the opposing dugout.

In addition, a check of both Marshall’s and Spark’s major league stats reveals the following;

• (Based: Career MLB Stats)    MM      JS  
• Strikeout/walks ratio          1.71     1.41
  walks per 9 inn.                     3.30     9.09
  walks per game pitched        .71     1.30

The sampling is way too small but still may be somewhat revealing.

But with the prevalence of injuries necessitating Tommy John surgery, former pitcher and Phd Mike Marshall can’t fathom why businessmen would shoo away something that would save them tens of millions of dollars.  Even with it’s possible flaws, I’ve gotta agree.

Dor those interested in further reading on Mike Marshall’s Maxline pitching technique, Baseball Almanac lists an e-book written by Marshall on the subject.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 7:59 am and is filed under Real-Time Baseball News and Commentary
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