DR. MIKE MARSHALL TODAY:
There was a great feature article this week on the man who I consider the best pitching coach in the country bar none, Dr. Mike Marshall, by Jeff Passan at Yahoo Sports.
Dr. Marshall believes that Sir Isaac Newton may in fact be the greatest pitching coach who ever lived, but you have to dig through his FREE on-line book to find out why.
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=Apk10uwj8nzz0lVh14FxK3w5nYcB?slug=jp-marshall051007&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
I've been to the Marshall Training Facility in Zephyrhills on a couple of occasions and Dr. Mike has always been open and accessible to coaches and players. Those that see the training methods first-hand and the impact it has on pitchers cannot help but come away impressed, and at times, awed. His guys always have lights out stuff, a great variety and quality of breaking pitches.
I recall on one occasion I visited and witnessed Jeff Sparks throwing the 15 lb. iron ball into the rebound wall as if it was a baseball or a softball. There was no hump-back trajectory, He was throwing from some distance away from the wall (most of the trainees work out close to the wall) and there was plenty of heat on the the throw. I believe they were shooting a feature for one of MLB's highlight shows. I never saw the show run live, but it was an awesome display of power pitching.
His methods are not accepted by the mainstream pitching gurus or major league baseball and that may be a good thing. MLB's track record of arm injuries amongst pitchers in their care and custody is historically bad and seemingly getting worse. It may only trail the collective record of the so-called pitching gurus who combined have not injured anybody "according to their records", but have presided over a nationwide epidemic of youth arm injuries.
I recall when I visited the complex for the first time, a young Mark Prior was blazing through the major leagues, with the mere mention of his name eliciting gushing comments regarding his perfect mechanics and impending injury-free, Hall of Fame career. Guaranteed. You couldn't get coaches to drool more if you had Pamela Anderson show up in a thong.
Tom House's computer told him Prior was perfect, and House came down from his mountain top to tell all of us coaches, so goodness gracious, it had to be true. At that time, Dr. Mike was answering questions regarding Prior with the caution that Prior's "perfect" delivery was flawed. He was heading full-length towards injury just as certain as his mound mate with the Cubs, Kerry Wood. Now at the time, this was on the order of saying the Emperor had no clothes, or that the Earth was round. It went against almost universally accepted wisdom. Wisdom gathered by first one person saying it, then another, and another until soon only a fool would dare get up and contradict the collective logic.
But Dr. Marshall calls it like he sees it, and he does not suffer fools gladly.
That may be why he does not endear himself to major league front office minds. Many of them don't want to have to think too hard. But when Prior, shortly thereafter began to have arm problems that he seemingly still has not recovered from, it should be noted that only Dr. Marshall predicted that this would happen using foresight and not the traditional baseball wisdom of 20-20 hindsight.
Marshall's credentials are impeccable and the faith he has in both his methods and his mission are impregnable. His style and bedside manner is as ferocious as a pit-bull. In my opinion, this is due to his obvious passion for the subject matter and the the consequences of failure to deliver the results that young pitchers are expecting. To be able to pitch effectively, consistently and injury-free.
When Marshall was a player he was a bit of an enigma, however he pitched virtually everyday, racking up innings pitched totals that would be the envy of most starting pitchers of today. When reporters or other players tried to find out what it was he was doing to get results that were so far from the mainstream, he told them he studied kinesiology. Players certainly had no idea what that meant, neither did reporters. Both groups it seems were equal parts intellectually lazy and skeptical of what Marshall was communicating to them, so they stopped communicating it seems.
One of the things I did get from my visits to Zephyrhills, was that Dr. Mike does not water down his terminology or his methodology. Those who can't keep up are swept aside. By the same token, those who stay in the ring and fight to learn end up richly rewarded in the end. The results speak for themselves.
I was just winding down my less than illustrious playing career when Marshall was dominating with the Dodgers. And I admired him, in spite of the fact that he played for the Dodgers, because he was an average sized individual, doing extraordinary things at the the highest level of his craft, a craft that was generally dominated by above average sized individuals.
If you visit his website www.drmikemarshall.com you will find his FREE Book, and also a fantastic CD that illustrates and explains the training and techniques. I can't recommend any books or CD's higher then these for training pitchers.
There currently is a small army of coaches who are using these techniques, Marshall currently offers a certification program for those interested. I know I'll be down there as soon as my schedule fits the Doc's.
For selfish reasons, I would prefer that not that many fellow coaches knew of or employed Marshall's methods, but for the greater good of preventing pitching arm injuries, how can any serious pitching coach ignore these methods when the traditional methods currently being taught have been proven to be a failure over and over and over again.
Q: What's the definition of INSANITY?
A: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
I think this maxim applies here. ENJOY THE JOURNEY.
HERE ARE SOME ILLUSTRATIONS OF SOME OF THE METHODS HIS TRAINEES USE:
STUDENT USING MARSHALL REBOUND WALL:
STUDENTS USING MARSHALL WRIST WEIGHTS:
EXCERPTS FROM THE ARTICLE:
Marshall won a Cy Young award with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1974, earned his Ph.D. in exercise physiology four years later and in the 30 years since has developed a motion that he believes could completely eradicate pitching-arm injuries, if only the right people would listen.
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.
Marshall has a Ph.D. in exercise physiology from Michigan State. 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 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."
Some days it sounds like a pig farm with all the noise. Marshall has expanded the exercise far beyond the 6-, 10- and 15-pound iron balls. The students, usually half a dozen ranging from 18 to 25 years old, are mostly marginal pitchers who want to pitch in college or maybe independent ball. With a wrist weight ranging from 15 to 30 pounds tethered to their pitching arm, they swing their pitching arm straight down like a pendulum, lift it over their ear and follow through with a hard pronation, turning the wrist outward with the thumb pointing down.
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.
And yet 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.
"Have you ever had surgery on your labrum?" Marshall said.
"No," Williams said.
"And do you ever have pain throwing as hard as you can today?" Marshall said.
"No," Williams said.
"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.
Here is the part where everyone calls Mike Marshall a lunatic, where they laugh at his motion, attack his science, scoff at his claims and roll their eyes.
Because for all of the triumphs Marshall sees, the baseball world sees him for what he hasn't done, and that is consistently produce major-league-caliber players. And so develops the Catch-22: Teams think Marshall is too much of a kook to send him top-of-the-line talent and elite players avoid him because they don't want any sort of associated stigma.
"Mike Marshall thinks I'm nuts, God bless him," said Tom House, the former big-league reliever, longtime pitching coach for Prior and, yes, a frequent target of Marshall's jabs. "I really admire his passion about what he does. But he's not the only one who does it."
Any suggestion that Marshall adapt his program – mix his motion with the traditional motion to make the transition easier, or cut out the terminology to focus on the end rather than the means, or perhaps collaborate with others in the growing field of biomechanics – is met with a stern no.
As averse as Marshall is to his peers' theories, he at least respects the science behind them. For baseball executives, who he believes take pride in their ignorance, Marshall saves a special kind of repugnance.
"I got tired of appeasing the stupid," Marshall said. "How long does a blonde have to act like a moron before she gets a date? These people (in organized baseball) are idiots. They don't know a damn thing. The thing is, they're powerful. They get the kids and can destroy them. And they do."
Problem is, the teachings – the same pitching motion for the last century – have led to arm breakdowns that stifled, shortened or ended careers. So in the mid-'90s, Marshall sent a letter to all 30 teams offering his services. No one bit. He called GMs he knew from his playing days and never heard back.
It won't happen. Marshall resigns himself to this. He tries to slough off any bitterness. He can't fathom why businessmen would shoo away something that would save them tens of millions of dollars.
At this point, he only hopes his ideas flourish. When Roger Clemens throws his fastball with a hard pronation of the wrist, Marshall beams. And, even better, during Clemens' first minor-league rehabilitation session, Marshall thought he saw a pendulum swing, a rarity among major leagues.
"People are going to take bits and pieces," Marshall said, "and if that's the way this spreads, fine. They're eventually going to figure out how I teach that curveball, and it's going to dominate baseball. Then they're going to pendulum swing, and that's going to get rid of Tommy John surgery. And then if they get the arm up before the front foot lands, that will take care of the front-of-the-shoulder problems. And then … "
Marshall kept talking. About different muscles, and where they attach, and what they do, and all of the things that make his theories, brilliant as they may be, so inaccessible. Only he stopped himself, like he knew he was getting off the point. As much as he is Dr. Mike Marshall, biomechanist, kinesiologist and anatomist, he's also just Doc, single-minded as ever.
"And then, finally," Marshall said, "we'll develop the best pitchers anyone's ever seen."
Jeff Passan is a national baseball writer for Yahoo! Sports. Send Jeff a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.
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