Modern Science Can’t Win the Arms Race

The prominent orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Anthony Daly, a medical chief of the 1984 Olympics and former adviser to the IOC, likes to tell the story of the ailing pitcher who visits the hemisphere’s foremost specialist in arm trauma.

“Soak the arm in hot water,” the specialist recommends.

The pitcher answers: “My cleaning woman said to use ice.”

The specialist responds: “My cleaning woman told me hot water.”

The point involved here, amid the growing incidence of arm malfunctions in the majors, is whether medical science, for all its advancement, can understand the problem, much less prevent it.

Once trouble surfaces, corrections are made surgically with swiftness and skillful precision. Today’s surgery is a marvel of study and technology.

But guys walking down Broadway, purporting to know how to avoid injuries and prolong careers, draw a suspicious look.

For instance, from the Center for Sports Conditioning in Boston comes the announcement that it has put together, with the medical director of the Red Sox, an hourlong video promising to help pitchers sidestep injuries.

On the tape, Dennis Eckersley is enlisted to demonstrate “34 flexibility, strength and aerobic conditioning exercises for the shoulder, elbow, forearm, wrist, trunk and lower body.”

And each exercise, we are informed, “addresses a specific element of the windup, cocking, acceleration, or deceleration phases of the pitching motion.”

In the scientific orbit in which we move today, countless other ideas are tendered to preserve the pitching appendage and to keep the entertainers generally fit, but they still flame out at about the rate, and for the same reasons, predecessors did years ago.

And today’s pitcher starts only every fifth day, and, in an age dedicated to the bullpen, it is abnormal when he finishes.

Cy Young, Ed Walsh, Walter Johnson--they pitched outrageous numbers of innings. So did Warren Spahn. Walsh lasted 13 years, Young and Johnson 21 each, Spahn 23.

Their only concept of conditioning was to watch what they ate and get some sleep.

Pitchers are running today. They are taking low groin stretches and performing aerobics. They are fastening tire tubes to iron bars and pulling them in various directions to strengthen the rotator cuff.

They are lifting weights, pumping the indoor bike, getting ultrasound treatment and chiropractic manipulations.

At one point, Storm Davis undertook the Jane Fonda Workout, forgetting that Jane never has won 20.

Pitchers also are icing the arm, as they would a fine Chardonnay.

But the injuries roll up. Whole staffs are all but decimated. And then you see Jimmy Key bow out, followed by Orel Hershiser and Rick Sutcliffe, not to mention others. Faithful conditioners, all.

At age 45, Phil Niekro won 16 games for the Yankees. Regularly, Phil went bowling, rated poison to the pitching arm. His conditioning program approximated that of Satchel Paige, who advanced the thought that a man sitting down is honoring a debt to his body.

Niekro explained to us one day: “A lot of pitchers say to themselves, ‘I must do something today to make me a better pitcher tomorrow.’ I don’t subscribe to that. I take the position that if you’re feeling good today, let well enough alone. Don’t do something that could foul you up tomorrow.”

Navigating clear of training rooms, he rejected ice after he pitched, deducing logically, “The ice numbs the arm so that you don’t know how it feels. The only way you can get a reading is to throw and let the arm alone. It then will tell you what kind of shape it’s in.”

Pitchers today even ascribe science to conditioning mentally, falling into silence the day they work, dramatizing the concentration required for the mission ahead.

Niekro always laughed at this. “The time to start concentrating,” he said, “is when you get to the mound. Nothing can happen before that.”

The whole concept today of conditioning, physical and mental, is suspect, mainly because some pitchers last, and others don’t, exactly as they did before.

Hershiser was a paragon of clean living, devoted to modern training. He ate his chicken and his fish.

And, as an accomplished starter, he took his turn at standard intervals, no beast of burden.

When he goes down, at 31, the cynic wants to tell baseball to take its science and place it in the receptacle.

A lot of things in life have changed, but arms haven’t.