Free The Arm by Jeff Passan Page B

from the truth. It is nature personified.
    Bows and arrows, traps, and guns eventually rendered spears, rocks, and blunt objects obsolete, turning the throwing arminto an antiquated device. Though we use our arms every day and would struggle to function without them, the ability to internally rotate the shoulder at 8,000 degrees per second serves no purpose in the modern world outside of athletic pursuits. Roach’s study of twenty top-flight athletes, most of them college pitchers, affirmed his theory about the modern shoulder acting as a clearinghouse for energy generated mostly in the hips and glutes. Mankind didn’t die in part because evolution in the shoulder helped it survive.
    What it didn’t do was give us an infallible joint. The shoulder can absorb a few full-power throws at prey, maybe a few more close-range rock assaults. Only the rarest are made for one hundred pitches. Shoulder problems, elbow problems—they’re all the same, all the function of men pushing themselves to do something the body never intended it to do.
    â€œUnfortunately, the ligaments and tendons in the human shoulder and elbow are not well adapted to withstanding such repeated stretching from the high torques generated by throwing, and frequently suffer from laxity and tearing,” Roach wrote in the final paragraph of the paper, which was published in Nature . “While humans’ unique ability to power high-speed throws using elastic energy may have been critical in enabling early hunting, repeated overuse of this motion can result in serious injuries in modern throwers.”
    Nearly one hundred years passed before anyone in baseball recognized that.
    B ASEBALL IN THE 1800S WASN’T baseball, not as we know it today. It existed for scamps and scalawags, a sport governed by its utter lack of governance. It couldn’t get the easy stuff right. Though baseball’s first official game came in 1846, no strike zone existed until more than forty years later. The mound’s sixty-foot, six-inch distance was not established until 1893. Expecting even awhit of care when it came to protecting pitchers’ arms was like asking Old Hoss Radbourn to stay sober during the 1884 season.
    Much as Frank Bancroft, the manager of the National League’s Providence Grays, tried to keep his ace away from booze, Charles Radbourn found a sip here, a nip there, every last drop used as an analgesic to dull the pain in his arm. He refused to let his teammates pitch, and Bancroft knew better than to argue with Radbourn, who later earned his nickname, “Old Hoss,” from his ability to pitch so often. For forty of the Grays’ last forty-three games, Radbourn trotted to the mound and gnashed through the discomfort. His fifty-nine victories in 1884 established a record that never will be broken, nor will any pitcher come near the 678⅔ innings he threw.
    Nobody benefited quite as much as Radbourn from the new change implemented in 1884: the legalization of overhand pitching. In baseball’s prior four decades, rules mandated that pitchers throw either sidearm or underhand. The advent of overhand pitching was a seminal moment for baseball, unlocking the body’s fullest potential to throw hard while inviting the injuries that accompany it.
    Which is not to say the previous deliveries exempted players from harm. This is a great myth, one easily disproved even with the paltry historical record of arm injuries in the nineteenth century. Pitchers of that era did not throw with great velocity, so the sheer load of innings, and the potential for those innings to stretch on, thanks to copious errors committed by gloveless fielders, ended careers with regularity. Of the eighteen players with at least one five hundred–inning season before 1884, two-thirds were finished pitching by age thirty. Tommy Bond was practically done at twenty-four, a year after starting thirty-five consecutive games for the 1879 Boston Red