The Arm (27 page)

Normalcy returned as Hudson's life got crazier. He and Sara looked after the neighbors' kids as practice. They found time to go to a weekly trivia contest at a local bar with friends. On the ride home one night, Hudson started talking about how excited he was, how great his arm felt that day throwing changeups off flat ground.

“I don't know what the fuck he's talking about,” Sara said. “I know nothing about baseball. But to see his face light up excited me. I think he's so Zen about it this time because he feels really good. He's really confident with his doctor, the fact that he's with the same training staff he loves. I just think he feels really, really good.” In mid-July, after Sara had spent all week calling the hospital to push up her elective induction, it finally found room to squeeze her in. She and Hudson ran home and packed their wares. By midnight, the Pitocin drip started. The contractions came on strong, and when Sara asked for an epidural, the anesthesiologist was assisting with a C-section and couldn't come for an hour. “That, honestly, was the most helpless feeling of my life,” Hudson said. “You can't do anything except sit there and watch her go through this pain. Literally the only thing I could do was hold her hand. Every forty-five seconds to a minute, she's squeezing the shit out of it.”

Once the drugs hit, Sara and Hudson snuck in an hour of sleep. When they woke up around five thirty a.m. on July 17, Hudson said he wanted to jump in the shower. Sara told him to hurry up. “I thought she was kidding around,” Hudson said. She wasn't. Three minutes of pushing, and out came Baylor Rae Hudson, 20¾ inches long, 7 pounds, 4.4 ounces, the most beautiful girl Daniel Hudson ever had seen. He held her and everything else vanished.

“You just think about the shit we've gone through for the past two years,” Hudson said. “I don't want to say it was worth it, but you forget about it for a while.”

This was a crucial juncture in his rehab, and he paid it no
mind. His elbow, the object of his attention and affection for far too long, could wait. Hudson first needed to learn how to hold Baylor when feeding her and inure himself to nights filled with sleeplessness. The mystery of the swaddle confounded him. “It looks so easy,” he said. “Why can't I do that?”

Being a dad suited Hudson well. Everything his elbow had taught him—the discipline, the diligence, the prioritizing—seemed to prepare him for this. Hudson developed a guardedness to keep him from planning too far ahead. Even when something was good, it couldn't be too good. “Everything's kind of looking up right now,” Hudson said. “I don't know if something bad is supposed to happen.”

T
ODD COFFEY, CEASELESSLY UPBEAT, DIDN'T
know what to do and started to panic. Choices are supposed to be good things, rich with possibility. Coffey worried he was making the wrong one.

He had convinced himself he would return from his Tommy John surgery within a year, and that didn't happen, and then a 1.5-centimeter intruder squatted in his elbow, and that waylaid his plans, and then he insisted on throwing in his first showcase, and that bombed, and now two teams with almost the exact same offers wanted him.

Coffey cared about only one thing: “Fastest to the big leagues is all that matters.” But he had no idea whether his path was clearer with the Atlanta Braves or the Seattle Mariners. Both teams contacted Rick Thurman almost immediately after Coffey's showcase and said they were preparing contract offers. The first official offer arrived in Thurman's in-box from Braves assistant GM Bruce Manno. The terms were straightforward: Start at Triple-A Gwinnett, in the Atlanta area, and make $15,000 a month. A promotion to the major leagues bumps the salary to a prorated $750,000, with performance bonuses for appearances starting around thirty games.

The next afternoon, Seattle assistant GM Jeff Kingston sent Thurman a more thorough proposal, even though the minor league and major league salaries were the same. The Mariners gave Coffey out clauses—dates he could opt out of the contract and become a free agent for any reason—on June 30 and July 31. Kingston outlined the pitchers currently in the Mariners' bullpen as well as their arms at Triple-A, separated into pitchers on the forty-man roster and nonroster players. The pitchers on the forty-man could be called up at any time, whereas a nonroster player—as Coffey would be in Seattle and Atlanta—must overachieve to merit an eventual roster spot.

“The nonrosters [
sic
] guys have been ok but none have been lights out,” Kingston wrote. “Todd could easily put himself at the top of the list if he comes in and pitches the way he has when healthy.”

This sounded like what he wanted, and doubts about Atlanta lingered. “If you look at the Braves bullpen,” Coffey said, “it just looks . . . stacked.” Craig Kimbrel was the best closer in baseball. Two other Braves relievers sported ERAs in the twos. Rookie David Hale was in the midst of a scoreless streak that would span all of May. Setup man Jordan Walden soon would return from the disabled list.

Six hundred eighty-seven days after his UCL blew out, Todd Coffey signed with the Seattle Mariners. “Is this the right choice?” he asked. Only if someone on the Mariners' roster got injured, a cruel fate he knew all too well.

On May 21, 2014, Coffey packed a suitcase, placed his glove into its special suitcase, and decamped to Phoenix. His first day at the Mariners' spring-training complex in Peoria, Arizona, included X-rays on his elbow and shoulder; both checked out fine. When he put on a nameless, numberless jersey, it felt better than a Savile Row suit. “To put a uniform on. To finally feel like a baseball player again,” Coffey said. “That felt awesome.”

Later that week, Coffey drove to the stadium at six a.m. for his
first game. He beat up an elliptical machine for forty minutes, did ab work, and strengthened his arm with rubber tubing. He faced rookie-ball kids from the Cincinnati Reds. He was one of them once, young and not very good, and he looked every bit the big leaguer comparatively. The first hitter struck out on three pitches. The next two broke their bats on sinkers that tore in at 94 miles per hour. The adrenaline of a game increased his velocity, which held steady in his next outing two days later, when he pitched two perfect innings and broke four bats against kids from the Milwaukee Brewers.

“Bet you money before the season's out I'll hit 88 on a slider again,” Coffey said. “And I guarantee I'll hit 96 before the season's over. Here's the thing. My arm's only going to get stronger when I throw more. I told Dr. ElAttrache how my first game was. And he said you're going to gain one to two the next month, month and a half, just from throwing hard in games.”

On May 29, Coffey left for Tacoma, Washington, home of the Mariners' Triple-A affiliate. The Mariners vowed to ease him in. No back-to-back games for a couple of weeks. One inning at a time. All building up to his first opt-out on June 30. Coffey hoped his arm would make it moot, that Seattle would see him fit for the big leagues and bring him thirty-five minutes up Interstate 5 to Safeco Field.

“If in a month they don't have a spot for me and I'm pitching good, I know quite a few other teams,” Coffey said. “It's all in my hands. Finally. It's all been on how quick my arm gets better. I don't have any second guesses. I think the opportunity to get to the big leagues with the Braves would have been a lot longer.”

Coffey pitched his first game for Tacoma on May 31. That day, in Atlanta, the Braves promoted Shae Simmons, a hard-throwing twenty-three-year-old from Double-A Mississippi. One Braves official, asked why the team chose Simmons when they could have kept him off the major league roster for at least another year, said: “Because Todd Coffey signed somewhere else.”

W
ITH A PROBLEM THIS ACUTE,
with this much money at stake, I figured doctors, biomechanists, and others from the academic world would find themselves at the cutting edge of research into how to save the arm. Instead, I found a swamp. All you need to be a pitching guru is a cell phone to take videos, some cursory web-design knowledge, and search-engine optimization skills. The arm-care business is massive and potentially worth billions, and some of its most visible names and voices know more about marketing than science. It's easy to take advantage of parents who listen to anyone promising to keep their son healthy, even if it means throwing plastic bucket lids and wearing thick, duct-taped wrist weights.

Dr. Mike Marshall, once the best reliever in baseball and the 1974 National League Cy Young winner, actually does live near
a swamp, in tiny Zephyrhills, Florida, where I first met him in 2007 at his pitching compound. It was a ratty old place, though the faith that emanated from it was infectious. About a dozen young men used to pay ten dollars a day for on-site housing and another ten dollars to learn how to throw a baseball from Marshall, whom everyone at the facility called Doc. They believed in him, despite baseball's overwhelming skepticism toward his methods.

Today, Marshall is seventy-three years old, his body slowing, all the way down to the atrophied muscle between his thumb and index finger. His 106 games and 208⅓ innings pitched during the 1974 season for the Los Angeles Dodgers remain records for relievers, each less likely to be broken than Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak. Barely five feet eight, Marshall had pain in his right throwing shoulder following his rookie season in 1967. He wanted to understand why, so he used high-speed video to analyze his delivery well before doing so became standard practice, spent his offseasons at Michigan State earning a doctorate in exercise physiology, and built a philosophy that has endured for almost half a century.

Marshall took the pitching delivery and blew it up. What he spawned was so unorthodox an approach, so far afield from what baseball pitchers were supposed to look like, that no matter how biomechanically sound—no matter how many injuries it may have prevented—nobody would ever adopt it.

Even Marshall admits that the delivery won't win any awards for aesthetics. It starts with feet parallel and belt buckle facing the catcher. A right-hander starts his arms together above his head, then drops his pitching arm straight down. As he brings it up directly behind him—“Pendulum-swinging,” as Marshall calls it, “eliminates Tommy John surgery”—the pitcher steps with his left foot to about 10 o'clock. He wills his pitching arm straight up, with zero external rotation, then starts to heavily pronate it, using the forearm muscles to turn the ball over as he half jumps off his back leg and whips his body around to face first base.

Baseball misfits ended up training with Doc. This was last-resort-type stuff for the injured, whom he promised to nurse back to health, and the velocity-deficient, to whom he promised another ten miles per hour. In the mornings, before their throwing sessions, the students strapped ten-, twenty-, even thirty-pound cuffs onto their wrists to practice pronating and build their arm muscles. They threw with six-pound iron balls. Marshall even made them throw footballs and weighted lids from four-gallon drums to simulate the release of the curveball he wanted to teach them.

His best students were a flameout named Jeff Sparks, who used a Marshall-style delivery, and a longtime reliever named Rudy Seanez, who threw traditionally and spent only a short portion of his career under Marshall's tutelage. Otherwise, it was kids looking to play low-level college ball or maybe get recruited to go somewhere bigger or land in independent ball. In 2008, Tommy John, one of Marshall's old friends from his Dodgers days and then the manager of the Atlantic League's Bridgeport Bluefish, invited two of Doc's best pitchers to spring training.

“There wasn't any harm in bringing them in,” John said. “Kinesiologically, physiologically, it's probably correct. But you would need fifty years of everybody throwing like that to get into the game. It's so different from what's done that baseball establishment won't allow it. So every kid would have to throw like Mike wants them to.”

No Marshall-style pitcher ever sat at 95 miles per hour and wowed scouts. Nobody who already threw 95 was willing to completely subvert his game in an effort to validate some mad scientist. So after years of publicly criticizing conventional pitching motions, Marshall took what amounted to the Pepsi Challenge in 2008: he brought his four best pitchers to Birmingham and had Glenn Fleisig run his typical biomechanical testing on them to see how their objective markers compared with the traditional method.

The results: Marshall's method “produced similar shoulder and elbow torques, but significantly less ball velocity” than “elite traditional pitchers.” Compared with others throwing at the same velocity, the Marshall pitchers' joints were far more stressed. Marshall took exception to Fleisig's findings, using his blog to drop an almost nine thousand–word refutation of the study's methodology, which ended: “That is all I can think of, for now.”

Over the next four years, self-styled pitching gurus hawked their methods on the web while Doc's site looked like an old Geocities page. None of his competitors boasted a doctorate like Marshall. Few bothered with legitimate research. All they needed to do was trick Google's algorithms into thinking they were experts. That's a game Marshall refused to play, and in 2012 he shut down his academy, the frustration of rejection too strong. Marshall still believes he can end all pitching injuries. It's just that nobody will listen to him.

I swung by Zephyrhills again in 2013 to see the fallout from two decades of proselytizing to skeptics. As he sipped a drink on his patio, Marshall lifted his right arm, revealing a scar that ran along the inside of his elbow. I didn't think he had ever needed surgery. He started to explain the one drawback to a pitching motion with excessive pronation: it can wear out the ulnar nerve. The atrophy between his thumb and index finger happened because of it. The solution, Marshall explained, was simple: when a pitcher showed professional potential, he would go in for surgery to transpose the ulnar nerve.

It took a second to process what Marshall was saying: in order to pitch in a fashion that he believes helps avoid Tommy John surgery, he suggested a pitcher undergo another kind of surgery—one that, with even slight complications, could leave a person permanently disabled.

“It's ironic, I guess,” Marshall said. “But I've said since even back in the sixties that the ulnar nerve is the contraindication, and we have to recognize that. We're going to move the nerve on the
inside, and it'll never have a problem. But that's trivial. When I went in and had the surgery, I was in for less than a half hour and was able to go to dinner and a movie with my wife that night.”

Never, right up to the end, would he settle on anything less than the full Marshall delivery. There was no compromise in Doc. It made him who he was. And wasn't.

“If you're a guru on anything, I think you need to be careful,” said Brent Strom, the Astros' pitching coach. “Because what you'll have is gurus clashing with each other. I think if we keep in mind that we don't fall into the trap that ‘my mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts,' I think we're better off. Because we're going to continue to evolve and see what works best.

“There's a lot of charlatans out there.”

O
VER THE COURSE OF THREE
years, I encountered plenty of people who believed they could help solve the scourge of Tommy John surgery, and one of the most vociferous was named Dr. Tommy John.

He was born Thomas Edward John III on September 27, 1977, almost three years to the day after his father's procedure, the eldest son of Sally and Tommy John, whose second career meant little Tommy got to hang out with Don Mattingly, Rickey Henderson, and other New York Yankees luminaries. He was a standout high schooler in Minnesota, played college ball at Furman, and parlayed a health and exercise science degree into a job as a personal trainer. Over time, as he worked toward his doctor of chiropractic, John started to champion his ability—anyone's ability, really—to avoid the surgery named after his father. “That's the big thing,” he said. “I want to prevent the cutting.”

The pitching subculture on the Internet works like this: Academic types commission studies and use data to construct hypotheses and test, test, test. Mechanics wonks believe in the purity of the perfect throw, their faith rooted in kinesiological principles.
Charlatans theorize and yell the loudest, research and physiology be damned. The discussions, debates, and disagreements in online forums grow heated, a sign of how imperative the issue is to baseball as well as the levels of self-importance and delusion that percolate throughout the subculture.

Tommy John III is far from a big name. Scott Kazmir and Barry Zito parlayed time at Ron Wolforth's Texas Baseball Ranch into revitalized major league careers and helped turn it into a cash cow. Much of what Wolforth teaches—the value of tempo, the use of weighted balls, mechanical efficiencies, and the importance of intent to throw, or getting in a ready position early and with a purpose—came from a man named Paul Nyman. He quit baseball for years, like Marshall frustrated that others got the attention he felt due him. Nyman didn't want to be Nikola Tesla, the genius bound to be appreciated only after he's gone.

Nobody could say for certain who in the swamp was right. For years, Alan Jaeger, a yoga-practicing Taoist, has tried to convince me the key to arm health is in extreme long toss, whereby pitchers throw baseballs on an arc up to four hundred feet to build arm strength. When I asked for evidence, he provided data he keeps. When I told him it's biased, he chuckled and said I'll see that he's right someday. Paul Davis, the Cardinals' pitching analytics coordinator, suggested I call an Arkansas-based CPA named Lloyd Lee. “He's the smartest person in the world when it comes to the arm,” Davis said, and I scoffed for a moment before remembering that the smartest person in the world when it came to baseball statistics was a security guard at a pork-and-beans factory. Once Bill James got a voice, he changed the game.

So I figured it couldn't hurt to hear out Tommy John III. He brought a bit of everything to his philosophy, minus the pretense of most who built their businesses around teaching proper throwing mechanics. John wanted to heal. Much of his work existed in the alternative-medicine space he occupies, without significant clinical research to support his theories. He believed
in brain-body symbiosis and how something as simple as cross-crawl patterning—moving the arms and legs in the same fashion as babies—was integral in creating the sort of healthy movement patterns he sought.

He sounded like a quack, the very last person who could save an arm, especially when I asked how he did it. “What I do is a form of direct current therapy,” he said. “It's electricity.” He uses a machine called the ARPwave, a small, portable device with a power switch, a knob, and two output cords with pads that sit on the skin. ARP stands for Accelerated Recovery Performance, and the ARPwave purports to use electrical current to shock muscles into high-velocity contractions that strengthen them. Some call it a scam, others a miracle device.

When John suggested the therapy to a high school junior named Jared Martin, the seventeen-year-old blanched. Martin was a catcher at Dunwoody High, about twenty miles outside Atlanta, and John was the school's conditioning coach. When Martin's elbow started hurting, he saw an orthopedic surgeon in Atlanta who recommended Tommy John surgery. His parents sought a second opinion, taking Martin to Birmingham to visit James Andrews. He diagnosed a partially torn UCL and told Martin he could try rest and rehab or get the surgery and miss a year.

Martin agreed to try John's protocol. John ran the pad along Martin's arm, searching for “hot spots,” or areas of particular weakness. He targeted muscles in the flexor-pronator mass, turned on the machine, and watched Martin writhe.

“It felt like I was getting electrocuted,” Martin said. “He would hit a spot down on my forearm, nowhere near the UCL, and I'd have the most unbelievable pain. He'd say, ‘Here's the hot spot.' I can't even describe the pain I felt when he hit the hot spot. I told him I didn't know if I could do it. He was sitting there by my side the whole time, motivating me.”

Two or three times a week, John used the ARPwave on
Martin. The elbow pain lessened. A rehab plan mapped out by John complemented the ARPwave sessions, and after four months Martin's arm felt good enough to visit the orthopedic surgeon in Atlanta for a follow-up appointment. The results of an imaging test shocked even Martin: the damage to his UCL was gone. John believed that by strengthening the muscles around the UCL and allowing inflammation to promote healing, he fixed it without so much as touching a scalpel.

“The doctors [in Atlanta] had no idea what happened,” Martin said. “It was magic. No one believes me.”

He wants to believe it was the machine. Not the time off. Not the rest. Not the other rehab exercises. There are no studies on the efficacy of the ARPwave, nothing to back up its claims aside from unverifiable anecdotes and cases with no control to isolate what really promoted the most healing. Other electrical-stimulation devices regularly adorn pitchers' arms in clubhouses after outings to encourage blood flow. Never had I heard anyone suggest it can mend the UCL, and the idea of a ligament healing on account of the muscles around it growing stronger does not compute.

“I really think that if the ligament healed, it healed by the natural processes of the body,” said Dr. Chris McKenzie, a physical therapist who trains baseball players in the Philadelphia area. “[ARPwave] is no different than most stim machines. Nothing I have learned, and nothing that any reliable medical professional would say, would show that it can fix a ligament. There's no evidence out there to support that. It's pretty much just complete crap.”