Trevor Bauer Will Not Be Babied
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1189170/index.htm
八月 15, 2011
Drivers on Texas Loop 336 head east to the town of Cut and Shoot, west to the
land of Rock and Fire. The gunslingers of America have a choice to make.
Those who bear west steer onto a winding two-lane road lined with sprawling
ranches, soaring oak trees and signs that remind them to DRIVE FRIENDLY. Many
of the ranches off 336 are raising longhorns. One is breeding pitchers.
Down a hill, past a barn, next to a tractor, 60 young men gather in the 103°
morning air. Some are freshly minted first-round draft picks. Others are
Little Leaguers just trying to make local All-Star teams. They have come to
the Texas Baseball Ranch in the town of Montgomery (population 600) to watch
video of Whitey Ford and Bob Feller, run wind sprints with tires strapped
around their waists and launch baseballs as hard and as far as they can.
Among them is a precocious 20-year-old from the Los Angeles suburbs named
Trevor Bauer, the third pick in this year's major league draft, the most
decorated amateur thrower since Stephen Strasburg, the most intriguing
pitching prospect since Tim Lincecum and the fault line along which big
league teams will debate the handling of the game's most valued commodity:
the young hurler. While Strasburg stood out for his velocity and Lincecum for
his mechanics, Bauer's defining characteristic is harder to measure. He has
an insatiable mind.
Bauer will tell you that virtually every play in a baseball game takes 12
seconds or less, so his workout regimen consists of vigorous exercises that
last no more than a fifth of a minute. He will tell you that every hitter
must decide to swing no later than the first 20 feet a pitch is in the air,
so he practices throwing into a metal grid 20 feet in front of the mound to
ensure that all his pitches start on the same plane. Bauer has at one time or
another deployed 19 different pitches, some of which he may have invented:
They include the "reverse slider" (a harder variation of the screwball) and
"the bird" (a splitter thrown with the middle finger raised).
Here is the modern pitcher, New Age but down-home, a product of both Southern
California think tanks and East Texas back roads. Bauer throws at least six
days a week with baseballs, weighted balls or medicine balls. He long-tosses
380 feet, even before starts. He warms up for his outings with about 45
pitches in the bullpen, and during especially long innings when his team is
at bat, he heads back to the pen for more work. On his first warmup toss
between innings, he crow hops across the mound and unleashes a fastball more
than 100 miles per hour. This past season at UCLA, where Bauer was National
Pitcher of the Year, he led the country in strikeouts (203 in 136 2/3
innings), led the Pac-10 with a 1.25 ERA and held opposing hitters to a .154
batting average. More remarkably, his last nine outings were all complete
games, and in only one did he throw fewer than 130 pitches. After each of
them he was out long-tossing the next day.
Major league executives have been conditioned to wince at such a regimen,
assuming all that throwing will weaken the arm and eventually lead to injury.
Over the past 20 years most organizations have tried to protect young
starters by barring them from long-tossing more than 120 feet, or from
throwing more than 30 pitches in the bullpen or more than 100 in a game. The
intentions were admirable. The results, as evidenced by thousands of elbow
and shoulder surgeries, have been catastrophic.
Bauer saw what those organizations did and then weighed it against
information he collected from coaches, classes, books, videos and personal
experience. "I just felt like there was a more efficient way for me," he
says. He concluded that his throwing regimen actually strengthened his arm,
as long as it was in concert with extensive stretching and sound mechanics.
Before this year's draft, he arranged face-to-face meetings with
representatives from the clubs interested in him. He wanted to explain the
specifics of his routine and the rationale behind it. He was willing to
sacrifice a better slot in the draft—and therefore potentially accept a
lower signing bonus—to be with an organization that trusted him.
"I told them all: 'This is what I do, it's what I believe in, and if you let
me stick with it, I'll pitch in the major leagues for 20 years,'" Bauer says.
"Some were open. Some weren't. But they needed to know what they were getting
into."
Kevin Towers grew up in Medford, Ore., throwing with friends every day in
pickup games, hot box contests and home run derbies. He spent eight seasons
pitching in the Padres' minor league system, but when he became their general
manager in 1995, he strayed from his rubber-armed roots. "We all did," Towers
says. "With the big signing bonuses, people were afraid to push the envelope,
because if something happened, it was, How dare you? But maybe that thinking
hurt us in the long run. Maybe it's why we have so many problems now. Guys
don't go deep into games, and then when they do, they're not used to it.
Thirty years ago, you threw and threw and threw. To me, that's healthy."
Towers took over as the Diamondbacks' G.M. last September, and in June, with
his first draft choice with the franchise, he picked Bauer third overall and
signed him to a major league contract that could be worth as much as $7
million. In his professional debut, for Class A Visalia on July 30, Bauer
threw two scoreless innings; last Friday night, he gave up two runs in three
innings but struck out six batters.
Bauer is entering pro ball at an opportune time. Complete games are up for
the fourth year in a row, from 112 in 2007 to 134 already this season.
Several organizations, including Arizona, have reconsidered elements of their
throwing program. The D-Backs were obviously drawn to Bauer because he can
reach 97 miles per hour and command 10 different pitches, but they also view
him as a catalyst for further examination of arm issues. "This is a chance
for us to really explore what pitchers are capable of doing," says Jerry
DiPoto, the club's senior vice president in charge of scouting and player
development.
While the Diamondbacks negotiated Bauer's contract, he flew to Texas for a
final summer at the Texas Baseball Ranch. Lounging in the barn one afternoon
next to Chasey, a golden retriever--Labrador mix named for her pursuit of
wild pitches, Bauer thought about a way he might treat himself when he
officially becomes a multimillionaire. He is eyeing a video camera that can
shoot 1,000 frames per second, which would allow him to study how each pitch
is coming off his fingertips. He makes the camera sound as fun as a Ferrari,
and far more essential. "Look, I'm not that big," says Bauer, who is 6'1",
185. "I'm not that strong. I'm not fast. I'm not explosive. I can't jump. I
wasn't a natural-born athlete. I was made."
Warren Bauer is a chemical engineer, and even though he didn't play much
baseball as a boy, he taught his son to view pitching through a scientific
prism. They read about Cubans who threw coconuts to build arm strength, so
they soaked baseballs in water to make them heavier. They drove nails into
softballs, a trick Nolan Ryan used to add weight. They sometimes hollowed out
balls, shoving sand and fishing weights inside. "We wanted Trevor to learn
how to throw the right way," Warren says. "We never imagined there was such a
huge divide in how you go about doing that."
At age 10 Trevor took pitching classes in Valencia, Calif., with a family
friend and former college pitcher named Jim Wagner. Wagner was a police
officer in nearby Glendale at the time, and Bauer was his only client. Most
of what Wagner taught came from an instructional video recorded by somebody
else. "It was what everybody taught in the '90s," Wagner says. "Lift your
knee, pause over the top of the rubber, keep your head straight, get your
elbow up, put your foot down, glide out along the ground and finish in a
fielding position. I guess that might have worked if [Trevor] were 6'4", 230.
But [in high school] he was 5'10", 150. We needed to be more athletic, less
robotic."
Wagner junked the video and encouraged Trevor to experiment. They pulled back
his front hip, angling it toward the third base line and uncoiling it toward
home plate like a slingshot. Warren made Velcro harnesses that Trevor wore
around his chest to isolate the lower body. Radar-gun readings climbed.
Wagner introduced Trevor to L.A. long-toss guru Alan Jaeger, who tutored one
of the most durable pitchers in the big leagues, the Angels' Dan Haren. When
Trevor was 12, Jaeger put him on an arm-care program similar to what physical
therapists prescribe for pitchers rehabilitating from rotator-cuff surgery.
Trevor had to perform six shoulder exercises with Thera-Band tubing strapped
to his wrists before he could make a throw. But once he was warm, Jaeger
urged him to let fly. Trevor would bike to a park near his house with a milk
crate full of balls and hurl them 300 feet against an adjacent tennis court's
fence before the pro ran him off.
On the recommendation of Wagner and Jaeger, Trevor fled every summer to East
Texas, where he could long-toss until midnight, and often did. Ron Wolforth
and his wife, Jill, opened the 20-acre Texas Baseball Ranch in 2003 to
nurture young pitchers and channel ancients. "Back in the '40s and '50s, guys
came up with their own motions, and they had more complete games with fewer
injuries," says Wolforth, a former college baseball player and private
pitching coach. "We interrupted the natural flow of Warren Spahns and Sandy
Koufaxes and Bob Gibsons. We overinstructed the delivery."
Wolforth's pitchers do not work the land, the way old-timers did every
off-season, but they do drag tires and pull 25-pound ropes, developing
muscles that are integral to a full-body delivery. When Wolforth once ordered
the pitchers to push a tractor across the ranch for 30 seconds, Bauer
interrupted, saying that no play lasts that long. They should push harder,
the youngster argued, for 12 seconds.
Bauer grew so comfortable at the ranch that he moved from the local motel
into the Wolforth house, signed for mail delivered to the barn and started
every day with high-minded questions such as: How do seams create spin? What
is the effect of high finger pressure versus low pressure placed on a ball?
When does a hitter have to commit? Wolforth once went to watch TV in the barn
and found Bauer placing yellow dots all over the screen because he was
mapping the plane of his pitches. Yet when Wolforth asked everyone to
identify a historical pitcher with similar mechanics, someone they could
pattern themselves after, Bauer struggled to pinpoint anybody.
Then, on March 31, 2006, on a 50° night in Seattle, a junior at Washington
struck out 18 batters and threw a two-hit shutout against UCLA. Bauer called
up the footage on a website. It was the first time he had seen Lincecum—the
narrow frame, tilted head, the furious hip turn, the massive stride. "I
watched it at 30 frames a second," Bauer says. "Before he gets to the top of
his leg lift, his pelvis has been in motion six to eight frames toward the
plate."
The next year, as a sophomore at Hart High School in Newhall, Calif., Bauer
took physics and applied the lessons to what he had seem Lincecum do. "It
started making sense why he did what he did," Bauer says, standing to
demonstrate. "The more you delay your hip and shoulder from opening up, as
long as you're moving toward home, you're shortening the distance to the
plate and adding tension to the body, stretching the elastic band. If you
fire your back hip and keep the front side of your body closed, you get more
torque. The more torque you get, the more impulse you will get when you
release."
Bauer heard the doomsday predictions about Lincecum, that his build was too
slight and delivery too violent to avoid injury, so he searched for the red
flags Wolforth taught him to recognize. Lincecum's throwing elbow didn't rise
above his back shoulder. His throwing arm didn't sweep across his midsection.
He used his entire body to generate velocity but decelerated his arm
gradually. The motion was unorthodox yet unstrained. Bauer had discovered his
model.
Lincecum was the friend he didn't have. In elementary school Bauer was teased
by classmates because he wore baseball pants instead of jeans. In high school
he was taunted by teammates because he carried a six-foot plastic shoulder
tube that loosened his arm. Coaches called it Linus's blanket. "A lot of
people don't want to be different," Bauer says. "And if they are, they hide
it so no one holds it against them. But I didn't want to be at the mall at 10
p.m. I wanted to be at the park."
Bauer, who was 12--0 with a 0.79 ERA and 106 strikeouts in 70 2/3 innings as
a junior, would have been drafted if he stayed at Hart for his senior year.
But he was miserable there, and he learned from Jaeger that about 80% of pro
organizations opposed long-toss programs like his. "I'd have just been some
dumb high school kid," Bauer says. "But if I went to college and made a name
for myself, maybe they'd see that it worked."
Bauer graduated early and enrolled at UCLA at the start of 2009, where his
routine stayed the same, only he was not ostracized for it. He refused to
lift weights because he felt they diminished his flexibility. He didn't run
poles because he believed the distance compromised his explosiveness. His
short-burst workouts with cones, ladders and hoses were just as demanding.
"Good coaching," says UCLA head coach John Savage, "is allowing a guy like
that to be himself." Bauer still carried his shoulder tube, and when an
airline lost it on a road trip to Houston, he said he couldn't throw without
it for fear of injury. The tube was recovered, and Warren made a PVC case to
protect it.
When UCLA flew to Omaha last year for the College World Series, Bauer checked
the case but carried on "Downright Filthy Pitching," a series of books
written by Perry Husband, a former junior college coach who runs a baseball
academy north of L.A. Husband has tracked millions of pitches in major league
games and concluded that a 90-mile-per-hour pitch appears to a hitter roughly
five miles per hour faster if it's on the inside corner and five miles per
hour slower on the outside corner. Husband's theory, known as Effective
Velocity, provided Bauer with the basis for his complex pitch sequences this
season. When he returned from Omaha, he called Husband and asked him one
question that Wolforth was never able to answer: When does a hitter have to
commit? Husband calculated the point of no return at the 20-foot mark. Bauer
was concerned that his pitches were traveling on different planes before they
reached 20 feet—Husband calls the planes "tunnels"—and therefore weren't
deceptive enough. He sent film of the pitches to Husband, whose advanced
video system makes it possible to overlay them on the same screen and show
how each one differs at 20 feet. Husband sent back the clips with a narration
of his findings.
"I've talked to other pitchers about this, and they're like, 'O.K., great,
thanks a lot,'" Husband says. "There are only a few people in the world like
Trevor." Warren promptly assembled a six- by seven-foot metal grid so Trevor
could practice throwing through the same tunnel.
In the movie Bull Durham, Crash Davis tells rookie pitcher Nuke LaLoosh,
"Don't think. It can only hurt the ball club." Baseball has traditionally
struggled with its intellectuals, dismissing them as quirky or zany. But in
the three years Bauer spent in college, some of his beliefs came to be more
accepted in pro ball. Ryan, now the Rangers' CEO and president, has pushed
pitchers to work deeper into games, and in 2009, hired Jaeger as a consultant
to develop a long-toss program for Rangers pitchers. The Twins, Angels and
Padres met with Jaeger as well. The Diamondbacks brought him to their
instructional league last fall. As this year's draft approached, Jaeger
quizzed executives on Bauer's behalf and then relayed the good news: At least
50% of organizations were now open to his long-toss program.
General managers regarded this draft as one of the best ever for college
pitchers, with UCLA boasting two candidates for the top spot: righthander
Gerrit Cole, 6'4", 220, with a classic delivery and a triple-digit fastball;
and Bauer, three inches shorter and 35 pounds lighter, hurtling his body
toward home plate like Lincecum with a buzz cut. Scouts were torn all season.
Many pegged Cole as the safer choice but predicted Bauer would make the big
leagues sooner. "If you try to change him, he won't sign," a scout said in
April. "Or he'll be at the mall at 2 a.m. throwing 400 feet."
The Pirates chose Cole, the second time in three years a pitcher from
Southern California went No. 1 overall.
Some scouts acknowledged that their bosses were put off by Bauer's flair—he
wore a faded cap at UCLA, played hacky sack before games and listened to his
iPod in the bullpen to enhance the rhythm of his delivery—but the
Diamondbacks were enthralled. What others labeled quirky they called
committed. When DiPoto met Bauer, the Arizona executive blurted out a line
from statistician Bill James: "Oftentimes you measure a player's potential
greatness by his uniqueness." Here was an organization that understood.
DiPoto pitched in the majors from 1993 through 2000, long-tossing daily, even
as coaches cautioned him, "You've only got so many bullets in that arm."
DiPoto has studied the difference between high- and low-stress innings. He
downplays simple pitch counts.
"There's a wave of this," Bauer says. "The wave is coming." He rattles off
names of other top pitching prospects who have embraced similar training
methods, such as Dylan Bundy, whom the Orioles took No. 4 overall. Bauer
rejoices that the Mariners hired a Harvard Medical School--educated doctor,
Marcus Elliott, who removed the weights from the weight room. Bauer is part
of a broad movement, but he has the biggest platform.
Stunningly, the Diamondbacks were only a half game behind the Giants in the
National League West through Sunday, after finishing last a year ago. They
have placed Bauer on the 40-man roster and will consider promoting him for
the pennant race, likely as a reliever. A September duel between Bauer and
Lincecum, with a division title on the line, is an enticing possibility.
Bauer realizes that he must make some concessions before then. He already
leaves his six-foot shoulder tube outside the dugout so as not to cramp any
colleagues. He bought a smaller version at Brookstone, and even though he
prefers the longer one sold by Oates Specialties, he understands the
realities of the workplace. He will adjust when logic dictates it.
Until he signed his pro contract on July 25, Bauer incubated on the ranch,
reminding the Little Leaguers to keep their throwing elbow below their
shoulder. When Bauer first saw Strasburg pitching with his elbow above his
shoulder, he felt a pit in his gut, and when he saw the Cardinals' Adam
Wainwright doing the same, he felt it again. Both are currently recovering
from Tommy John surgery. "I was like, 'No!' because I love watching those
guys," Bauer says. "And I feel so sorry for them because it's not their
fault. They were taught this way. I was just lucky enough to be taught a
different model."
He is eager to share it, and on a steamy summer afternoon he sat in the barn
next to an 18-year-old righthander from Oakland named Joe Ross. Ross is 6'3",
190, throws a 95-mph fastball and was picked 25th overall by the Padres, an
organization that has squandered first-round picks for the better part of two
decades. Bauer and Wolforth deconstructed video of Ross's delivery, which
reminded them of Roy Halladay's, with only two minor fixes recommended. "You
need to guard these mechanics like a junkyard dog with foam coming out of
your mouth!" Wolforth shouted.
He barked to punctuate his point. Chasey jumped. Ross froze. Bauer nodded.
This is no joke. The gunslingers of America are entering an industry that for
more than 20 years has failed to protect them. The most promising one of all
has done what he can to protect himself.
--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc)
◆ From: 140.112.25.133
推
08/13 01:17, , 1F
08/13 01:17, 1F
Diamondbacks 近期熱門文章
PTT體育區 即時熱門文章
