The Arm (8 page)

“When I played, everything was corrective,” Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer said. “It wasn't proactive, it wasn't prevention. That didn't make sense to me.” In 1965, Palmer injured his rotator cuff at twenty and thought his career was over; he couldn't throw faster than 80 miles per hour. He went to Robert
Kerlan, who didn't have a solution, other than for him to pitch in Puerto Rico during winter ball and hope his arm responded. As Palmer recalled, a friend working for a pharmaceutical company suggested he take Indocin, an anti-inflammatory drug. He swallowed three a day and started throwing 95 miles per hour again. He doesn't know why or how. Palmer didn't need surgery, pitched another sixteen seasons, and threw more than four thousand innings for Baltimore, eight of them in game two of the 1971 World Series. Like Koufax, he needed 168 pitches to grind through it. His arm only got stronger, and Palmer won three Cy Young Awards over a four-season stretch soon thereafter. He was
H. erectus
, the survivor.

Palmer's teammate in the Florida Instructional League, and the better performer there, too—an Orioles prospect named Steve Caria—never made it past Double-A because of arm troubles. Dave Ford was supposed to be the next Jim Palmer, a big, strapping, hard-throwing right-handed pitcher. He lasted fifty-one games in the major leagues and last threw a big league pitch at twenty-four, his shoulder shot. Palmer remembers dozens more.

Young arms failed everywhere. From 1967 to 1971, the Cincinnati Reds brought an unparalleled cache of hard-throwing kids to the major leagues: Gary Nolan, Don Gullett, Wayne Simpson, and Ross Grimsley. All four were done in by arm injuries before their twenty-ninth birthdays. The death rattle of the complete game sounded with the 1980 Oakland A's, who rode their rotation of five twentysomething pitchers so hard that four of them didn't make it past 1983. The luckiest of the group, Steve McCatty, lasted five more years.

The year Sandy Koufax retired, a nineteen-year-old made his major league debut in September. He would last longer than the Reds' quartet, longer than the A's quintet, all the way into the mid-1990s, when he would retire as the paragon of durability. Whenever pitchers today draw criticism for their coddling, the
discussion inevitably goes back to him, and it's always in the form of a question.

“Why can't they be more like Nolan Ryan?”

T
O THIS DAY, NOLAN RYAN'S
delivery is studied and dissected like a work of art rich with hidden ciphers. He pitched for twenty-seven seasons, faced more than twenty-two thousand batters, and still threw in the mid-nineties as a forty-six-year-old. Ryan was not the best pitcher ever, far from it, but he pitched forever, and that makes him a deity.

Here is a little-known truth about Ryan: he was a god whose arm hurt. In 1967, when Ryan was twenty, a doctor recommended he undergo surgery to fix the pain. Ryan refused. Eight years later, Ryan had bone chips removed from his right elbow. Come 1986, Dr. Frank Jobe suggested that the thirty-nine-year-old Ryan undergo Tommy John surgery to mend a torn UCL. He refused again and pitched for seven more seasons until his UCL forced him into retirement in 1993.

What allowed Ryan to survive remains a mystery. Surely genetics factored in. While his mechanics were considered clean, Ryan changed his delivery multiple times in his career, and his UCL issues speak to some flaw. If he had an obvious freakish ability, it was to defy medical advice and keep strong with no loss of effectiveness. His usage was unparalleled among modern pitchers. In his career, Ryan threw somewhere in the vicinity of 90,000 pitches. In 1974 alone, it was an estimated 5,700—a start every fourth day and nearly 140 pitches every turn. His pièce de résistance came June 14 of that year, when Ryan went thirteen innings, walked ten, struck out nineteen, and threw 235 pitches. In 2015, only 66 of the 4,858 starts featured pitchers throwing more than half as many pitches as Ryan did that day.

The survival-of-the-fittest mentality that ruled the game during Ryan's heyday has vanished. His ethos: throw, throw some more,
and when you're done throwing, throw again. He equated it with running: if you get tired at the five-mile mark, go six and then seven and eight, and the body will adapt to meet the greater workload. This is an inapt comparison. The arm better resembles its hinged counterpart, the knee. As much as extreme running builds up endurance and cardiovascular fitness, it can be death on the knees.

Ryan sees a happy medium. It does not exist by nannying pitchers.

“I think the system has hurt pitching,” he said. “They don't know what they're capable of doing. They don't know what their ability is as far as endurance, and the number of pitches they can throw. Who's to say 110 pitches is right or wrong? They prove what they're capable of doing. We've gone from when I was with the California Angels carrying nine pitchers to carrying thirteen now. That's crazy. More than half your team is pitchers. Why should you do that?”

Every argument about pitch counts suffers from survivorship bias, and it's part of why the debate agitates those who did hold up. Nolan Ryan's arm was an engine on its 100,000th mile without an oil change and still purring, hungry for more. Asking why a pitcher can't be more like Nolan Ryan is like asking why some rookie guard can't play more like Michael Jordan or a hockey player just called up from the American Hockey League can't score more like Wayne Gretzky.

As CEO of the Texas Rangers, Ryan instructed his team's pitchers to throw more. Never in his six seasons did the Rangers finish higher than ninth in team ERA. However much Ryan wanted to find a magic bullet, to have pitchers throw, throw, throw their way to success, it was incompatible with how baseball's youth culture raised them. And, in a way, Ryan understood that.

“These kids are being overused, the dominant kids,” he told me in 2009. “When I say overused, if you don't have the foundation for it, you're not conditioned for it. If you have a something in your delivery that's putting undue stress on it, and you're also
talking about kids that are in growth spurts, you don't have the muscle structure to handle their skeletal structure, so they don't have the timing.”

While his understanding of bones and muscles and ligaments is cursory at best, Nolan Ryan—the greatest advocate for major league pitchers needing to throw more—believes kids should throw less. Even he sees the problems in how baseball treats Harley Harrington and every other child thrown into a youth culture that looks nothing like it did even a decade ago.

A
T A BASEBALL TOURNAMENT ON
his fifteenth birthday, Anthony Molina threw a fastball clocked at 91 miles per hour. About a year later, before the state of Florida offered Molina the ability to drive a car by himself, a gaggle of scouts sat behind a chain-link fence as Milton Ramos, a future $650,000 bonus baby of the New York Mets, dug in against Molina. Radar guns steadied, anticipation palpable, Molina did what few sixteen-year-old arms had ever done. Every reading said 95 except the one on the Mets scout's gun. His said 96.

Scouts are inveterate gossips, and word of the high school sophomore from a Miami suburb circulated through the baseball world quickly. It was May 2014, and I was looking for a high schooler who threw hard and could illustrate the peril in keeping his gift healthy. I asked a scout friend, figuring he would pass along a junior, someone from the class of 2015. Instead, he said, “There's a kid named Anthony Molina. Created a lot of buzz already.”

Even better, Molina had received an invitation to the Perfect Game National Showcase, one of the most important events on the amateur baseball calendar. I planned on traveling to Fort Myers, Florida, to see the showcase, a gathering of talent that draws scouts, executives, and coaches from across the baseball world. Another scout friend described it as “a cattle call where the cows pay two hundred dollars to be there.” Perfect Game was a running joke, gallows humor, really, because some people believed it was killing baseball.

Showcase events like nationals barely existed before Perfect Game. Neither, for that matter, did the infatuation with kids like Anthony Molina. Lusting after a sophomore in high school used to be a no-no. Too much could happen between then and his draft year. Perfect Game helped legitimize and monetize the hunger for outstanding kids. One of its partners, a company called Skillshow, which makes glossy highlight videos for high school athletes, handed out a flyer at nationals with promotional material that said, “Due to the increased availability of information in the computer age, the recruiting process is beginning much earlier than ever before. College coaches are starting to identify prospective recruits as early as 7th and 8th grade!”

It was during Molina's ninth-grade season that the University of Miami offered him a full scholarship. He accepted, though it was just a backup plan, because arms like Molina are worth seven figures to major league teams. The first fifty-five picks of the 2015 draft were offered signing bonuses of at least $1 million. If Anthony Molina was hitting 95 as a six-foot-five, 175-pound beanpole of a sophomore, his fully grown self might hit triple digits. The last right-handed high school pitcher to throw 100 miles per hour was a Texan named Tyler Kolek. The Miami Marlins drafted him second overall in 2014 and paid him $6 million to sign.

Perfect Game nationals at JetBlue Park, the spring-training home of the Boston Red Sox, was simply another opportunity
to whet the appetites of scouts and send them back to their bosses raving. Nationals kicked off showcase season with aplomb. A military-grade radar system tracked every pitch to the tenth of a mile per hour and broadcast it on the scoreboard. The stakes were obvious. Seriousness and silence prevailed. I literally heard crickets chirping during the games that followed the drills measuring throwing velocity and running speed.

Molina's first, a 92-mph fastball, was returned up the middle for a single. The hits kept coming: a single, a double, another double, and suddenly all the 92s and 93s looked middling. Scouts scribbled notes, undeterred; they figured he would hit nationals again next year and fare just fine—maybe with 96s and 97s.

Halfway up the first-base line, two sections away from the field, Nelson and Olivia Molina feared something was wrong. Nelson inspects homes for a living and wore the aftereffects of a spider bite on his face. Olivia has spent nearly three decades as a secretary at Carnival Cruise Lines. They are working-class people, he a first-generation American, she a Cuban immigrant who came to America at four. Tony was their baby and his arm their gift, and when he trudged into the stands after his game, his parents were concerned.

“Your arm good?” Nelson asked.

Molina nodded. Olivia wanted more than a nod.

“How's your arm?” she asked. Molina sat down. “It's all right,” he said, and she started massaging his back. Any showcase without pain—any injury avoided—constituted a victory. They sat in the sun, watching the next game, when a man named Roger Tomas approached the three Molinas.

“Arm all right?” he asked. Tomas was Molina's advisor, a code word every amateur player uses for “agent,” because those who choose to attend college can lose NCAA eligibility for hiring professional representation. Tomas's duty was to deliver a healthy right arm to the draft in June 2016.

Already it felt like Molina had done this forever. At thirteen,
he was part of a team that played a tournament at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Molina was six feet four and could dunk a basketball. Olivia needed to bring his birth certificate everywhere he went to prove his age. Around that point, Molina said, “I hopped on the mound and I just started doing good, just dominating. . . . I just started blowing it by kids, and kid after kid would just start walking back to the dugout with eyes wide open.”

He was a kid himself, one who liked to fish, didn't like to do his homework, and worried his parents. “We try to keep him from the bad crowds,” Olivia said. “I don't know. You know how moms are. We take him to the movies and let him go with his friends. Tell him to be careful. Because things are so bad now. You have to be careful out there. Because you never know who's out to hurt you. And for no reason.”

Baseball saw Anthony Molina between those moments, and he was its evolutionary archetype, the product of a system that lusts after the next big thing, fetishizes it. Perfect Game posts national player rankings of every age group starting with freshmen in high school. “Kids obsess over the rankings,” Nelson Molina said. Even after his performance at nationals, Anthony Molina was the number one player in the class of 2016.

“He has no clue how talented he is,” said Richie Palmer, Molina's coach with Elite Squad, a travel team that hops around the country to play in high-level tournaments. “He doesn't realize he can be a multimillionaire in a couple years.”

I
'VE WRITTEN ABOUT BASEBALL FOR
a dozen years now, and I can say with certainty that nothing unites people in the industry quite like the enmity for Perfect Game. The complaints go something like this: What at first seemed like a useful idea—bring all of the best players together in one place so scouts could see talent vs. talent and teams could skimp on travel-budget money—morphed
into an outsized machine that profited off the backs of teenage boys and glory-hungry parents. While Major League Baseball chased steroid users and cable TV contracts, the whole of its youth system was co-opted by a small-college coach from Iowa named Jerry Ford. And it was only getting worse.

There are truths and exaggerations and hypocrisies in this assessment. One certainty is that baseball's developmental system is almost indistinguishable from basketball's oft-criticized Amateur Athletic Union apparatus. Travel baseball has become at least a nine-figure industry, preying on parents' insatiable desire to secure college scholarship money and a high-paying major league future for their children. In 2015, Perfect Game robbed the cradle with more than a dozen events for nine-and-under teams. The US Specialty Sports Association, originally a governing body for slow-pitch softball that weaseled its way into amateur baseball, ranked thirty four-and-under teams in 2015—as in, preschool-aged. The hunger for validation in youth sports never ends, and it's exceeded only by someone else's hunger to commodify it.

In order to ascend those rankings, or get noticed by Perfect Game, children must play. So they do, hitting and pitching for up to twelve months in warm-weather states. Year-round baseball is the bane of the medical community, which rues single-sport specialization and advocates participation in at least one other sport to lessen the chances of injuries. A study at the American Sports Medicine Institute found that kids who had pitched competitively for more than eight months of the year were five times as likely to undergo arm surgery. Another study, published by the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, linked warm-weather climates with a higher incidence of Tommy John surgery.

The significant rise in Tommy John cases dovetails with the expansion of Perfect Game in 1998 from an outfit based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to the talent hotbeds of Texas and Florida. Within six years, Perfect Game was holding twenty-five national showcases, and Dr. James Andrews's youth and high school–aged pa
tients jumped from 4 percent of his UCL reconstruction cases to 26 percent. Andrews now estimates that one-third of his patients are under eighteen, and that doesn't count the hundreds who make an appointment only to be sent home with a rehabilitation protocol. Andrews doesn't call out Perfect Game by name. Next to nobody does. It is a powerful entity, and even top major league officials decline to talk about it on the record. They're all afraid of pissing off Jerry Ford.

In his telling of Perfect Game's origin, Ford was nothing more than a parent who would've paid anything to get scouts to see his son. Ben Ford eventually pitched for three major league teams, though it wasn't because people were flocking to Cedar Rapids to see him. Iowa baseball started its high school season around Memorial Day, a week or two before the amateur draft, and the paucity of scouts who showed up to watch the Iowa Wesleyan College teams that Jerry Ford coached convinced him to start a new business. Between a spartan facility he outfitted for baseball players to train in over the winter and a league for them in the spring and fall designed to draw scouts' interest, Ford built Perfect Game to conquer Iowa, not the baseball world.

At first, it did neither. The baseball industry subsists on reputation, and Perfect Game meant nothing. Ford bled money. “If we would've had any brains, we could've gone bankrupt at any time and gotten out,” Ford told me. “I've often told people, had we been in the hardware business or a pizza shop or any other business, we'd have been gone a long time ago. But the thing that kept us going was what we were doing was benefiting a lot of kids. The idea was actually working. We just couldn't figure out how to make any money.”

In the fall of 1999, a Cedar Rapids businessman named Mark Hanrahan—“I'm the Fred Sanford of the airline surplus business,” he said—walked into Perfect Game's offices. He was indebted to Jerry Ford, who helped teach Hanrahan's son Sean to hit for more power. Perfect Game needed a bailout. The gas company was
threatening to turn off Perfect Game's heat. Hanrahan bought a majority share of Perfect Game and funded it through its first growth cycle.

“I'd sit in my office and I'd write checks for $25,000 and $50,000, and that went on for five years,” Hanrahan said. “I had blind allegiance to Jerry. I will not say that I knew he would make it and do it as well as he's done, but in baseball he was like nobody I'd ever met. Jerry Ford is a goddamn genius.”

Ford wasn't just the strategic mind behind bringing elite youth baseball to the masses. He helped set the price for how much peanuts would cost at the games in Iowa. He tapped away on his computer, one finger at a time, to sculpt Perfect Game announcements. He believed that with time the business would turn around.

By the time it did, Hanrahan had sold his share of Perfect Game to a New Jersey man named Jose Rodriguez. Ford was still running the company and wanted it back. “Jerry loves the game,” Rodriguez said. “Jerry is knowledgeable about the game. He has a lot of great stuff when it comes to the game. Jerry is not a businessman. And we'll leave it at that.”

Eventually, Ford wrestled Perfect Game back from Rodriguez for an amount neither would discuss, and what grew from it seems to invalidate Rodriguez's assessment of Ford. Perfect Game took in $15.5 million in revenue during 2014, according to Ford, and netted $1 million—double its profit of three years before. And it came in a time of significant investment aimed at total takeover of a market it already owns. Perfect Game is now to youth baseball what Kleenex is to facial tissue. Ford still projected “extreme growth” in the future. “We want that corporate identity to be the M of McDonald's, to be the swoosh of Nike,” said Patrick Ebert, Perfect Game's managing editor, on a video posted to its YouTube channel. “So when people see the PG, we don't even need to say it's Perfect Game, because you'll know it's Perfect Game.”

On its website and social media accounts, Perfect Game doc
uments showcases, games, and events in breathless recaps. Years before Major League Baseball used radar technology to grok on-field goings-on, Perfect Game employed the Trackman radar system to capture pitching velocity and batted-ball exit speed. It implicitly encourages young players to throw harder, run faster, hit longer, all so they can scale the leaderboards that Perfect Game posts online. Perfect Game's database contains more than one hundred thousand names of past participants. If Harley Harrington sticks with baseball, he'll go to a Perfect Game event soon enough. Everyone does.

Perfect Game's biggest asset—the one that makes its critics cringe—is that Major League Baseball teams find it indispensable. Scouts show up to all the big events, droves of them, to validate a system rife with moral hazard, in which grown men are often forced to pit their own futures against what's best for the athletically gifted children they're using to advance their coaching careers.

Ford doesn't see his enterprise as the issue. “The problem,” he said, “is there's this thing called winning. That's what seems to make people crazy, not Perfect Game.”