Originally Posted by
Todd4State
To me part of it is all of this Tommy John and max velocity research is fairly new. And it comes down to a lack of education on the parts of coaches, parents, and trainers. You can't expect parents to know what good pitching mechanics are in general unless the father played a high level of baseball. MLB needs to do a better job of teaching youth coaches safe pitching mechanics and habits. And the same with trainers too. I'm in an exercise related profession and we spent a grand total of zero days on pitching mechanics in school.
The whole point behind the Wes Johnson philosophy is to be able to throw hard without getting hurt. But I think that's where there is a breakdown in baseball coaches not understanding about lifting weights and training properly. I think his philosophy and training methods are actually sound- WHEN DONE PROPERLY.
None of our older pitchers had to have Tommy John and they're pitching and doing well in the minors- Hudson, Sexton, Houston, Tatum, and etc. Smith did have to have Tommy John surgery but he had a partial tear. Pilkington is the only younger pitcher from last year that didn't have to have Tommy John- and he is a big physical guy and he has a fairly simple delivery and sound mechanics in general.
I think what went wrong to my understanding is basically Wes spent most of the training time with the older pitchers and he didn't monitor the younger pitchers as closely and left them with the trainer. Our younger guys were doing the workouts with too much weight and with bad mechanics and we all see the fallout. Had Wes spent more time working with them on making sure that their mechanics were sound and focusing more on lower body/core work early we probably don't have the injury problems that we did. But again- some of this is the fallout from learning because with things that are fairly new- sometimes mistakes and disasters have to happen in the learning process.