Quote Originally Posted by Commercecomet24 View Post
Yeah that's a great point. My youngest son is the pitching director at a baseball training facility and we talk about this a lot.
I heard about this bracing procedure that Spencer Strider is going to have to have done so that he can try to come back sooner.

Kind of makes me wonder as a medical person- maybe come up with something like that as an implant for the UCL? Because Dr. Andrew's research shows that the ligament loses it's structure once you throw something over 80 MPH and in this era that's lower than your standard senior high school pitcher. I mean- we can implant boobs into women why can't we implant something like a brace to support the UCL so that it can withstand forces that are generated up to 30 MPH greater (which would be 110 MPH) than the UCL ligament can normally withstand?

The thing is you can't really strengthen ligaments like you can a muscle. And I think that's part of the problem. I can strengthen my core, legs, arm, and do all kinds of yoga and pilates and get as flexible as a circus performer and have flawless mechanics like Nolan Ryan but the UCL is still only going to withstand what it can withstand structurally.

So IMO the real solution here is going to be to find something essentially artificial which the baseball purists are going to love**. But just because you get an implant just like fake boobs isn't going to make you a supermodel getting a Todd4John implant is going to make you a MLB ace. You're still going to have to learn how to command pitches and learn how to pitch. It's just going to be a lot more safe.