Latest / Dugout Dish Baseball Recruiting Podcast powered by EMD Baseball / Preventing Tommy John Surgery & Protecting the UCL — FlexPro Grip Co-Founder Adam Moreau - Ep. 180

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Preventing Tommy John Surgery & Protecting the UCL — FlexPro Grip Co-Founder Adam Moreau - Ep. 180 · Dugout Dish Baseball Recruiting Podcast powered by EMD Baseball

0:02
Speaker A: Hey parents and coaches, are your kids using the right glove? The most important skill for youth athletes to learn is how to play proper catch. The problem is most youth gloves are made with bad leather and are too big for small hands. They actually make it harder to play catch. That's why former Major League Baseball shortstop Kevin Smith created Cali Gloves. Cali Gloves are crafted from 100% Japanese kip leather and are the perfect size for kids. All Cali Gloves come with palm slits, finger loops and elastic wrist lacing that encourage proper hand placement. The right closing patterns and give kids more confidence to go make plays. Cali Gloves even allow parents to break in the glove without stretching out the fit. It's the glove Kevin wishes he had growing up and the glove all his teammates want for their kids. Visit caligloves.com to learn more and help your kids play better catch. Cali Gloves K a l I gloves.com. Great.
1:18
Speaker B: How are you? A special guest on tonight comes comes highly recommended by a dear friend of ours and we're super excited to have this conversation. I think we're going to, we're going to learn a lot and then I think we, we got some, we got some time to chat about some pertinent topics with regards to arm care and recruiting and the such. So I'll kick it over to you for the introduction here. Sure.
1:45
Speaker A: Highly touted guest, highly recommended from a previous podcast guest. But tonight we're joined by the co founder of Flex Grip Pro and the host of the Layback podcast, Adam morrow. Back in 2017, a study nearly 200 kids found that grip strength had a 0.9 correlation to throwing velocity, the highest of any metric measured. That number sent our guests down a two year rabbit hole through 25 plus years of research on the forearm, wrist and fingers. What came out the other side was Flex Grip Pro training device built to help pitchers throw harder, command the ball better, protect their UCLA and recover. Coming off a TJ Adam, we are super excited to have you on the podcast. I have been researching this left and right so that I at least can hold my weight in this conversation. But Andy and I could not be happier to have you join our podcast tonight. So Adam, welcome to the show.
2:38
Speaker C: Thank you so much. Definitely a cool intro and I apologize just from the jump, you know, it's one of those like when someone messes up the name of your kid, you got to say something. And Keith, I feel so badly to put you on blast up front but we got to flip the pro and the Grip Flex Pro Grip. Everyone So there we go. Keith, sorry to be that guy on your own show. You were nice enough to have me and you guys already called me highly touted. So I think you guys were just hitting me with the compliment sandwich. If you say really nice things in the front end, you can do whatever you want to someone immediately after that, as long as you follow it up with something really nice. So I just knew this was my opportunity because then I'm just going to get hit with the. With the crap storm after this and you guys can make me feel bad and then say one nice thing at the end of the show and we're all best friends again.
3:36
Speaker A: No, it was. It literally says Flex Pro Grip. And I read it as Flex Grip Pro.
3:43
Speaker C: You're on every app known to man now that puts a pro on the end of it to make you feel good about whatever you're buying.
3:49
Speaker A: I am. I apologize for that. It is Flex Pro Grip. It's like, I swear I'm.
3:55
Speaker B: Yeah.
3:55
Speaker A: Wow. I apologize for that. It literally says it in front of me. I wrote it down and still said it incorrectly. That's. That's. I've had. I've had everyone on the. Who wasn't on the pre show. I've had a long 24 hours before this podcast. So my. My mind is in a blunder. So I apologize. I am so sorry. It is. It is not what I said that it is. It is what Adam said that it is and it is Flex Pro Grip.
4:22
Speaker C: Nailed it. Hey, it's all good. So I don't know if I'm supposed to go into a bio from there. I'm more than happy to, but I
4:29
Speaker A: figured give our listeners.
4:33
Speaker B: Yeah, kind of how you got here, baseball career, all that kind of stuff.
4:36
Speaker C: Oh, gosh. All right, I'm going to try to condense this as much as humanly possible, guys, because I'm a talker. As you know, I host my own podcast, so I try to get all the words out on there so I can be succinct when I talk to other people. I'll do my best, but I started my career as a middle infielder. I grew up as the smallest kid on every single team I ever played on, so naturally I played second base. Thankfully, I started to grow a little bit and skills started to come around in high school, so I finally got to move over to shortstop, then went to college. I originally went to Eckerd College of the Sunshine State Conference out of high school, was able to kind of like follow my left handed stick and just Find a place in the lineup right away. And I played multiple infield spots during my time at Eckerd. I was able to start as the second baseman right away my freshman year. But really early on, I knew my ceiling in baseball wasn't going to come from skill, or at least that was my personal assessment of myself. It was going to come from my ability to produce athletically and hang with the big boys. I'm 5 foot 11. When I was playing college ball, I was probably 180 to 190 pounds depending on the year. And I knew I needed to wring every single ounce of athleticism I possibly could out of myself. And for that I knew I needed to turn to the books right away and turn to experts and turn to research and just try to learn as much as I could about the game. So this whole research thing started early for me, trying to be or trying to use kind of my weapon, which was how smart I was or how much I cared about learning. And I applied that to learning how to be more athletic, get through an injury riddled college baseball career. I ended up finishing out at University of Dayton in the probably ugliest fashion possible. I think I had like six at bats. My final year in grad school at Dayton, I thought I was going to be in a position to parlay a grad year into pro ball. And turns out my shoulder still didn't work. Two years after surgery, so be it. I went and played one more summer of ball out in California, Played about as well as I could possibly play, at least hitting wise. But I knew the career had kind of entered the sunset at that point, or I was riding off into the sunset. I was never going to be the player I thought I could be. Shoulder wasn't where I needed to be. And from there I elected to basically approach the crossroads of what any player kind of runs into when they think their career is over. Well, I only have two routes. I can train people or I can coach people. Because of course those are the only two possible things that you can do when you finish a baseball career, right? Not any of the stuff I studied in school, not any of the things my friends were doing. It was just while I can coach players or I can train players. And I thought I could have a bigger impact from the jump training guys. So I went back to New Orleans where all my family was. I opened the New Orleans Sports Performance Institute with my Flex Pro RIP co founder as well. And from there we started training athletes. And Keith, as you mentioned, that study about very high correlations in youth population in grip strength to throwing velocity. That was one of the first studies that we ever read when we opened the New Orleans Sports Performance Institute. And that became a driving force in the way we looked at literature and the way that we applied science to training athletes. Now, causation and correlation aren't the same thing every time you go to coach an athlete or train an athlete on something. But that study stuck with us. And it, it was so intriguing when every single guy that walked in the door either wanted to throw harder or had a hurt elbow or in the worst case scenario, a mixture of the two, which kind of seemed to be most guys of like, hey, I really need to throw harder to play another year of baseball, but my elbow hurts every time I pick up a ball. Like, all right, well, this is a big problem and seems like it's every single kid in this situation. So what we thought was going to be just this like, cute little project that we could do to learn more about elbows than anybody else during this kind of like 2018 period where going to train somewhere was the biggest thing in the world. During summer ball some or during summer, summer ball had kind of started to be vilified at this point and it's just like, oh, it's useless reps. None of that stuff matters. You got to go somewhere to train to get better, and that's the only thing that is worth doing. We figured our niche could be becoming the elbow facility because again, think 2018 driveline is no longer the villains at this point or they're no longer doing dark magic. People have started to come around on them and weighted balls have been accepted and it's like, wow, okay, they do know what they're doing there. Let's go there. If we want to throw harder or if you have a shoulder thing or if you have a back thing, you go train with Eric Cressy. If you are the old school guy, you go to either the Texas baseball ranch or the Florida baseball ranch because you got a long toss and you have to do these different things. So for us, like, how are we going to make our name Elbow facility? That's us. So what we figured was going to be like a four, five week project of learning why ucls tear, what we can do to stop it. And then just creating this program, we realized not a single person had any idea why UCLS were tearing. And with that, it means no one had any idea how to stop it. So instead of just running this summer training group, which, I mean, we still did, but instead of Becoming the elbow facility. We realized nobody had an answer for UCL tears, why they happen. So we just dedicated the next years of our lives to trying to uncover the clues to this problem or this epidemic. Why are athletes tearing their UCLs? And I'll give you GU the the super simple version, which is the elbow can only handle so much. There is a limit of stress that we can handle. And within the elbow as a whole, there are only three main things that can handle the torque that we experience when we throw. We have the UCL itself. So the ulnar collateral ligament, which holds the forearm to the upper arm when we throw. Without the ucl or without these connective tissues, the forearm would just fly off the body. So we need the ucl. We have the bones colliding on the backside of the elbow. So them actually colliding, running into each other provides a stabilizing force. And then we have the only piece that is actually variable in the puzzle here, which are the muscle tendon units. And then now the wheels start turning. If we have one thing that's variable, the muscle tendon units, why can't we treat them like muscle tendon units anywhere else in the body and train them and get them to be able to withstand more force? So instead of looking at this problem the way everyone else had forever, which is we need people to have quote, unquote, perfect mechanics or optimize the way they move, we looked at it from the other perspective, the weight room perspective. If we can give athletes the ability to handle more, then they can handle more. And we can throw more, we can throw harder, we can do all these things and care less about perfection. Because if we give an athlete a longer leash or a longer Runway, there, there's more that they can do. So then from there, we needed to figure out how to actually do this. And that then caused the next chapter of this story, which was creating the FlexProGrip device and beginning to understand the best way ways to target a few specific muscles. The muscle that controls the fingertip, the muscle that controls the mid finger joint, and the muscle that controls ulnar deviation to target them at the right way, the right percentages, and build out a longitudinal program to help athletes be as healthy as possible with the use of objective data and isometrics.
13:19
Speaker B: You use some words in there that fire me up as a, as a math guy, sweet as an analytics guy, but I think so. The 0.9 correlation is obviously real, really significant, right? And you talked about correlation and causation. It's not exactly what you Know, people think it is. Just because it's 0.9 doesn't mean that that is the reason. But you also identified two of the constants with the bones colliding as a stabilization. Stabilization for. In the UCLA to. To hone in on the variable, which is ultimately what I'm guessing you kind of modeled. And that's where you get the 0.9 correlation from. Can you talk a little bit about some of the modeling that went into place to kind of prove the theory in terms of what you guys really looked at? I mean, you can dumb it down as much as.
14:10
Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
14:11
Speaker B: But I think that that's really interesting for people to understand that. What is that correlation? Like, what were you looking at to get the correlation? Or was it your research or was it kind of driven off of the original paper that you. That you had read?
14:25
Speaker C: Yeah. So let's peel back the layers on this a little bit, and it's probably good for some clarifying points. So that initial study that Keith brought up, and then you were addressing right there, Andrew, that that wasn't from us. That was a study done in the kind of mid 2000s, maybe like 2008, 2010 range from A. And I apologize now for forgetting, it's been a while. It was either a Taiwanese Little League or a Japanese Little League. And the. The researchers collected data from literally an entire league of like 8 to 16 year olds. So mostly pre pubescent athletes. And they tested everything under the sun from med ball throws to sprints, to jumps, to any kind of like plyometric movement or like rapid force production type movement. And what they found had the highest correlation to throwing velocity in this prepubescent group was hand dynamometry grip strength. So that that word hand dynamometry or that tool has kind of been the gold standard in arm care assessments for the longest time. So for us, like early on when we were running our training facility, we tied everything back to that hand grip dynamometry. And when I first got into coaching, I went back and I coached at Eckerd College in. I started the wonderful year of 2020. So a great year to be a college baseball coach. I have the amazing, amazing claim to say that I was an assistant baseball coach at Ecker College for two years and didn't coach a single baseball game because I was there in 2020. And then we canceled again in 2021. So that was awesome. I got to recruit guys, I got to practice with guys, but I never coached a single game. So as a development guy at heart, like kind of super Fun because I got to run some really cool practices, but I never got to see it play out on the field. However, the reason I go on that diatribe right there is we utilize or like we believed in grip strength so much before that we even had Flex Pro grip. I took a hand grip dynamometer to the dugout in my first thing that I implemented with Eckard when I was like in my early stages of testing to try to prove that a prototype of Flex Pro grip could work, was assessing pitchers after every single outing, after every single bullpen and what they could squeeze on. Hand grip dynamometer. What we later learned, which is why this matters so much in prepubescent athletes from a force production standpoint and why it has a correlation to velocity, but not so much injury risk, is that the thumb is involved in hand grip dynamometry. And since it's a multi finger task, we can't isolate the individual fingers on hand grip dynamometry. And we're in this closed hand grip. So we are working at a shortened muscle length so we don't have a mechanical advantage on our side. We are limited basically by how much opposing force we can create with our thumb. That all these things together basically give us a really, really poor view of what the flexors can do, especially the most important flexors that support the medial elbow. Really we're given a much better view of what the thumb can provide as supporting force in a closed fist task. So everything that was being relied upon or what hand grip dynamometry was being relied upon for in the medical field or in like the testing world of baseball, we were kind of able to throw aside. Now that doesn't mean the research that's been done or the idea behind grip testing is what is wrong. The tool is just what is wrong. So then that when I brought up those muscle tendon units quickly when we were going through like our dot connecting phase of reading all this research legitimately, if an article was published about arm health from 1970, whatever, when Frank Jobe performed the first Tommy John surgery, to at that point of 2019, 2020, I'm telling you, I fully believe we read every article that was published and that enabled us to then have our big board of dot connections of like, okay, well what was said in this 2011 article and what was said in this 1998 article, does it compare to the 2017 article that Glenn Fleisig and his crew came out with and what are we seeing? What we saw time and time again are three specific muscles get mentioned. The first two the most important are the FDS or the flexor digitorum superficialis that controls flexion of the metacarpal joint. So that's basically that that first knuckle or where the finger meets the palm and then the second joint, or what would be called the proximal joint of the finger, then the second most important muscle in stabilizing the medial elbow is the muscle that controls ulnar deviation. So going back to the old adages of pitching coaches throwing hammer, that exact muscle that enables you to throw a hammer is the muscle that we are concerned about, the flexor carpi ulnaris. And then the third, slightly less mentioned. But this was kind of like our aha moment when we realized that Dr. Andrews and all our other surgeons, Escamia, Ahmad, they mentioned in surgical reports having to be very careful in moving the flexor digitorum profundus during surgery or working around the profundus during surgery. We're like, why nobody mentions this profundus? The profundus is the muscle that we don't think about it as much because where these other muscles originate in the same spot as the ucl, kind of on that what people would say the medial epicondyle, common flexor tendon, it isn't as much common as people say, but that same spot basically on the funny bone, the flexor digitorum profundus originates over the insertion point of the ucl. So it doesn't run the full length of the ucla, but it starts on the other side of the or over the insertion of the UCL on the actual forearm, not on your funny bone, and then runs down to the fingertip. So even if you want to argue that it doesn't matter as much for stabilization of the ucl, which fair, I'm not going to say that you are wrong in that claim. What you can't deny is that training the fingertips is going to have a direct impact on performance. So, Andrew, I know you wanted me to address like, kind of what we were able to uncover with like these 0.9 correlations, causations, what we saw. I, I've. And I know I kind of like took liberties with how I answered that question, but I felt like it was way more to, way more important to understand what that study and what that information led us to in maybe rounding it out and connecting it back to the original question. When we, when we were in this position talking to surgeons with medical or in medical departments for big league clubs for the first time and we're at winter meetings and we're talking to the biggest colleges there are, and they're saying, well, how do you know this works? What we could do is go back to all the research that I mentioned that existed from 1976 to, at the time, 2022 and say, well, what we did is go through every one of these articles and we built Flex Pro Grip on the principles of what these articles say. So either Flex Pro Grip works because of what all these people have said, or everyone here is wrong in either way. We're okay with that. It either means, great, we're all in this together. We put the work of everyone who tried to identify the problem and, and I. And no one, just, no one created the solution. And we believe that we have created something that can be a major part of the solution. Or we're all arm in arm wrong. And at the end of the day, if we're all arm in arm wrong, I can live with that. So we didn't bother, especially early on to do the crazy testing necessary to be FDA approved and do those kind of things because we felt like the work had been done before. And as you guys know just as well as anyone, injury rates have only gone up. They weren't, they weren't plateauing, and they weren't going down. So it was. We were in a position where we felt like if we had a solution, we needed to get it out there. And thankfully, now that we've operated for a few years, really three and a half full years, at this point, we've been able to be a part of multiple clinical trials to show the efficacy of FlexPro RIP and how it can impact the musculature and how it can improve performance and how it can be used to identify injury risk. So, yes, there we go. Rounding out the, the whole sciency part of that discussion. Again, hand up apologies for the tangent and the liberties, but hopefully that answered a few questions.
24:16
Speaker B: No, no apology needed. I think going into the weeds on this stuff is awesome, and it's why we, it's why we choose to do a podcast. Like this is like, you need explain this kind of stuff. And I think it's important for the listeners, like, to understand what you guys did and how you did it. And I mean, I find that stuff absolutely fascinating as a, as an analytics guy and just leveraging data, leveraging the research for the, for the listeners, like, how does this get implemented? Like, how do, how is this used? How does it get built into, you know, all these college guys, they've, they've got different throwing programs and there's another element to Arm care that has to do with the type of throwing, the, the volume of throwing, the intensity of throwing. You've got the weight room, you've got all these pieces of the puzzle that are a part of guys building up arm strength and staying healthy. Where does, where does Flex Pro Grip fit in that conversation? And how does, how does it get implemented?
25:18
Speaker C: Well, the beauty of the device in the app, thankfully I have it next to me here, so I can kind of vanilla white this thing and I'll throw it on if we need to. But Flex Pro Grip is just like the weight room. And what that means is it's relatively agnostic. We don't care if you're a weighted ball guy, we don't care if you're a long toss guy, we don't care if you don't throw a ball over 90ft ever in your life. Because what we care about is creating or allowing the athlete to have a greater capacity when it comes to their throwing or their performance. So just like the weight room where we're trying to increase force production, so we're trying to increase strength, we are trying to increase how fast you can apply that strength or your rate of force development, we're trying to increase your endurance and we're trying to increase basically your tissue quality or how well you can recover. Meaning, like, nothing here is new. And we utilize Flex Pro Grip just as a tool in most cases, especially athletes who are new to Flex Pro, we highly, highly, highly encourage them to use Flex Pro on the back end of their throwing for the day, just like they would the weight room. However, if you have a guy that's been in the weight room for four and a half, five years and he can come to you as a very mature athlete and say, coach, I feel great after I lift. Like I have a really good sense of where my body is or things like that. We have guys who have been on Flex Pro Grip for a couple few years now and we use it as a primer for them or they know what they can use Flex Pro Grip for on the front end, much like a guy might use medicine balls or plyo balls or do a sprint routine or maybe do like a primer lift to really fire himself up neurologically. We can do that stuff with Flex Pro. But for 95% plus of the athletes, we're doing strengthening work on the back end of high intent throwing days and then we're doing other recovery type protocols on the days in between to make sure that athlete can get themselves back to baseline. So just like the Weight room, it's a tool, and you can just basically decide how you want to use it from there.
27:42
Speaker B: So you. I'm just processing all that. Like, so what I'm gathering is that you have different protocols that you are able to outline and be able to say, hey, if you're going to use this as a primer, this is kind of what it should look like. If you're going to use this as a post throw portion of your arm care, this is what that particular workout should look like. So you treat it, you treat Flex Pro Grip as kind of a. It's a part of the weight program is essentially what it is.
28:17
Speaker C: No, you're, you're, you are so. You are so close. It's a good thing. This podcasting is kind of like horseshoes and hand grenades. Like, if you're, if you're close enough to the point you understood it. And I think there's one piece I'm going to clarify, and then I'm going to use our kind of beloved connection that helped bring me to the podcast as an example here. So we'll continue to keep his name in the background, but I'll spoil it here in a moment. The one thing I wanted to clarify is you said kind of like the strength coach using Flex Pro Grip. Flex Pro Grip fits where you want it to fit in your program. And I know that's like really, like, cute wording to use, and people might be like, all right, what does that even mean? If you are a pitching coach and the thing you care about most is generating better pitch shapes, we can use Flex Pro Grip as part of the pitching performance program because we can analyze how the fingers are working together or independently and create programs to help a specific athlete generate more ride on the heater on their heater. Or maybe we can bias the middle finger a little bit more in their training, and that might open up seam shift wake opportunities when it comes to throwing a sinker and maybe getting around the ball and sweeping it a little bit. Or we could turn it over to the strength coach and maybe our sole focus is the best forearm program possible. And we just want to see guys increase their strength numbers. That's great. Strength for us is a conduit for what is called muscle tendon unit stiffness, which is just basically a fancy term for how, I guess, resilient, how tough, how strong the actual tendon is. And people get scared of the word stiffer. But when it comes to tendons and athletes, often stiffer is better. Or we can use it on the Medical side, we can use it for rehab or we can use it for that like arm care, true arm care piece. And we have schools and we have programs that do that like Ole Miss, Vanderbilt, lsu. Flex Pro for them is driven from the athletic training department for friend of the program. Our mutual here coach Eric Supleece as a mid major pitching coach he has to be the overseer and he has to make sure that it fills all buckets. Because if you're investing in something as a mid major guy or a small school guy, you need to make sure that it is helping every single one of your players. That means he is using it to assess readiness, he's using it for recovery. And we'll talk about his programs in a moment. But I just wanted to make sure that we talked about the different ways that FlexPro was being utilized. Like the originally the Cubs, for example, the Chicago Cubs, they brought on FlexPro for what they felt it could do on the pitching development side first and now they've started to implement it more on the health side. So it's just kind of like again like pick your lane, where do you want it to apply? And it can apply because it's a tool with multiple capabilities. Now where we bring up soup or Eric Suplee here, when he was at USF and we were programming with them, what we would do is he would give me an outline of when their high intent days are for their pitchers and basically he would send me their throwing program. I would get in touch with him and then his assistant. And what we would do is we would assign high intent training so their their strength work on the device. We would consolidate their workload. So on the back end of their high intent throwing days we would also do our high intent flex program knowing that that is going to be the toughest day that they have. During the week they might have two of them. So we might as well just drain the tank on those days because we have three to four days to recover before the next one. And then in between we would either do accessory work. So we might train the extensors, the backside of the forearm to kind of like keep it in equilibrium in a sense of the strength ratios between the flexors and the extensors. Or we might do low intensity long duration holds on the device which are shown to increase blood flow. Some fancy words I'm going to use here but help with extracellular matrix repair and collagen cross linking. Basically what that means is improved tissue quality because if we hold for long durations at low intensities we are allowing hurt or degraded tissue to work again. And the healthy tissue can be like, oh, this is easy. I'll take a step back. So that's how it integrates then into a college program. And then each week we can slowly do work that is slightly more intense because just like the weight room, you are building a tolerance to the stimulus just how you would go up in a bench press or in a squat the more you do it. So that's why I say like, that's why it's so easy to always connect it back to the weight room.
33:48
Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. I mean, Eric raves about it and I mean, I just think there's. It's so interesting to me how you're able to, to fit this into multiple. It's like configurable to a certain extent. Like it can, it can, it can benefit a pitcher or a thrower in a multitude of ways. And it's not just a one size fits all. Like, you're talking about the, the one thing that you mentioned I thought was really interesting when you're talking about throwing readiness. And I'm assuming that as players use the tool, you start to gather a library of information around what you would expect them to be at on certain days in terms of grip strength or some. I'm sure you're tracking different metrics. They may indicate like, hey, maybe you need to take another day or maybe, maybe your high intent day needs to wait another day because some of your numbers are telling us that you might be a little bit more fatigued that you'd been previously. I'm. I'm completely put out in a limit,
34:51
Speaker C: but no, you are.
34:52
Speaker B: You are probably trying to use as much of it as you can.
34:57
Speaker C: So a perfect, A perfect application of what you just threw out. There is a hunch here. So we are involved in two studies this summer. We'll see if they end up being clinical trials. One will, one definitely should be because it's MLB sanctioned. So I'm hoping they do all the things in the right place to kind of keep this moving the way it should. And then one is very basically the same trial being performed at two different sites. One now in the second half of the MLB draft league, which I know you guys know turns into basically rookie level indie ball during the second half. Flex Pro Grip is being utilized in the league to assess how stressful an outing was for a pitcher. The way we do that is our rate of force development testing, which is then Flex Pro Grip effectively being used as force plates. So as Athletes perform this test, not only can we see how much force they're applying with their fingers, but we can see how long it takes them to create that force. And if we can create tracking from outing to outing to outing, we have baseline testing in between. It gives us an even more in depth look than pitch counts would on how taxing the outing was. Because what we are seeing time and time again has been proven in the SNC world, your time to peak force is going to fall off before your actual peak force does. So you think about your, your guys's coaching days. You, you can look at a pitcher who might have started the game at 88 miles per hour and he's still 88 miles per hour in the fifth inning. But there's. You don't know what it is, but just something tells you it's not as sharp or he looks fatigued or he's. People would say he's laboring or maybe it's not as accurate. So now instead of just having to use the trained coach's eye and go off of some number just because we've said 100 pitches is dangerous for X player, and really we have no clue if it is. It just sounds like it because the number's big. What we can actually do is assess how taxing that was for an individual. And then maybe, maybe you two guys could have been on the exact same throwing program every single day for the past four years. But for whatever reason, when we put you guys in legitimately the exact same outing, maybe you both are 75 pitches, maybe you both topped out at 92 miles per hour, maybe you had the same amount of quote unquote, high stress innings. But we can look at it and maybe one of you falls off in that time to peak force more than the other one. It becomes really simple. That outing was more stressful for whoever had the time to peak force fall off faster. And then we can utilize this data to actually see how the forum is responding during an outing. So we have that going now in the MLB draft league, as I said, and then really awesome. This is, this makes me kind of feel like a proud parent to an extent. We started working with BYU last season and they had an awesome turnaround, which was cool to be a part of, but now we have an individual who was a pitcher, a pitcher on staff at byu, who now wants to be a physician and specifically wants to work with throwing athletes. He, he wants to be an orthopedic surgeon. And what he is doing for research is basically running the exact same trial in the MLB draft league in a league out in Utah this summer. So he, he is running this. He, he's controlling all the testing and it sounds like he's also going to have some hitters involved too. So we might be able to look at some swing speed stuff. So I know this, this isn't just pitching, it's mostly pitching, but we're going to learn some more about hitting in the process. But he is running the exact same thing in this league out in Utah called the Marshals League. So we should have a really good idea of how individually stressful an outing might be and maybe another another talking point for all of us that believe pitch counts don't tell the whole picture of workload and how stressful things are for guys.
39:42
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40:45
Speaker B: Me and Me and Keith could vent on the pitch count thing for probably a significant amount of time. Just the arbitrary nature of it and I know we both have our thoughts on that.
40:57
Speaker C: Yeah, I saw that got a smile when I brought up 100 pitches.
41:01
Speaker A: Yeah, it's just a made up number but I, I do, I do think that like there's I I will say this since we're talking about that what will go down this rabbit hole for a second. I don't love it for kids for college age kids and older. Right. Like those kids are trained by and large to be able to handle some semblance of pitch count variability. Like some guys aren't going to be able to handle as much. Some guys can handle more. Some guys are built up to like some guys can throw on back to back days, other guys can't. I do believe in being able to protect younger kids arms. I think that throwing at the youth level in an excessive amount. I saw a thing on Twitter last week. It was actually from someone out here in Rochester. I think it was 11U game or 11U tournament. A kid threw 194 pitches over four games, which is an absurd amount of pitches. And I think one of the things that gets lost on in the pitch count discussion as well, because, like, the hundred. Let me, I'll backtrack a second. The hundred I find to be absurd because it's not 100 pitches. Like, we only go off the in game number, right?
42:19
Speaker C: We don't.
42:19
Speaker A: And we all know that that's not actually the actual number of pitches that you've thrown that day, because depending on how many you're going to throw to get loose in the bullpen, then you get eight to start the game, then you get five. Like, that number is a hell of a lot higher than what that final number actually is. Which is why Andy and I did a whole podcast on why we don't like in game bullpens. Because, yeah, you're supposed to throw 30, but you threw 30 in the bullpen just to get loose, and then you go throw another 30 like you just threw 60. You know, so, like, I, I, I don't, it's you, when you do this long enough and you do this as a career or, you know, you do, you know, you did this as a career while also, you know, creating this, there's, you understand the nuances of those things and you understand that like, you know, I smiled again when you said, like, yeah, some guys like it. Just like everyone has their own acronym for it or their own saying. Like, you know, it doesn't look like the ball's jumping out of his hand anymore or he can't get, you know, his breaking ball isn't a show, whatever it is, but it clues you in of like, yeah, we're, we're on a tight leash here. Like, the bullpen's got to get going and sometimes it is earlier than others. And, you know, I, I think the one thing that I love about this is it also, it allows you to put data to being able to protect your players from themselves. I, I think in a lot of instances, you know, I had a guy who played for me who ended up finishing up for Eric at San Francisco. And for whatever reason, his last two years with me, I don't know exactly what it was, but, like, he would start getting some serious, like, forearm, not discomfort, but it was almost like his grip strength was gone and, like, you could tell the ball was Coming. It was just flat. You know, he was a kid who was usually 88 to 91, and he's 84 to 86. And I would just shut him down for however long our trainer said to shut him down for. And he always came back and was healthy and he was fine. But, like, he wanted to continually throw through that. And it was like, no, man. Like, you're not throwing. I don't know what this is. I don't. I can't risk you getting hurt just because you want to throw. Like, that's not.
44:27
Speaker B: That.
44:27
Speaker A: That. That doesn't mean anything to me. And I think it's a hard thing for coaches, I think. And I think that the majority of us would say, like, we're going to shut our guys down and err on the side of caution at the upper levels, right? Like in college and pro ball, like, you're going to err on the side of caution, figure out what's going on, and then assess from there and move forward. Where I think the complete opposite happens at the youth level, where it's like, well, Timmy can come in and throw 65 pitches, and then. And then here's the other thing. They're going to go play shortstop more than likely, and they're going to throw another 7,000 balls playing shortstop. And then all of a sudden, Fast forward to 15, 16, and that kid's either going to blow out or he's going to hate the game or he just can't throw. And like, what are we doing it? Like, what. What. What is the. What is the purpose of this? Where the guys who do this as a career at the highest level, whether it's college or professional, they will protect their athletes at all costs. And I think that, you know, Flex Pro Grip is great because you have the app, you have the data, and you can. You can. You have support to what it is that you're. You're ultimately driving at, but at the younger levels. And I will probably dive into this later, like, we're just throwing guys and then being like, yeah, whatever, we won the, you know, Firecracker classic and at 11U. And I'm going to post it on Facebook, and everyone's going to think I'm the next Connie Mack. Like, yo, no one cares. Literally, no one. The only people that care are the people that your. Your little incestuous group of people that you hang out with. No one else cares, because there's not going to be a college coach in the country that's going to recruit a kid because he was good at 10 or 11, not one. No one cares what you did at 10. I can tell you right now, I don't care that you went to Cooperstown and won the tournament. Awesome experience, probably for you. But guess what? Not helping me win games when you're 20 years old care.
46:16
Speaker C: Also, 10 other teams won Cooperstown. That's it.
46:18
Speaker A: Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more with you. I'm glad you said that. It's something that gets like, I get fired up about it because I don't understand why in, in today's day and age where we have all of this stuff more or less at your fingertips, to pun intended, to, to do this. Like, we, you know, the trickle down effect of all this. Like, we have the guys that are best in the world at what they do. They are less than the 1% being able to do this. Like, yo, they're not throwing 12 months out of the year. There's rules in place in organizations that, you know, guys can't throw on more than, you know, you can't throw three days in a row. Maybe when you get to the playoffs, all that all goes out the window. But again, that's back to the point of these guys train for that stuff. They are professional athletes. Their only job in the world is to go toe the rubber 60ft, 6 inches away, the best hitters in the world and try to get them out. That is what they're paid to do. And at 10, 11, 12, 13, 40, 15, we're like, let's just throw caution to the wind. How's your arm feel? Come on off a shortstop and get out here and wheel and deal for 90. And then I'm going to throw you back out there at short. And hey, you know, you threw less pitches than you have to sit for. So I'm going to do it again tomorrow. Like, what are we doing? Sorry, my rant is over.
47:40
Speaker C: No, it's all. Well, it's your podcast. You're allowed to do whatever you want. But if you don't mind, there, there's a few specific pieces in your rant that I would love to address because I think they actually do directly apply to a couple of things that we're trying to do with flex program. So sweet. Okay, one you mentioned. So I, I apologize if the wording is slightly wrong, but I'm pretty sure you said for whatever reason, some guys can go back to days or some guys can go longer. And we, we don't always know why. The beauty of the study that we're running in the draft league and the beauty of something like Flex Pro Grip is we can begin to understand what guys are actually prepared for those things. So another school that I want to call out, Lindenwood University, it's a mid major D1 in St. Charles, Missouri. So just outside of St. Louis, they're one of the best mid major pitching programs in the entire country. What they have done is insane in the Ohio Valley. For anyone who is a college baseball kind of nerd, I encourage you to look up what they have done on the pitching mound. It's insane. But what they do or what their coach has done with flex program. His Name is Denton McNamee. Is he. He will do max testing with all his pitchers throughout the year to understand what baseline is. He basically does it every single Monday of their season so he has an idea of how taxing the season was. Now this data doesn't mean a ton to him in February or March, but come April when they're a one bid league, you have to win their conference tournament. To me just let's face it see Ohio Valley, you have to win the conference tournament to have a shot to go play May baseball in June baseball. That means he needs all his horses ready at the right time. So then what he begins to do is after outings then is apply that same rapid flexion testing or our rate of force development testing to figure out how a guy is responding to the outing that he just threw. So then he use it as he uses Flexborough as a bullpen management tool. And of course this isn't going to be the end all be all but he can at least get a look at how prepared the forearm might be to go again the next day so that it starts to answer your point Keith of instead of like some guys are able to go back to back this gives us an actual look of whose musculature or whose under the hood actually ready to go back to back. Another piece that I wanted to address you talked about those guys trained for this in regards to the guys that are going three times in a week or that are prepping for playoff baseball or throwing in multiple roles again, I'm going to shout out someone else. We've loved working with him. He's an incredibly smart individual. He's. He's in the Marlins organization now and he's also technically still an intern with Driveline Baseball. But his name, his name is Josh Hedgka. He's as smart as smart can be. One of the things that Hedgeka does as a Submariner so he knows he's A super funky matchup guy that's going to get used in unique roles is he starts throwing back to back high intent outings before spring training because he knows one of the best things he can do is be available. He might not throw for a week, but he also might throw three games in a row. So if he is going to be ready for that, he needs to do very, I guess very intense exposures to throwing a baseball in ways that might seem kind of weird or like an anomaly to your standard baseball pitcher or your standard coach. And it goes exactly to what you were saying Keith. These guys understand their role and they prepare for it. So you hope that the people that are guiding these decisions are invested in doing what's right for their individuals. Because what does enable Josh Hedgka to throw back to back to back days down the stretch if needed is the fact that he did it in February and the fact that he did it in March. So then he can go. He can then do it in a low pressure situation in June and maybe again a low pressure situation in July. So then come August or September he knows he's ready when it's actually time to do it. Now I'm going to pick up the pieces on one other thing because I do think it matters a lot. You talked about the in game bullpen or how many throws it actually takes to be prepared to throw in a game and why pitch counts are dumb. So when we look at our return to throw programs, our return to performance programs that we offer guys with flex program, yes we are a we created a training device, we do programming around it but naturally we end up rehabbing a lot of guys and we work with coaches on developing return to throw program programs. We think the whole return to play structure needs to be revolutionized. So we took our stab at it last fall. About a year ago we published a bunch of stuff on it. It's all free on our website if anyone wants to check it out under Baseball Rehab Network. But would someone would see in our throwing programs for a pitcher to be cleared from our program to throw three innings in a game. We want them to be able to make 125 max effort throws. People think that is insane until they realize that includes the 15 throws you made at 290 plus feet of your long toss, all your quote unquote compression throws on the way back in and your pull downs. It includes those gray ball plyos that you think don't matter before you even started your throwing program. But because you're throwing the great ball, you were throwing 92 miles per hour before you even picked up the baseball. And then it includes your pregame bullpen and it includes the eight pitches you get before the first inning. And it includes. We, we were a little more liberal with it. So we know the goal Is to be 15 pitches or less per inning, but if a guy is rehabbing, who knows what could happen? So we accounted for at least 20 pitches per inning, which probably should be more. But then your five year, five pitches in between innings after that, then another 20 pitches, then your five pitches again, another 20 pitches. Lo and behold, we're, we're coming real close to 125 throws at that point. So Keith, I hear you loud and clear and I think you are 100% correct that guys are throwing way more than they realize they are.
54:51
Speaker A: I feel like I'm, I might just, I might pack it in for the rest of this one. I had, we have the smartest guy we've ever had on here telling me that he's with me. So I think I'm done. I do think that it's like, I think it's something that gets lost in the wash when we talk about, when most people are talking about this, right. And like I'm going to say this and I hope that does, this does not come across as egotistical or, you know, anything more than that. But when you, when you do this as a profession like you, those are things that you are in tune to and you pay attention to now, whether or not you're counting them, you know, that, that remains to be seen. But it's something that you know, and I think that it's something that we get, we lose sight of that at lower levels and at the youth level because it's like, wow, it's just in game stuff and that's what we always point to where we don't account for what you had to do, warming up, how many pitches it took you to get loose and what you're doing, if you're coming off shortstop or in from center field and all of that stuff where that adds up just as much as, as anything else. And it, you know, I, you, you see it unfortunately way too much than I, I would, I can remember. I mean I'm 40, so I, I don't necessarily like. But I don't remember guys our age, you know, with the amount of arm injuries that you see nowadays at younger levels. Right. And I do think that it's the rise of travel ball and showcases and year round training and all this stuff, you know, you have the specialization of sport and you know, I think that it's gotten out of control to the point where we've, we've lost the plot, as the kids say nowadays, on what some of this stuff, like what actually matters and we've, we've gotten away from what actually matters and we're just super hyper focused on one specific thing that, you know, we, we've put parameters around in like actual in game pitches and then just walked away and been like, yeah, no, it. As long as he throws under 65, he can come back and throw tomorrow. And like, I threw 64, so he's back tomorrow. Like, yo, he probably threw a hundred plus. Like, that's not safe.
57:07
Speaker C: He also didn't land his curveball. So dad's little Johnny, go throw a bullpen tomorrow to make sure this curveball the next time he gets a shot.
57:15
Speaker A: Right? Whereas, you know, as we talked about at the start or at the start of my rant or after my rant, like you have the guys who can do it on back to back date, like there's, you can start to quantify that. But there's going to be times, especially in college where like, you're aware, you're keenly aware of guys who you might have gotten up in the bullpen two or three times and didn't use. You better walked away and been like, yo, Adam's down tomorrow. Because I got him up three times, we ended up not using them and he fired like 60 bullets in the bullpen. Like, he's, he's gonna be down tomorrow. You know what I mean? Like, those are things that you actually equate for and think about versus just, well, he threw 64. Get back out there, big guy. And that, like, it's, it bothers me, obviously, but I think it's, it's, it's just, it's such a, it's, it's the lack of understanding of the stress that goes on and what it's doing to people's arms, young kids and then, you know, as they get to older adults. But like, the fact remains, you know, you, you, if you're fortunate enough to play at a high level, like, those things factor in. Like, there's definitely been guys in my career that I've gotten up three or four times because it's a tight game and we get out of the inning, he goes back, you know, we score five, and it's like, yo, we don't need, we don't need our guy up right now because we Just went up five. And then it happens again. And then we score three and you keep extending. Or maybe you, you know, you go out and give up more, whatever it might be, right? Like, that guy sits down. Like, that's happened. It's like, hey, he can't throw tomorrow. He got up too many times today. Okay, Gonna have to get a different guy up instead of, you know, well, I don't care. Get back out there. Let's see what happens. You weigh the cost benefit analysis. Like, yes, everyone wants to win. We all want to win. I always wanted to win. I'm uber competitive. I'll beat my grandmother in Scrabble. I don't care. But you have to protect your athletes at the same time. Like, you can't just, you can't just willy nilly, throw everyone out there in the hopes that you're just going to win at the expense of their future and what they're going to be able to do or, you know, you know, I just, I have, I have a really hard problem with that and the lack of understanding around how serious I think it is and what, what those ramifications and repercussions are for these younger kids as they get older, if they even stick in this game. Like, I think we're losing people not exactly because of this, but I do think that it's, it's part of it in this game. We're losing kids because it's like, you know, I. My arm hurts. They just keep throwing me all the time. Like, you know, in the old, like, well, whatever, get out there. You're young. It'll be okay. Like, yeah, well, let's see. In four or five years,
1:00:08
Speaker B: we see it in travel ball, right? And this isn't an indictment on all the travel ball coaches, but I think what, what I see is that when you get into competitive travel baseball, right, obviously these kids are trying to get recruited. They're trying to go out and put a good foot forward and kind of perform at their peak during the windows at which they're going to get evaluated. Most of the kids who pitch on these travel teams that are going to provide exposure, they're starters in high school, and they're on, like, a fairly normal schedule, like, as normal as you can get in high school where you can kind of predict, like, hey, I'm going to throw on Friday, and then I won't throw again until Thursday. So they have a map, right? And we talk about this with all our guys is like, you got to make sure that you, if you throw on Friday, and you're not throwing again until Thursday. Like we got to get Saturday through Wednesday, right. With recovery and lifts and make sure you're doing what you need to to kind of peak for the next outing. You get into summer ball in the schedule is gone. You've got Thursday through Sundays. A lot of the travel ball teams don't have enough arms. So you run into these situations where everybody condenses innings in a specific outing, but they're not actually condensing or really reducing the volume. All they're doing is increasing the frequency at which they throw high intent. And that's one of the more troubling things that I see in the summer is like a guy will throw three or four innings on Thursday and oh well, we made it out of the bracket. So we need somebody to throw on Sunday now. And this kind of hits on a couple different things. Most of those kids are not trained to do that. If you're, if you're a college age kid and you've been a bullpen guy, like that's not an unreasonable ask to go and throw 45 on Thursday and come back on Sunday and give me another 30. Like that's not crazy for college guys and for professional guys. But for guys who've never trained for that, you're, you're doing them a disservice in multiple accounts is how I look at it is you're increasing the likelihood of injury would be my estimation. Your data probably is able to shed some additional light on this. But my anecdote, my assumption would be that if you throw really hard with shorter rest periods, like eventually that's going to catch up to you. But then the other part is that most of these kids are stuff ticks down. So now the coach who comes to see that kid on a Sunday, instead of being 86 to 88 with a good breaking ball, now I'm 84 to 86 and I'm rolling that thing in because I'm just not primed and ready to go. And this tool, I think it would, I think it would be really important for this information and the data to get out and get circulated within the travel ball because it might change how these guys roll out pitchers. They might change what they do midweek. It might improve the likelihood that some of these kids get recruited because they are throwing on days that they're actually primed and ready to go. So like thinking about it through our lens of trying to make sure guys are ready to perform when it's time for them to go perform, like having this information could do wonders for a kid. It can not only help them throw harder, it can not only help them potentially continue to develop. Right. But when push comes to shove, we all. Sometimes all it takes is one outing for somebody to fall in love with you, but you want to maximize the amount of times that you have your best stuff. The other thing that I kind of. I was laughing at myself while you were. While you're talking about is like, we all had these guys in college who, if you had them primed and they were ready to go, it was primo stuff. 89 to 92 with a banger slider, and he was legit. Didn't matter if he threw one inning or if he threw four. But for whatever reason, you might only get that once a week. And I'm thinking of a kid that we added, William Mary, who will remain nameless. And he had outings where it was like, this dude's going to be our closer for the next three years. And we would throw him on Friday, and then we'd bring him back for midweek on a Wednesday and try to get him some more work. And it was like, he'd come out and be 84 to 86 with a mediocre breaking ball, and then you'd give him some rest, and he's 89 and 93 with a banger. And it was like, you didn't know who you're going to get. But as a. Now I'm looking at it from a. Through, like, a coach's lens. If I've got a found, if I've got a baseline of what you are. And, like, what do the metrics in the data tell me when you're feeling saucy, like, when you're feeling like, I got my really good stuff. That's pretty valuable to know when you're managing a bullpen of, like, who's ready to throw for me when you're trying to go win that game? Like, if you know somebody, like, really needs an extra day. Because the primer of the information that you may have gathered in the last 24 or 48 hours, if you have that information, it could change how you make a decision during game. So, sorry, my. My brain's on fire right now because I. I think this has so many applications. Like, I think of it as from a coach's perspective. It's the development piece, it's the health piece. It's. It's in season maintenance, it's in season tracking, it's in season recovery. But then I think of it from A youth perspective and a recruiting perspective like this data should be something that people look into and go as a coach, like, yeah, just because I'm falling within the the rules of the pitch counts doesn't mean it's the right decision to kind of get back to what Keith was saying is that just because he threw under 60 and I can throw him two days from now doesn't mean it's the right thing to do for the kid.
1:06:15
Speaker C: 100%.
1:06:16
Speaker A: And someone has to be the adult in the room.
1:06:19
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:06:19
Speaker C: Yes, well, so pitch counts. It does bring up a point where Keith was saying that as. As we get to the higher levels and these guys are paid so much to care about people who are being paid so much. We're going to go with a quick athlete story. Maybe if someone is good enough with MLB data, they can figure out who this might have been. So kudos to you if you can get to that. But at the start of the 2025 season, a team with a key bullpen piece elected to get one of their guys up 21 times over the course of 19 games in the first 27 games of the MLB season. So 27 total games. So it's the MLB season. Maybe what, they had three off days over those 27. Maybe. I don't know. It's the guy warmed up 21 times over the course of. Over the course of 19 games. So whether two games he. He got up twice. Thankfully there weren't that many games he got up twice. And of those he appeared in it, I believe it was. He appeared in 14 or 15 of them. So just an absolutely insane clip to appear in two. More than two. More than two of or. Sorry, more than half. There. There's the math. Sorry, guys, I was going the wrong direction. It's getting late for me. And that's because Keith called me smart earlier. So now I can't figure out fractions, but more than half of the team's games first 27 games. More than half the games he appeared in. That's insane. No wonder he went down with an injury. Like, that's bonkers. And that's happening at the highest level of the game during the like. Yes, in the first 27 games of the year, if you go 1 in 26, you're probably not making the playoffs. But even if you go 26 and 1, you're no guarantee that you're going to be playing October baseball. So I don't want to be so quick to put the people at the highest level on a pedestal because it almost Seems like they're the ones that think they can get away with more. It's like there's a bell curve. The guys that I usually think who are the best at it. So you guys can probably walk away from this feeling really good. I think the people that are best at it are smart small school college coaches because they're the ones that have to figure it out. They're the ones that have to figure out how to leverage guys because they have, they might have 16 pitchers on staff, but they know if they need to win a game, there's probably only six or seven that they feel good about putting out there. And if that's the case, they need to make sure those guys are prepared like crazy. But then also they need to be mindful that in the conference tournament they need to go 14 dudes deep or who knows, you might have a double header because of the way rain outs work in your league. And you're playing eight games over the course of the next 10 days. You have to be ready with all your guys at any moment. So that's why like you guys probably feel like you have learned how to do this over the years and you're in your ability to apply it because you coached the game. I think where to an extent it is most challenging but also most rewarding as a coach because you have the guys that have elevated high enough out of high school baseball to have that breakthrough level of talent to be good enough at the college baseball level. But they also need to kind of going back to what I said about myself earlier, they need to figure out how to wring out every little ounce of ability to even have a better's chance at, to see the game at any level beyond where they currently play at. If that's the case, like you guys have to be the best possible supporters for them, then we, we go back to the travel ball level. Like they, it's so weird because now, now where that kind of gets flipped on its head and you guys would know better than me. The only kids that I feel like they know exactly what they are doing every single weekend are the like top 10 travel teams. Because they can afford it. Because all those kids have already committed. They have their agents or advisors saying if my kid throws more than four innings on the day that you told them that he's throwing, he will never play for your team again. And then they just lost all their notoriety. So those coaches or those organizations can't afford it. However you have, you have those teams that are telling their kid we're Going to get you as much exposure as possible. It's the same. I. Now I forget Andy or Keith, which one of you said it. But the sentiment holds true. No matter what, we happen to win out of our pool. So now we are playing on Sunday and we need that guy who threw three innings on Thursday. And we told him he's done for the weekend. He's just been chewing bubble gum and seeds. And if we're in Atlanta, he's eating at one of the 39 different chain restaurants on our street next to the hotel before we need him to throw again three innings on Sunday. And also, by the way, we're playing the best team that any of you kids have ever seen. So good luck. And like that. That's just such an unfair situation for the kid because they're going to go out and they're going to give you their best. Like, none of this to me is on the individual athlete. Yes, we can arm them with the right data and the right information, but I know that none of us could ever, ever even imagine a situation where if we went up to a kid and asked if he was ready, gonna say yes. Especially if they know that,
1:12:29
Speaker B: I don't
1:12:29
Speaker C: know, UC Irvine is there to watch them, or North Dakota State, like, the school doesn't matter. Like, if they know a school is there to potentially see them, or they look and they see radar guns in the stands or a little notepad, that kid's telling you he's ready. So it does come right back to the education of the industry, the education of the coaches, and how can we make sure that they are making the right decisions? And now this is where, like, hopefully we can sing Kumbaya and find a way that the PBRs and the perfect Games and whatever other organizations who have run really good tournaments and certain spots run amazing tournaments even still today. But you have to pick and choose the right one because like you said, Keith, the Firecracker Classic at 14 years, Summer Ball really doesn't mean anything for anyone. But the WWBA might mean a ton. When you're in 17, you and you have a shot to sign because you're a junior who just had a breakout year. I don't know, like, there you can kind of pull different levers and strings on this because at the end of the day, it is still a game. And all these kids do want to accomplish amazing things. And from our side, we're just trying to support the athlete. Like, we're just trying to make sure that they know what they are up against. And we have informed them with the proper data so they can make the best decision for themselves. Now that's up to them at the end of the day, or that's up to the coach at the end of the day. We can't make that decision for them. But unfortunately, it does seem like a lot of things are going to have to change to put athletes in a situation where they feel more comfortable making the best decisions for themselves.
1:14:17
Speaker B: Yeah. And until that happens, it's. It's on the. It's on the coaches, it's on the people around them. And it was refreshing to have a conversation with a couple guys who travel ball guys who. Teams made it pretty deep into. Into Georgia, which is an accomplishment. Like, you make it into the final 32 down there, like you did some good stuff. Like, there's a lot of teams that go down there and it's super competitive. And I remember having a conversation with a friend of ours about, like, after they had won their round of 32. And I called him. It's just like, hey, man, you guys are playing well. He's like, we're going to have to mash our way out of this one. I was like, no pitching. He's like, we don't have much arms left. And like, I'm not running those guys back out, period. He's like, we need to win. We need to win for another two days before I could responsibly bring anybody back to throw again in this tournament. And those are the type of coaches that you want to play for because, yeah, that guy wants to win. We're. We've known each other a long time. Like, he's as competitive as anybody, but he will never put the kid's health ahead of that. And unfortunately, and I don't know if it's an epidemic. Right. But there's enough travel ball coaches out there where we hear these horror stories. Right. Keith talked about at the beginning with the young kid up in Rochester throwing all those pitches like that should never happen. That's inexcusable in my opinion. And if more travel coaches were in tune with this information and not saying everybody needs to go out and get, you know, flex Flex pro grip, but understand what we're talking about. Understand that there's data out there that should inform you to make a responsible decision with the kid and that don't use the pitch counts as a crotch. Just because a kid falls within the pitch talent limitation doesn't mean it's the responsible thing to bring him back on two days rest. Because going Back to it. Most of the kids are really good. They're starters in high school. If that kid had been performing as a bullpen guy, throwing every Tuesday and Saturday for the last three months, we could have a little bit of a different conversation. But that kid's been primed to throw once a week, so he should throw once a week, whether it's three innings or seven innings or one inning. Like, it's, it's the coach's responsibility to take, take advantage of it. And what you guys are doing not only with the, with the product itself, but what you're doing with, with these, these studies and these longitudinal studies is that hopefully this data gets out there and it can be an informative tool for these coaches and they can use this to make better decisions and not, not fall back on. Like, well, we, we didn't break the rules. You know, we didn't break. Like, just because you don't break the rules doesn't mean that it's right. So.
1:17:02
Speaker A: But how many youth kids are going to actually say no?
1:17:06
Speaker B: They won't. That's the thing.
1:17:07
Speaker A: How many college kids, when you ask them to Adam's point earlier, like, how many kids that are in college, when you're like, are you good? How many kids are legitimately going to be like, I'm hanging today. Most of them are going to say, no, I'm good, give me the ball. And it's not just game stuff either. Like, I can't tell you how many guys that we would shut down for the fall because they threw a ton in the spring, they threw a ton in the summer, and it's like, hey man, you're a weekend guy for us. Like, we're taking an extended break from throwing and we'll fire up a little bit earlier and like, those guys get mad at you for shutting them down in the fall. Like, I want the ball, I want to throw it. Like, dude, we're going to inter squad five times. Like, the three innings you're going to throw are literally meaningless in the grand scheme of things. You're still going to get the ball on game one on Friday or Saturday. Like, you're the guy. You were the guy last year. You proved it. You're still the guy. You're going to have the ball, but they want the ball. Which, you know, when you're at that level, like when you get to college, like, you want those competitive kids in your program, but you need to protect them against themselves at some point. And I can't imagine a 10, 11, 12, 13 year old like telling their dad, like, nah, my arm hurts, I don't want to throw. Like, what do you think that car ride is going to be like on the way home? You know what I mean? Like, what do you mean your arm hurts? Like, you know, and the, the other thing that it boggles my mind with some of it as well as I have to imagine. I'm not a scientist, but I've coached this game for a long enough time. When they make the jump from the little league field to the, the Babe Ruth field, where you're going from 60, 45 to, you know, or whatever, 45, 60, excuse me, to 60, 90, there's more stress being put on their arms would be my guess because you have to throw the ball further and you're trying harder to do so. So there's probably a little bit more stress there. And then we run them out even more. And you know, I, I just, I, I have a hard time with, with some of this stuff at, at the lower levels and I, I, I, it's not that I, I, I probably coming across as bashing people. It's not, it's not everybody, but you see that, you see the stuff, you hear about the stuff and like it, it's, it's, it's frustrating because I think that the data is out there for you to be able to figure out like this probably is a bad idea. And I think sometimes ego gets in the way of like, I want to win the, you know, Father's Day Classic so I can go home and drink some Coronas with my boys and talk about us winning like no one cares. And I hate to be so dismissive of stuff like that because it's awesome for kids to be able to go win and compete and play and do that stuff. But like as the adults, nobody cares. There's not a college coach in the country that cares. We care about you cultivating the game and keeping kids in this game long enough to where we might be able to keep more players that are really good in the game longer because they're having really good experiences and they're staying safe and they're being healthy and they're able to recover and they're able to do these things so that we might have the opportunity to recruit them and maybe in some instances be able to change kids lives for the better. Right? Like we want, we want that stuff as coaches at higher levels. And I feel like we're losing them, not in, not just because of pitching. There's a lot of other things, but I do think that we're losing kids because it's just, you know, I don't want to do this. Everyone just wants me to throw every weekend. My arm hurts. I can't say anything. Like, you know, it's. It frustrates me because I think that we have an amazing game. We have so much to offer. There's so many opportunities for kids to be able to do this. And we lose kids to it because we specialize too early, we throw too much, we do all this stuff and don't take a step away. And, you know, Andy and I talk about this a lot. And you're like, you know this as much as anyone, Adam. Like, this game is hard. It is a hard game to play. I tell this to people when we do our. Our recruiting talks. Like, you go hit 350, people are like, yo, can I hit with you? Like, what are you doing differently that I'm not? Like, you go knock down a 35 on your math test. No one is seeking you out for help. No one is going to be like, hey, so you got a 35 on the math test, did a really good job. Could you tutor me? Like, no, there's not a person in the world that's going to ask you to for help, but you go hit 350, people are like, that dude can roll the pole. And it's such a. It's such an odd concept. And we focus so hard so much on results in this game when the reality is like, the results are not really what drives this game. It's all of the stuff that you've talked about of being able to prehab rehab, be able to figure out what, what are stressors and what are not. When are guys primed and ready to go? What is it that we're doing from our training aspect that get guys to the point of where they can go out and actually be the best version of themselves every time it is that they get the ball and toe the rubber. That is the process that gets missed in a lot of this. And I think Andy does a good job of talking about this a lot where it's like, you know, whether it's recruiting or whether it's baseball, you know, at the pro level, whatever. Like, you're only seeing what is the finished product at that point in time. You're not seeing everything that went into that kid committing to LSU or that guy committing to Marist College or Eckerd College. Like, you don't see all the stuff that went into that or the guy who's pitching in the big Leagues. Like, you don't see the, the prehab and rehab stuff that they're doing over the course of the offseason and their lead ups and what that looks like. I mean, we had a guy who used to throw at RPI, is in the big leagues for 12 years, you know, but like, he would come in and long toss with us and like, there was very specific things that he was working on every single day and being in the same slot and throwing certain pitches that, you know, throwing changeups at a length in which no other human on the face of the earth can throw it out. But it was very specific for him to be able to prepare for what it was he was going to do. And I was fortunate enough that like, he did it with my guys. So my kids saw that glimpse of like, what this kind of looks like, but no one else. 99.9% of the population is never going to see that. And then wonder like, why does this guy throw a lot of change ups all the time? And it's like, well, you see the work he puts in on the front end. Like, you're just seeing the finished product. And, you know, I think that too much in this game, we go to the very finished product and we don't understand the things that are available on the front end that got that kid to that point and you know, to the pitch count thing. Like, it's like, well, you know, Tommy threw 65, he's fine. Like, yeah, man, but just because it's good for him doesn't mean it's good for everyone else. Like, at some point we have to dig a little bit deeper into this to figure out whether or not these things are actually good for younger kids and, and even college and pro guys. Like, it's not just a one size fits all, but, like, what is best for the kids. And that now that we have some of the technology and the data and the things that you're doing, which I think is awesome because you can cover so many different things. You know, it's out there. Go research it and look at it. Like, the game is, is not what it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Hell, it was not the same as it was when you probably played high school baseball in the 90s. If you have a young kid, like, it ain't the same, man. It is far different. There's way more that goes into this than just like, get to your inverted W. Arm up, let it rip. So sorry, I've been ranting all night. I'm in one of those moods. Andy.
1:24:59
Speaker B: Hey, that's why, that's why we do long form. We got, we gotta, we gotta give you space to air it out a little bit before we kind of close out here. Adam. What? Is there anything that we missed? Do you want to make sure that we highlight with regards to Flex Pro Grip and what it is and why it's awesome?
1:25:23
Speaker C: I definitely do think it's awesome, which is really exciting. Of course it's probably good when the co founder believes in the product, but thank you for also saying it's awesome. Something that I do think is worth addressing is when I talk about the big colleges we work with and I mentioned the big league clubs we work with individuals too and I don't want anyone out there listening to think, wow, Flex Pro Grip will be an awesome tool when I sign at a P4 school and I can get it because I have nil money and maybe they'll work with me. Right now our client list are 3,000 plus users of FlexProGrip. Our youngest user is 8 years old and we have Cy Young winners and it like the 8 year old in the Cy Young winner. That's not because the Cy Young winner is on a team that we are contracted with. In the 8 year old obviously isn't on some college club. The 8 year old found it. Well, their dad found it and saw from an early age what was happening because of everything Keith ranted about tonight with little league elbows in kids that do throw a lot. And he knows his kid is good at 8 years old. So he's already scared of the abuse that that 8 year old might feel or might have with his arm in the years of baseball, in the years of sport. I'm not trying to say that every single eight year old needs to get flex program tomorrow, but the seeds of UCL and forearm injuries are so young. I'm not here to try to be like the boy who cried wolf or fear monger. I don't want anyone to play this game scared. But if you want to learn more about what we do, reach out. We have tons of available resources. We zoom with anyone and everyone that you're not being charged for our time. We are happy to get on and chat our phone numbers on our website. You can reach us via email@info lexprogrip.com you can find us on Instagram or Twitter with app FlexProgrip. You can reach out to me directly. Whether it's email or on social media or anything. We know that education is going to be the first step with everything in this game because it's driven by data, because it's so hard to make a change, because we are so set in our old school ways in this game. We need information, we need education to take the next steps. We want to be a part of that revolution and we know conversations are where that starts. So I just want everyone to know that Flex Pro Grip is accessible for the masses. We, we know it is still kind of a luxury product or that's what people would view it as. But I promise you, you are spending more on your new glove and new bat than you would on Flex Pro Grip. Flex Pro Grip is less expensive than some of the things that I've seen out there in this game. And I had a college pitching coach say this the other day and I hate putting it out there. But what costs more? The, the seven. The $750 you're spending on Flex Pro Grip and three months of work that you have to do to get in a good spot or the $20,000 surgery you have to get in the 12 to 18 months of rehab to hope you're back to who you were previously again. Like, I hate putting that out there like publicly because it sounds like fear mongering, but that's the reality that college coaches are like facing with this in the fact that we actually have something in place where you can legitimately, scientifically proven reduce the risk of a throwing arm injury and all it takes is a little bit of training and we're right here to hold your hand in the process. We, we think it's a no brainer but like I said, we also created it. So more than anything else, I hope this sparks a conversation with someone and I appreciate the platform, guys.
1:29:57
Speaker A: Yeah, I'm gonna push back for one second. I don't think it's fear mongering. Just so I understand what you're saying, but like I'm not even gonna say I'm pushing back. But I, I don't, I don't think it's fear mongering. Like it is a stark reality. You can just look at the. Not like the data is there to support that arm injuries are continuing to rise. So if there's something out there that is going to prove that we can reduce the, like to reduce and mitigate the risk of those arm injuries. Like why would we not attempt to look into it? On the very, on the very. As a bare minimum, I guess. But no, I don't. The data supports that arm injuries are on a rise. So I don't think it's fear mongering. But I understand what you're saying as a business owner saying like every, everyone's blowing out, come get my device. Right. I understand that. I understand that that's not what you're saying. I wanted to, you know, kind of at least put that out there on our end that like it, it's, it's a reality like it just is. And I, I think that it's, you know, the data suggests that it's, it's proven like it's, it's not as, as crazy as you think.
1:31:15
Speaker B: So before we sign off, tell you kind of hit it a second ago, but tell everybody where they can find you. Social media, website, all that kind of good stuff.
1:31:24
Speaker C: Yep. Flexprogrip.com Instagram is @flexprogrip. Twitter is Flex program. You can email us at info@flexprogrip. The hard one would be my personal email, but we'll go for it anyways. Just hard to spell people. But amoro flexprogrip.com that would be a M O R E A U at Flex F L E X P R O G R I g r I p.com I almost got through all that cleanly, kind of kicking myself. I was about to feel so good about it. But yeah, we're, we're here. I'm the co founder who still runs the social media. So I promise guys, if you reach out on social media, you will hear back from me. If you reach out to our info at FlexProgrip, you'll hear from either me or my co founder Darrell. But we still kind of have a small team of player facing individuals and we know it's hard to bring new people into the circle of trust in this game. So we will work as hard as we can for you to make sure that we can be someone that is
1:32:46
Speaker B: supporting you for the listeners. Do your due diligence, Go check it out. If this conversation didn't pique your curiosity as to, as to what they've developed, I'm not really sure what will. But go, go check it out. Whether it's a fit for your family now or later, like I think this is is something that anybody who's serious about development and serious about their son like something you should take a look into. Adam, this is awesome. I really, really enjoyed it. I know Keith did as well, but really appreciate your time everybody. Check it out. Tune in next week, we'll talk to you then. Thanks everybody. Thank you for listening this week. If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and smash that like button for us. Check us out on Apple, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts as well as Spotify. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram MD Baseball. If you want to find out what me and Keith do to help families and players navigate the recruiting process, go ahead and check us out on emdbaseball.com take a few minutes to check out our new online academy. I promise you'll get some good information out of that. Thanks again for listening. Check in with you next week. I.
1:34:10
Speaker A: Just watch Sona.