Turns out, there may be a mutual benefit here that neither side expected.

Over the last few years, the loss of over a billion dollars to injuries has become a critical topic of discussion for baseball teams, but few are doing much about it. Medical budgets for teams are significantly less than the cost of a mediocre player, and the willingness to let a player be rebuilt by renowned surgeons like James Andrews or Neal ElAttrache holds sway over simple prevention.

When the Washington Nationals lost prospect pitcher Stephen Strasburg to a torn ulnar collateral ligament this past summer, it seemed the nadir of pitching. Still, the Nats have “no plans,” according to one front office source, to start using more advanced methods (such as biomechanical analysis) in order to prevent the next such injury.

Glenn Fleisig is the top biomechanist in baseball, heading up the research labs at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Alabama. Set up by Andrews in the 1980s, ASMI has worked to improve the health and mechanics of baseball players at all levels. Their research has led to pitch restrictions on Little League players, a move that has reduced the occurrence of injuries to prepubescent pitchers.

Fleisig himself has been trying to get teams to send pitchers to his lab for years, getting a couple takers, such as the Moneyball-era Oakland Athletics, but currently only three teams have any formal program of biomechanical analysis.

Some of it is the glacial pace of change in baseball, but cost is also a consideration. The Milwaukee Brewers are the only team to own and run their own biomechanical lab. The cost for the cameras, computers, and software, as well as the engineers and doctors to do the analysis, can run in the neighborhood of a million dollars, but their ability to get data on the arms of every pitcher in the organization is already starting to give them an information advantage. Now, that cost might soon be coming down thanks to an unexpected source: Microsoft.

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Authors: Will Carroll

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