I know he is great but his windup terrifies me. I see too much AJ Burnett there for my liking.

Pitching is bad for you. Even throwing with perfect mechanics is going to hurt your arm — it’s just going to hurt it less than throwing with poor mechanics.

As far as individual pitchers, every one has a different inherent level of “durability,” so to speak. But all else equal, a pitcher with poor mechanics is more likely to get hurt than one with good mechanics. However, it’s so hard to determine that durability tool for a certain pitcher, that predicting injuries or health for a pitcher is pretty futile.

That’s my opinion, anyway.

That young man just has too many miles on his arm. He has to be considered a major injury risk at this point.

But I could be wrong.

I’ve always hated the max effort guys. Guys like Jimenez don’t bother me too much because they don’t look like they are really trying to throw that hard. I always thought Volquez was a big risk (from the max effort thing) and sure enough his arm blew up. Thought the same thing about Liriano before the surgery but he looks more controlled now. I’ll be curious to see if Volquez has changed his mechanics.

I realize you asked for guys that haven’t already been hurt so two more names that jump to mind are Carlos Marmol and Francisco Rodriguez. Their deliveries have always looked pretty violent to me — although they may be able to avoid injury due to being short relievers. As far as prospects, it’s tough because I’ve seen such little video on most of them. I have seen Martin Perez in person and I didn’t think it looked like there was much effort in his delivery so I’m not too worried about him. I feel the same way about Strasburg. A few other names to keep an eye on are Joba and Mejia — I think both of them have a bit more effort than I’d like.

I don’t even know how he’s never had somebody try to change his delivery before now (though if I’m the A’s, I don’t mess with him if he can get people out with it).

It’s like he does every single possible thing wrong when he pitches.

…people try to make this more complicated than it is. If it looks wrenching, jerky, painful, or high effort, it’s a warning flag. A lot of the mechanical issues people try to pick apart and describe ultimately result in the same basic impression: That doesn’t look natural. It looks damaging.

Granted, pitching in general is not a natural motion. But there are degrees involved here.

but if not someone should run a statistical analysis of the Inverted W (or any other perceived mechanical flaws) and calculate the recent rate of injury for pitchers with the inverted W and pitchers without.

Guys who “short arm” the ball like that, have always struck me as being big risks, rightly or wrongly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEXm2LnLtvk&feature=related

I haven’t updated it lately. It should also include Everett’s salary, and Laird’s as well.

The nice thing about it is their ace and stud hitter are locked up long term.

There is also another 13M coming off at the end of 2011 for Carlos Guillen, and 8M if they don’t re-up Valverde.

Tyler Robertson - supinated breaking ball

Some classmates of mine did their senior design project on the development of a system to analyze pitching mechanics with actual numbers rather than the wholly subjective methods currently used.

Their results showed that pitchers started to have difficulty repeating their motion at a certain point in their pitch count. I don’t have all the data or info, obviously, but I think it’s a really interesting project.

http://www.northeastern.edu/news/stories/2010/02/baseball_shirt.html