Pitcher injuries remain the highest priority concern persisting in baseball. A quarter of all big league pitchers have undergone Tommy John surgery, and elbow and shoulder injuries accounted for 54 percent of all days on the disabled list from 1998 through 2015, according to a recent study. Poor mechanics and excessive workload are generally blamed, and Motus Global’s elbow sleeve sought out to analyze one problem but found utility in assessing the other, too.
“When we first made MotusThrow, we thought we were giving teams a tool to do a quick biomechanical assessment of their elbow, but what it turned out to be is a really good joint-specific workload monitor,” Motus Global vice president and chief technology officer Ben Hansen told Bram Weinstein in the SportTechie podcast. “So instead of saying ‘I know that Pitcher A has mechanics that are good or bad,’ we’re finding that it’s more important to measure the workload of those mechanics.”
Major League Baseball gave MotusThrow its initial approval for use before the 2015 season and for in-game use in 2016. Its use has been particularly prevalent at the minor league level, allowing a wealth of data to be collected on pitcher mechanics and workloads.
Orthopedic surgeons at the Hospital for Special Surgery — including New York Mets medical director Dr. David Altchek and assistant team physician Joshua Dines — compiled a data set of 81,999 throws from 81 pitchers wearing the Motus sleeve, concluding that arm slot, arm speed and shoulder rotation all have a significant relationship with elbow valgus torque in hopes of identifying more objectively what causes ulnar collateral ligament injuries. (Tommy John surgery is the colloquial name for a UCL repair and typically requires more than a year of rehab.)
Hansen said efforts are underway to quantify muscular fatigue, which is a major cause of injury, by logging acute and chronic workloads and the ratios of those two. Such a measurement might be more predictive of problems than the current standards, innings and pitch counts. Hansen said managing workload can mitigate some risk and that “true cumulative stress measures on that elbow or shoulder throughout an entire season” seem to correlate to injuries more accurately.
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Motus has deployed machine learning to tag data sets of workload with user performance in games to find trends that can help a pitcher understand why he is throwing particularly well or poorly at certain times. While some aggregate trends have been spotted, Hansen said the Motus is best equipped to help at an individual level.
“We think that a pitcher should learn how to optimize their own regimen,” he said. “We’re finding it’s much more powerful to personalize those insights.”
The company uses its technology to help football quarterbacks as well and has been working with several other sports in its biomechanics research lab. Motus is also looking to make inroads in markets outside of sports, including worker welfare such as those on manufacturing assembly lines.
Motus’ signature product continues to be its baseball sleeve, which Hansen hopes will aid amateur pitchers with quantifiable data.
“Obviously we have a really good start at the professional levels, but our goal is to trickle that down and replace the Little League pitch count,” Hansen said. “That’s our ultimate goal.”