The Arm

The Arm by Jeff Passan

Book: The Arm by Jeff Passan Read Free Book Online
Authors: Jeff Passan
Stockings. George Derby’s wonderful rookie season with the Detroit Wolverines in 1881 ended with shoulder pain and a dead career two years later.
    Baseball did learn something. The five hundred–inning pitcherwas extinct by 1892, the four hundred–inning starter by 1908. Teams changed their strategy of relying on one or two men for almost every inning of every game. The new restraint did little to stop injuries from proliferating. To make matters worse, sports medicine barely existed in the early 1900s. The man nearly every injured player sought wasn’t even a doctor. John “Bonesetter” Reese was a Youngstown, Ohio, mill worker whose supposed ability to heal through muscle, tendon, and ligament manipulation brought him great renown and a client roster filled with Hall of Famers. Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Pete Alexander, Addie Joss—the best pitchers around the turn of the century and into the 1920s sought treatment from the Bonesetter, whose formal training consisted of three weeks at medical school before he dropped out because the sight of blood nauseated him.
    Reese’s work with soft tissue foretold much of what’s done by athletic trainers and massage therapists today. Other treatments for sore arms, meanwhile, dove headlong into quackery and continued to prevail for decades. When Chicago Chi-Feds left-hander Ad Brennan lost velocity on his fastball in 1914, a doctor accused his inflamed tonsils of infecting his shoulder muscles via an infection traveling through the bloodstream from the mouth to the shoulder. Karl Spooner was far from the first pitcher whose arm injury was blamed on oral hygiene. Ridiculous though it may sound, doctors demonized the tonsils, teeth, and other parts of the mouth as the arm’s greatest hazard. Three abscessed teeth were yanked from the mouth of Red Sox star Lefty Grove at the beginning of the 1934 season to help heal his sore arm. He turned in the worst season of his career. Grove returned in 1935 looking like his Hall of Fame self, validating tooth extraction and prompting a litany of copycats. Four years after Grove, left-hander Lee Grissom tried to cure chronic arm soreness by one-upping him with the removal of four teeth. “The teeth pulling didn’t hurt me,” Grissom later said. “But it damn sure didn’t help my arm none.”
    Surgery grew commonplace after the successful removal of third baseman Pepper Martin’s bone chip in 1934. At least six pitchers had bone chips taken out before the 1939 season, including Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell. Robert Hyland, the orthopedist nicknamed “Baseball’s Surgeon General” and an expert at bone-chip removal, hypothesized that arm issues were due to “the development of trick pitching”—sliders, screwballs, forkballs, knuckleballs. Syndicated writer Harry Grayson warned of an “epidemic of arm injuries” and wrote that pitchers suggested “it was caused by the lively ball forcing them to bear down on every pitch.” Bonesetter Reese blamed high-velocity fastballs for elbow injuries and breaking balls for shoulder woes.
    Evolution is a funny thing. The technology, the advancement, the progress—everything today reinforces the idea that we know more and are better positioned to understand the problem at hand. And maybe we are. Maybe we’re closer to figuring out the arm. That doesn’t take away from the fact that most baseball men are still saying the exact same shit they did seventy-five years ago.
    I N 1959, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED RAN a cover story about arm injuries. The main headline: “The Pitching Crisis.” Mentioned as one of many cautionary tales was a man named Paul Pettit. His arm had changed baseball.
    A decade earlier, the seventeen-year-old Pettit was among the best-known baseball players in Los Angeles, a hard-throwing, six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound left-hander who in one high school game struck

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