The Arm by Jeff Passan Page B

turned into pyrite—and not on account of mental weakness or extinguished passion, as Spahn suggested, but because of obliviousness. While the surgical innovations of Hyland, Bennett, and others relieved pain and allowed pitchers to continue throwing, never did they address the root issue: What causes arm problems?
    â€œWhen I played, everything was corrective,” Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer said. “It wasn’t proactive, it wasn’t prevention. That didn’t make sense to me.” In 1965, Palmer injured his rotator cuff at twenty and thought his career was over; he couldn’t throw faster than 80 miles per hour. He went to RobertKerlan, who didn’t have a solution, other than for him to pitch in Puerto Rico during winter ball and hope his arm responded. As Palmer recalled, a friend working for a pharmaceutical company suggested he take Indocin, an anti-inflammatory drug. He swallowed three a day and started throwing 95 miles per hour again. He doesn’t know why or how. Palmer didn’t need surgery, pitched another sixteen seasons, and threw more than four thousand innings for Baltimore, eight of them in game two of the 1971 World Series. Like Koufax, he needed 168 pitches to grind through it. His arm only got stronger, and Palmer won three Cy Young Awards over a four-season stretch soon thereafter. He was H. erectus , the survivor.
    Palmer’s teammate in the Florida Instructional League, and the better performer there, too—an Orioles prospect named Steve Caria—never made it past Double-A because of arm troubles. Dave Ford was supposed to be the next Jim Palmer, a big, strapping, hard-throwing right-handed pitcher. He lasted fifty-one games in the major leagues and last threw a big league pitch at twenty-four, his shoulder shot. Palmer remembers dozens more.
    Young arms failed everywhere. From 1967 to 1971, the Cincinnati Reds brought an unparalleled cache of hard-throwing kids to the major leagues: Gary Nolan, Don Gullett, Wayne Simpson, and Ross Grimsley. All four were done in by arm injuries before their twenty-ninth birthdays. The death rattle of the complete game sounded with the 1980 Oakland A’s, who rode their rotation of five twentysomething pitchers so hard that four of them didn’t make it past 1983. The luckiest of the group, Steve McCatty, lasted five more years.
    The year Sandy Koufax retired, a nineteen-year-old made his major league debut in September. He would last longer than the Reds’ quartet, longer than the A’s quintet, all the way into the mid-1990s, when he would retire as the paragon of durability. Whenever pitchers today draw criticism for their coddling, thediscussion inevitably goes back to him, and it’s always in the form of a question.
    â€œWhy can’t they be more like Nolan Ryan?”
    T O THIS DAY, NOLAN RYAN’S delivery is studied and dissected like a work of art rich with hidden ciphers. He pitched for twenty-seven seasons, faced more than twenty-two thousand batters, and still threw in the mid-nineties as a forty-six-year-old. Ryan was not the best pitcher ever, far from it, but he pitched forever, and that makes him a deity.
    Here is a little-known truth about Ryan: he was a god whose arm hurt. In 1967, when Ryan was twenty, a doctor recommended he undergo surgery to fix the pain. Ryan refused. Eight years later, Ryan had bone chips removed from his right elbow. Come 1986, Dr. Frank Jobe suggested that the thirty-nine-year-old Ryan undergo Tommy John surgery to mend a torn UCL. He refused again and pitched for seven more seasons until his UCL forced him into retirement in 1993.
    What allowed Ryan to survive remains a mystery. Surely genetics factored in. While his mechanics were considered clean, Ryan changed his delivery multiple times in his career, and his UCL issues speak to some flaw. If he had an obvious freakish ability, it was to defy medical advice and keep strong with no loss of effectiveness.