While I’m at SABR Analytics in Phoenix, here’s something to tide you over. I like finding the most interesting people and having discussions. It’s something I really want to do with more and more of the people in the industry, so if you have suggestions, let me know.
The conversation about injuries in Major League Baseball is stuck. Every year, teams lose their best pitchers, fans ask what went wrong, and organizations claim to take the issue seriously. There are plenty of smart people working on the problem, but progress remains elusive. Chuck Wolf, a specialist in human movement, believes part of the issue is that we’re looking at injuries the wrong way. We analyze velocity and stress, track pitch counts, and test shoulder strength. We measure, categorize, and theorize. But we rarely step back and look at how the entire body moves together, how the chain reaction of forces plays out from foot to fingertip.
Wolf has been studying these injuries for years. I was introduced to him by AJ Pierzynski of Foul Territory about six months ago and we immediately discussed a lot of ideas about motion, injuries, and sport and I wanted to write about his ideas here.
Wolf wasn’t surprised by the recent wave of elbow problems, including the one that sidelined Gerrit Cole. “I feel bad for Cole. He’s a great pitcher, love watching him work, but I wasn’t surprised,” Wolf said.
He had a slide deck he had shared with me earlier, breaking down what Wolf calls the dreaded ‘C’ configuration — a mechanical red flag that has shown up in pitcher after pitcher before major injuries.* Cole was on that list. The idea isn’t just about arm angles or scapular loads. It’s about how everything connects, starting at the feet. “Throwing is an integrated chain reaction movement,” Wolf explained. “People focus on the forces at the elbow, the shoulder, but they’re just looking at a link in the chain. No one is really thinking about the fascial system and how it distributes force through the body.”
The fascia is the connective tissue that wraps around every muscle and organ, creating a continuous system that helps manage force absorption and dissipation. When the foot lands, that impact doesn’t just stop at the ankle. It ripples up through the body, affecting the calf, hamstring, glute, lat, and ultimately the arm. If one link in the chain is out of sync, the stress gets shifted elsewhere. The body is remarkable at compensating — until it can’t anymore.
“You land on your heel, and it starts a domino effect,” Wolf explained. “The foot shortens the fascia, the calf tightens, the hamstring gets pulled taut, the glute lengthens, and by the time you get to late acceleration in the throw, the lat and shoulder are lengthened and overloaded. Now you throw a two-seamer or a changeup, pronate a little more, and there’s nowhere left for that force to go except the UCL.”
I pushed back on that. “But isn’t knee extension what we’ve been teaching? The firm lead leg block, the idea that you get out as far as possible to create that perception of velocity?” Wolf nodded. “That’s exactly what’s been coached, but the problem is when it happens too early. The knee is supposed to extend, but if it extends too soon, there’s nowhere for the force to go but up the chain. It’s like a car crashing into a wall instead of rolling through a curve.” That made sense. The firm lead leg idea wasn’t wrong, but maybe the sequencing of how and when it firms up had been misunderstood.
Stride length is another factor that gets misunderstood. Conventional wisdom says longer is better. Get out as far as possible, create a firm lead leg block, maximize extension. But Wolf has seen what happens when pitchers overstride. “They land on their heel, the knee extends too soon, and now they’re locked out. The hip gets pulled back, they can’t get their chest over their front leg, and all that force has to go somewhere.”
He pointed out that the best, most durable pitchers tend to have their chest fully over their lead leg at release, their knee flexed, their hip positioned optimally to absorb force. “Tom Seaver? Chest over the lead leg, knee flexed, no major arm injuries in his career,” Wolf said. “The guys in the Hall of Fame who stayed healthy, like Maddux, Martinez, and Ryan weren’t overstriding. Their mechanics allowed them to manage force.” This is one I want to go back and check, as just looking for the non-heel landers is a new obsession of mine.
I brought up the extreme stride-length guys. “There’s that one guy on LinkedIn that posts on anything pitching related, saying that Seaver was 120% of his height or something, that you need to get as far out as possible.”
Wolf chuckled. “No way Seaver was striding 120% of his height. The studies show the optimal zone is around 85%. Some guys get to 90%, but when you get beyond that, unless you have insane mobility, you’re going to lock up.”
The idea that foot placement and ankle mobility could be a key to elbow health might seem counterintuitive, but Wolf makes a compelling case. He brings up a simple analogy — jumping for a rebound in basketball.
“Before you jump, your ankle dorsiflexes, your tibia and femur internally rotate, your hip loads properly. That’s how you generate power efficiently,” he explained. “Now, if you land on your heel and lock out your knee, you’re not in a position to absorb force. It’s the same with pitching. You need the lead hip to be flexed, internally rotated, adducted — all so it can decelerate force optimally. If that doesn’t happen, something else has to take the load.”
I don’t love that analogy, because basketball players are jumping all the time and are selected for that ability, both simple vertical, re-jumping, and jumping on the run. The game is predicated on elevation, where baseball simply isn’t. Box jumps and plyo jumps aside, not many baseball players are training for that jump at the wall or to get up a bit more to reach a line drive. He’s correct, of course, about the sequencing of both those type of jumps and the pitching, but I’m not sure understanding one helps the other.
Wolf is a big believer in using drills that reinforce proper sequencing, and one of his go-to techniques is the rocker drill. “It’s a simple but effective way to help pitchers feel the right movement pattern,” he said. The pitcher starts in an overstride position, with their weight balanced between both legs. The reason to start from the over stride position is to gain mobility in the adductors (inner thigh muscles) and the calf group muscles.
Additionally, it will help mobilize the foot and ankle complex. From there, they rock back onto their rear leg, then move forward into their delivery, focusing on maintaining stability and avoiding early knee extension. After performing about five to ten repetitions, then the pitcher will reposition their feet into their normal stride length and repeat. They should quickly see they gained greater range of motion and easier movements through their delivery.
“The key is getting the body to feel how to transfer energy efficiently without locking out too soon,” Wolf explained. “It’s a controlled movement that teaches them how to stay in their legs and keep everything in sync.” I had seen similar drills before, but the way Wolf described it, the emphasis wasn’t just on rhythm but on the timing of force absorption and release. “A lot of guys think of their motion as just a push off the rubber and a throw. But the rocker drill forces them to feel the entire kinetic chain working together,” he said.
So what can we actually do? Changing a pitcher’s mechanics is notoriously difficult. Even if a flaw is identified, the body has spent years reinforcing movement patterns. Most pitchers — especially those already succeeding — aren’t eager to overhaul their deliveries.
Wolf understands that. “I’m not trying to change your mechanics,” he tells them. “But what if we improve your mobility?” That’s a conversation they’re usually willing to have.
He prioritizes four areas: the foot and ankle complex (including the subtalar joint), the hips in three planes of motion, the thoracic spine, and scapular movement. He’s found that limited hip flexor and adductor mobility is often a key issue. “When you see a pitcher fall off to one side at release, it’s usually because their hip isn’t in the right optimal position to absorb forces,” he said. The result is less efficient energy transfer and, ultimately, more strain on the arm.
I had one final question for him: “So what’s the real low-hanging fruit here? If a pitcher or coach reading this wants to do one thing differently tomorrow, what is it?”
Wolf didn’t hesitate. “Single-leg balance. If a pitcher can’t hold five seconds on one leg without wobbling, they’ve got issues. That’s a sign they don’t have the stability or mobility they need. Fix that first, and the rest starts falling into place.”
Baseball’s injury epidemic isn’t going away by looking at elbows in isolation. “We need to stop chasing symptoms and start looking at root causes,” Wolf said. The answers are out there. The question is whether teams are ready to listen.
*Yes, I remember all the “Inverted W” talk and loathe seeing another letter in the discussion. But it does look like a C.