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    The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports
    The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports
    The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports

    Written by Jeff Passan

    Narrated by Kevin Pierce

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    About this audiobook

    Yahoo’s lead baseball columnist offers an in-depth look at the most valuable commodity in sports—the pitching arm—and how its vulnerability to injury is hurting players and the game, from Little League to the majors.

    Every year, Major League Baseball spends more than $1.5 billion on pitchers—five times more than the salary of every NFL quarterback combined. Pitchers are the game’s lifeblood. Their import is exceeded only by their fragility. One tiny band of tissue in the elbow, the ulnar collateral ligament, is snapping at unprecedented rates, leaving current big league players vulnerable and the coming generation of baseball-playing children dreading the three scariest words in the sport: Tommy John surgery.

    Jeff Passan traveled the world for three years to explore in-depth the past, present, and future of the arm, and how its evolution left baseball struggling to wrangle its Tommy John surgery epidemic. He examined what compelled the Chicago Cubs to spend $155 million on one arm. He snagged a rare interview with Sandy Koufax, whose career was cut short by injury at thirty, and visited Japan to understand how another baseball-mad country treats its prized arms. And he followed two major league pitchers, Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey, throughout their returns from Tommy John surgery. He exposes how the baseball establishment long ignored the rise in arm injuries and reveals how misplaced incentives across the sport stifle potential changes.

    Injuries to the UCL start as early as Little League. Without a drastic cultural shift, baseball will continue to lose hundreds of millions of dollars annually to damaged pitchers, and another generation of children will suffer the same problems that vex current players. Informative and hard-hitting, The Arm is essential reading for everyone who loves the game, wants to keep their children healthy, or relishes a look into how a large, complex institution can fail so spectacularly.

    Editor's Note

    Power & vulnerability…

    Perfect for baseball season, in “The Arm” Yahoo’s lead baseball columnist examines the most precious and precarious limb in baseball: the pitcher’s arm.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateApr 5, 2016
    ISBN9780062445636
    Author

    Jeff Passan

    Jeff Passan is a baseball columnist at Yahoo Sports, where he has worked for the past decade. He is the coauthor of the critically acclaimed Death to the BCS. He lives in Kansas with his wife and sons.

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    Reviews for The Arm

    4/5

    65 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A terrific insight into the world of pitching with a lot to say about youth baseball.
    • 4/5
      In writing this book, Jeff Passan set out to answer two questions: “I sat in laboratories, saw doctors tend to bodies living and dead, went halfway across the globe to a place where the problem is even greater, read medical studies, and scavenged through data, all to answer two vital questions: How did baseball fail the pitching arm, and what can be done to save it?”

      He calls attention to an important issue that impacts not only major league pitchers, but children that aspire to become a baseball player, particularly a pitcher: “Elbows are breaking more than ever and younger than ever. And while the rash of Tommy John surgeries that spread across Major League Baseball over the last five years took out some of the game’s finest pitchers, children ages fifteen to nineteen make up a disproportionately high number of patients. Baseball is thus left scrambling to figure out how to keep its million-dollar arms healthy while fixing a feeder system that keeps sending damaged goods to major league teams.”

      What he found is that, while data could be used to figure out what could be done about this epidemic in sports injury to help everyone, and in today’s “numbers era” metrics are more readily available than ever before: “Baseball nevertheless has fostered an environment in which all thirty teams treat pitchers’ health as proprietary information instead of banding together to solve the sport’s greatest mystery.”

      With today's increasing emphasis on velocity, overuse and excessive maximum-effort throwing are two of the primary culprits. In addition, to exploring the various technical solutions, describing ulnar collateral ligament (UCL aka Tommy John) surgery in vivid detail, and interviewing some of the most celebrated players in the game (such as Sandy Koufax), Passan focuses on the human side of the story by following two major league pitchers, Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey, to find out how they cope during downtime required during the rehabilitation process.

      Some of the interesting highlights of this book include:
      - Visiting baseball-obsessed Japan
      - Bringing to light to perils involved in kids’ participation in the travel circuit and showcase tournaments
      - Investigating the latest technological and scientific developments in the field

      I found it well-written and informative. While there are no guaranteed solutions, there are recommendations and steps to be taken to prevent injuries. Baseball fans and anyone interested in the root causes of the rising number of arm injuries will find a wealth of fascinating material in this book. Parents of kids with a passion for baseball will gain insight into how to help keep their arms healthy.
    • 4/5
      I like Passan's sentences and paragraphs, and the narrative thread of the rehabs of Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey was compelling, especially the deeper dive into the emotional component, but the other pieces of the book didn't hang together in a cohesive whole for me. The Jon Lester chapter is a standout in both directions: Being deep inside the negotiations, down to jagermeister spilled on someone's jeans in a late-night session at the winter meetings, was thrilling, but it also felt like a magazine article about that negotiation shoehorned into a book about the arm. The opening chapter, about Todd Coffey's surgery, was a genuine marvel, though. Probably a full star of my rating is for that story.
    • 4/5
      The subtitle of this book is Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports and "mystery" is an important word.  No one knows for sure why some pitchers can gain incredible endurance and others are prone to injury.  Practices for building arm strength and preventing injury are built more on guesswork than science.  And while new surgical procedures have allowed some pitchers to return to successful careers, they are no panacea. At the heart of The Arm is the fact that throwing an orb overhand a 100+ times in succession is an unnatural action, and the mystery is that anyone manages to do it without injury rather than why some pitchers can't avoid injury.At the heart of this book, Passan provides eyewitness documentation of two contemporary pitchers - Todd Coffey and Daniel Hudson - as they undergo Tommy John surgery and attempt to return to pitching at the top level in Major League Baseball.  In between there stories, Passan interviews various baseball legends: Sandy Koufax, whose Hall of Fame career was cut short in the days before surgeries that could've extended the life of his arm; Nolan Ryan, the opposite extreme, a pitcher known for his remarkable longevity despite refusing surgeries; and of course, Tommy John, whose eponymous surgery changed baseball. The career of orthopedist Frank Jobe, who humbly named ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction for his patient rather than himself, is also documented.  Outside of Major League Baseball, Passan investigates the increasing pressure in youth sports to specialize in one sport early and for coaches to overuse their young players' arms in games.  Tommy John surgery is skyrocketing among adolescents.  An exploitative youth sports industry has also emerged that encourages young athletes and their families to pay to participate in showcases on the hopes of attracting attention of Major League scouts.  Passan also visits Japan where the traditionalist view of "pitch until your arm falls off" in high school baseball is just beginning to be challenged by the younger generation.  The mystery of the arm is not resolved in this book, but Passan does an excellent job documenting what we know about pitching and exposing a seedy underside of our national pastime
    • 5/5
      As I was reading this, my hometown team, the Seattle Mariners, kept losing pitchers to injury. As I write, all but one of their five regular starters is on the DL because of injuries. Passan's book explains why highly paid pitchers suffer frequent injuries through multiple lenses: baseball mythology and history in the U.S. and in Japan, sports medicine, two pitchers who are rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. An excellent comprehensive look at pitching injuries and the mechanics of throwing.
    • 5/5
      Passan, a longtime sportswriter most recently for Yahoo Sports, spent three years learning everything he could about baseball pitchers, and more specifically, the throwing arms of baseball pitchers. A great pitcher commands enormous salaries, and this despite the fact that serious elbow injuries are as common for pitchers as houseflies at a garbage dump. Given the enormous amounts of money at stake, Passan wanted to find out what MLB is doing to figure out how and why pitchers get hurt, and how those injuries might be prevented. The most notorious pitching injury is a torn ulnar collateral ligament (UCL), which is located in the elbow. The surgery to replace the UCL, usually with a tendon from the player's own arm or leg, or from a cadaver donor, is known colloquially as "Tommy John surgery" after the first pitcher to ever have the procedure done. John went on to pitch successfully for many years after the surgery, and the surgery has been refined and developed to the point where it has come to see almost routine. Passan makes a convincing case that the high rate of success has had the perverse effect of disincentivizing teams from trying harder to find a way to prevent the injury. And the success rate, along with the growing tendency for young players to play baseball all year around, has led to an explosion of players as young as 12 or 13 having what is still major surgery, with a recovery window of 12-24 months.Passan does a great job of demystifying the medical and biomechanical aspects of what exactly happens within a pitcher's body and arm when they throw a pitch. And while he never uncovers a "magic bullet" of training or predictive diagnosis that could keep pitchers from blowing out their elbows, he follows up on some promising research developments into the problem, almost all of it being done outside of professional baseball itself. It's hard to believe in an era when the Cubs happily agree to pay 32-year-old Jon Lester $155 million over six years that they aren't trying harder to protect such an outsized investment, but the evidence is right there in Passan's fascinating book.
    • 5/5
      Read with alternating periods of horror and fascination. The 13 year-old really likes to pitch, may need to look up DriveLine (not far away) once he gets a chance to read the book.