Wake Forest Baseball: In the Lab

WAKE FOREST BASEBALL, WAKE FOREST BAPTIST HEALTH TEAM UP IN STATE-OF-THE ART BIOMECHANICS LAB TO HELP PREVENT PITCHING INJURIES AND ENHANCE PERFORMANCE

By Jim Buice

When describing Wake Forest Baseball’s new state-of-the art pitching lab and a partnership with Wake Forest Baptist Health, head coach Tom Walter said, “Nobody has everything we have here. Nobody has the people we have. And nobody has it under one roof collaborating on everything.”

The organizations will combine forces in the biomechanics lab in the Chris Hurd Player Development Center at David F. Couch Ballpark – the first partnership of its kind in college baseball.

"This is truly a groundbreaking partnership," Walter said. "First and foremost, this ensures that the development and health of the Wake Forest pitching staff will be second to none in professional and amateur baseball. Equally important, however, is the opportunity to improve the game of baseball as a whole and put Winston-Salem at the epicenter of cutting-edge pitching analytics."

The lab, which will eventually be expanded to analyze athletes from various youth baseball organizations, utilizes 16 high-speed cameras and motion-captures markers to record each detail of a pitcher’s delivery. The additional data gathered from the young athletes will be combined with that of the college athletes to help identify the root causes of baseball injuries and hopefully prevent many of them.

Dr. Brian Waterman, who is the Demon Deacon team physician and an associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Wake Forest Baptist, specializes in shoulder and elbow care and works with the players on injury prevention and recovery.

"Helping athletes prevent injuries is a major focus of our sports medicine team, and we are thrilled to be able to bring the expertise and research capabilities of Wake Forest Baptist's academic medical center directly to the players who will use this facility," he said.

Dr. Andrew Koman, who is head of orthopaedics at Wake Forest Baptist, added, “We’ve been the sports medicine physicians for the university for 45, 50 years. But we were just the doctors. Now we are partners. This gives us a way to do research and advance care for all student-athletes.”

Athletics Director Ron Wellman said that the structure and the lab is unique, but what really makes this initiative so special is the partnership with Wake Forest Baptist Health.

“There isn’t another baseball program or athletic program that is so closely tied to an academic medical center,” he said. “What we gain would not be possible if it weren’t for that partnership and what they’re going to be able to give us to help our players.”

Along with the lab comes a true team approach to working with the pitching staff, including the return of John Hendricks as pitching coach.

Pitching coach John Hendricks (right) looks on as freshman Ryan Cusick throws a pitch.

Hendricks, a 2000 graduate of Wake Forest who still ranks as the program’s all-time leader with 34 career wins and 409.2 innings pitched, spent more than nine years working in Major League Baseball, including the last five seasons with the New York Mets. After two years as the Area Supervisor of the Carolinas, Hendricks was promoted to National Pitching Supervisor in 2015.

“It was a dream job to be a scout for nine years, and I never ever thought about being a college coach again,” he said. “I certainly wouldn’t be a college coach anywhere except for Wake Forest.” In his last position with the Mets, he was responsible for evaluating and drafting pitchers across the country. He also served as the voice on the staff regarding future pitching development and mentored a 20-person staff on the science of scouting pitchers.

“I’m one of those guys whose brain gets really excited when there’s new stuff,” he said. “I don’t think Coach Walter would have hired somebody that would say we don’t need all this new stuff.” And he’s getting a great education working with Dr. Kristen Nicholson, a member of the Wake Forest Baptist sports medicine group who has a Ph.D in biomechanics and kinesiology and occupies an office in the Player Development Center.

“Her office is right down there,” Hendricks said while pointing down the hall. “It’s sort of the hub of everything. She runs the motion capture, analyzes the data and builds the kinematic printouts.

“My job is to look at the kinematic breakdown and see deficiencies like in hip movement, their legs, their trunk, their shoulder, their elbow and then to devise ways to work on their throwing patterns and their delivery patterns to enhance and maybe change some of the things that they’re doing poorly.

“It’s not just the building and the cameras. I mean, this is our fulltime PhD. It’s not just somebody who comes by once a month like a physical therapist. We get together every day, and we talk about the pitchers on the team and brainstorm on new ways to help them.

“So all the things I was talking about that we needed our pitchers and pitching coaches to work on (with the Mets), we can find out now if it actually helps the elbow and shoulder while we try to throw harder and make better pitches.”

Then there’s what Hendricks calls “our double top secret weapons for our pitchers” in Jeff Strahm, the baseball athletic trainer, and Mark Seaver, the strength coach.

Strahm is in his 21st year with the WFU Sports Medicine Department and is responsible for the team’s day-to-day care including prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of injuries. Seaver, a former pitcher for the Deacons from 1993-96 who pitched in the minor leagues for six seasons, is in his 13th season as coordinator of sports performance.

“With the lab, and our strength coach and arm care coach, who are two of the smartest people I know, a pitcher can’t go anywhere in the country and have a better situation,” Hendricks said.

Morgan McSweeney watches as sensors are placed on his body as part of the evaluation.

As one of the first students in Wake Forest’s pitching lab, Morgan McSweeney quickly realized the benefits of the new facility and all the scientific data being produced.

McSweeney, a 6-4, 210-pound righthander from Hudson, Mass., who is one of two Deacon pitchers on D1Baseball's top-100 college draft prospects list for the 2019 MLB Draft at No. 58 (Colin Peluse is the other at No. 88), learned from the data that he needed to make an adjustment to avoid possible injury.

“The big thing for me was hip/shoulder separation,” McSweeney said. “I learned I wasn’t firing my backside necessarily on time. So I know I’ve got to work on getting that more on time. This shows you things that you miss with just the naked eye.”

Dr. Kristen Nicholson, a member of the Wake Forest Baptist sports medicine group who occupies an office in the Player Development Center, is part of the team approach.

Hendricks added, “Morgan was looking at some things shoulder- and elbow-wise that weren’t good. It could have been a possible injury down the road, but it also affects his performance and protects his top ability. If you’re not efficiently using your body, you can throw as hard as you can but not get 94, 95. You’re going to pitch 91. So it helps on both sides, but it helps with the buy-in from the kids.”

McSweeney said he knew a pitching lab was in the works when he was recruited by Wake Forest.

“I wanted to go somewhere that was a good baseball school and had the academics, so I was looking for a place with good balance,” said McSweeney, an economics major who picked Wake Forest over Boston College, Duke and Vanderbilt. “It came down to I fell in love with North Carolina and Winston-Salem, and when you look at all this stuff here, it’s a pretty easy choice. It sells itself.”

McSweeney said that it was “pretty cool but a little strange when they put like 55 sensors all over your body, and then there’s pressure plates in the mound and cameras all around. Then Kristen gets a computer and she can look at the strain being put on your body, and then we go back and analyze it before she prints out a biomechanics report.

“You really learn about yourself. The big thing is sort of evidence for the visual feedback you get. You can always go get hard-core evidence. Then there’s the team approach to pitching.

I think it’s different from other schools. We’ve got Coach Hendricks, and then you go to weight room and talk to Seaver, who is a Wake alum and been through pro ball, and then you have like having another on-the-field coach in Strahmer, who has been here forever.”

Hendricks said that McSweeney throws in the mid-90s and has three “swing-and-miss” pitches in a fastball, slider and a cutter, and is now taking his changeup to another level.

“He is an athlete and competitor,” Hendricks said. “I scouted Morgan the last couple of years, and he is learning to be a pitcher without losing his stuff. He is definitely a Major League prospect.”

Even when he was a standout pitcher two decades ago for the Deacons, Hendricks was already a quasi-pitching coach and into the newest trends when Wake Forest won back-to-back ACC championships in 1998-99, including a school-record 47 victories and finishing one step shy of the College World Series in 1999.

“We were cutting edge because we had a video that you could roll the slo-mo back and forth,” Hendricks said with a laugh. “But it was the beginning and foundation for what I do now because I started watching different types of body movements. But it’s only changed because it’s fancier. It’s the same pioneering – what can we get better at. The passion for figuring out the deliveries and how to make them better already started then.”

However, his contributions on the mound were significant, too, as the crafty southpaw was part of a strong staff that included Mike MacDougal and Dave Bush, who both pitched in the major leagues.

“I’m really, really proud of what we did,” Hendricks said. “We played in the first-ever NCAA Super Regionals (in 1999). I’ve always been haunted that we didn’t go to Omaha.”

Now, he has another chance. And the biomechanics lab could play a key role in helping the Deacons get there.

“We’re doing it not only to sort of push the science on how to keep a pitcher healthy while we push his performance ability,” Hendricks said, “but we’re also doing it in a way to try to help Wake Forest win baseball games and go to Omaha. I think we can do it, and we get a chance to learn more about pitching at the same time.”

“ THIS IS BIGGER THAN JUST WAKE FOREST. ARM INJURIES HAVE BAFFLED THE BASEBALL WORLD FOR DECADES. WE'RE EXCITED ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WHY THESE OCCUR AND USE THAT INFORMATION TO HELP THE NEXT GENERATION OF BASEBALL PLAYERS.”

— TOM WALTER, WAKE FOREST HEAD BASEBALL COACH, ON THE NEW PITCHING LAB

GOLD RUSH MAGAZINE