LAKELAND, Fla. — You can still feel the aftershock of last season’s injuries in the Detroit Tigers clubhouse.
On the south wall of lockers, there’s Alex Faedo. He just threw in his first game since hip surgery last summer. Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal pop in and out, usually heading back and forth from the training room. Mize is rehabbing from Tommy John surgery and Skubal is on the mend after a procedure to repair his left flexor tendon. Matthew Boyd and Spencer Turnbull, who both suffered structural arm injuries in 2021, are on that row of lockers, too.
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It’s a lot of damaged players in a small amount of space. Tigers players missed a combined 1,728 games on the injured list last year, per Spotrac. That figure ranked 10th in MLB and did not account for players on the minor-league injured list, such as Riley Greene, Faedo and Joey Wentz.
There’s no end-all solution to preventing pitchers from getting hurt, but the long list of injuries to young arms is high among the reasons the Tigers overhauled their strength and athletic training departments this offseason.
Former head trainer Doug Teter was reassigned to a new role in Lakeland. Kevin Rand, formerly the senior director of medical services and a Tigers employee since 2002, did not have his contract renewed. Steve Chase, a strength and conditioning coach in the organization since 2005, also did not return.
MLB 2022 regular season injury plot. Injuries and injured list games missed versus team wins. Bubble size represents cumulative quality of players lost for games (Lost-war metric)https://t.co/Yh0kuFC1gD pic.twitter.com/pCjXscawYi
— Man Games Lost MLB (@ManGamesLostMLB) October 13, 2022
The Tigers in turn hired Nelson Perez — formerly an assistant with the Guardians — as their new strength and conditioning coach.
Shane Wallen, who worked for the Chicago Cubs and has an NFL background, is now the Tigers’ performance coach.
Ryne Eubanks, a former assistant with the Diamondbacks, is now the Tigers’ head athletic trainer.
It isn’t easy to know precisely what is being done differently under the guidance of these men. Tigers support staffers are generally kept off-limits to the media, and teams across the league prefer to keep details of their performance-science initiatives proprietary. It’s a competitive advantage for teams that excel in this area.
What we do know: First-year Tigers president Scott Harris probed deep into every part of the organization’s engine from the day he was hired.
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But in regard to injury prevention, where did the Tigers even start?
“You have to kind of look at everything,” manager A.J. Hinch said. “With Scott coming in, it’s a fresh set of eyes and a fresh set of things to go over. We obviously have a lot of new voices in and around the organization. (You) just start to peel back everything imaginable.”
Even in this sweeping review of the organization, it seems the Tigers did not pinpoint exact problems in their previous conditioning or training methods. At least nothing they’re willing to share publicly.
“There’s no definable thing that we were doing or not doing,” Hinch said. “It’s hard to identify exactly why we had such a run of injuries. It was painful, no pun intended, when you lose so many players and so many days for players. So we’ve altered a few things here or there behind the scenes.”
A couple of players polled in the Tigers’ clubhouse said they have yet to notice many tangible differences. Mostly, they know there are a lot of new faces walking around, a lot of support staff still to meet and get to know.
“I think we’re still just building new relationships with these guys,” said pitcher Beau Brieske, who had his season end prematurely last year because of right forearm soreness.
“Yeah, I like where we’re going,” said pitcher Alex Lange, who’s known for being extra diligent in taking care of his body.
In a broad sense, the goal of the changes was to modernize the Tigers’ performance department. This spring, there are glimpses of what’s new. You see players training with metaballs or water balls and other new gadgets. There’s a host of nutrition staffers roaming around the complex. Throwing programs have supposedly become more individualized.
Players have also spoken highly of their work with assistant pitching coach Robin Lund, formerly a kinesiology professor.
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“We’re kind of feeling through that with what (Lund) is gonna be doing with each of our guys and his opinion, his breakdown,” Hinch said. “He’s looking at it from a different perspective. Our sports science department is really talented. Georgia Giblin does a great job of helping us in that department, as well.”
Those changes hint at what the Tigers are trying to accomplish in this realm. It is less about overhauling a specific training method or revamping throwing programs. Instead, the Tigers are trying to create a greater level of connectivity between all their departments.
That’s where they were lagging behind before. The Tigers’ training methods focused largely on treating the symptoms of injuries. Missing was a greater emphasis on injury prevention or incorporating data and science to identify injury risks before they happen.
This can relate to overall performance, too.
“We need to understand how our players are moving and how we can align those movements with our hitting coaches and pitching coaches,” Harris said this offseason. “If we have a medical and strength and conditioning department that has strong relationships with our pitching department and our hitting department, then all of a sudden we can work on movement patterns that are gonna help our guys to get a little bit more power out of their deliveries, or get a little more contact, or reshape their bat paths to allow them to perform a little bit better.”
There are teams such as the Yankees, Cubs and Dodgers who have been ahead on all this for years. Teams can analyze players in different ways. One example: identifying pitchers who have gained or lost range of motion in their shoulder. That can help shape the volume of the intensity of throwing programs. That’s the kind of thing the Tigers weren’t doing much of before.
None of this, though, is an issue unique to the Tigers. Teams across the league are trying to crack the code of injury prevention. The Red Sox and Twins are among other clubs that dealt with an unfortunate run of injuries last season.
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“There’s a lot for us to learn,” Red Sox executive Chaim Bloom said last season. “Every discovery we make, everything we think we know, or think we can learn of how to better help our guys acquire skills, maintain their bodies, stay on the field, just opens up more that we realize we don’t know yet. It’s something that 30 teams are competing over and we have to make sure we come out ahead in that competition.”
The Tigers won’t disclose much about their methods, but the staffing changes alone show there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.
Sometimes in sports, though, there’s only so much you can do.
“I’ve been in the league a long time, thinking that we’re getting better and better at predicting who’s going to get hurt, what are the fatal flaws, what we need to do differently,” Hinch said. “The reality is the more we’ve monitored innings, the more confusing it gets. The individual circumstances are different, the deliveries, different breakdowns of different body parts, it’s a big moving target that we’re trying to conquer.
“For us to get where we want to get, we have to have optimal health, and that starts with the program, the nutrition, the prework to postgame work. It’s all-encompassing.”
(Top photo of Joey Wentz leaving a game with A.J. Hinch and Doug Teter: Raj Mehta / USA Today)
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