Do Sidearmers Get Hip Problems?

When Marlins reliever Brad Ziegler made the switch to throwing out of a submarine motion, his new mechanics made him sore. In the hips, as he remembers it. Ask fellow submariner Darren O’Day if his delivery was related to his hip labrum surgery, and his answer is succinct: “Absolutely.” Now fellow side-slotter Andrew Triggs is headed for that same surgery and it’s fair to ask: is the sidearm or submarine delivery hard on the hips?

It’s never easy to answer these sorts of questions because of the problem of sample. There might be two true submariners in baseball today (O’Day and Ziegler), and then a few who others who live low — a group that includes Steve Cishek, Pat Neshek, Joe Smith, and the like. Head any higher on the release-point list, and you’re already at Chris Sale, nobody’s idea of a sidearmer.

If you just take the list of pitchers who have recorded hip problems in the last 10 years, you get 33 different names. Hardly an epidemic. Take those 33 pitchers, and look at their average arm slot, and you might think you’ve found something.

Pitchers with hip problems release their pitches, on average, three-and-a-half inches lower than the general population.

What we lack here is context! What does three-and-a-half inches look like? I went through and tried to find the pitchers who best fit the criteria here — and threw in Triggs to show the lower end of the spectrum.

Can you imagine those guys without pictures? I can’t. Here are all three pitchers on top of each other, visually.

So, yeah, three inches is the (nearly indistinguishable) difference between the top two arms, and then there’s another nine inches before you get to Triggs. If you take O’Day off the list, that difference between hip-problem pitchers and the league average shrinks to two-and-a-half inches. Not a huge effect here.

Maybe what’s here is more about traditional mechanics than arm slot. When I asked Blue Jay reliever and sidearmer Smith if he’d had hip issues like O’Day, he was surprised by the question. “We all throw from down there but from different mechanics,” he pointed out. “I stay up and throw down while O’day goes down and comes up. Ziegler is way down there.”

“I haven’t had hip labrum injuries but there’s a lot of torque down there,” Smith said in the end, and that’s important. The landing foot is immensely important for velocity, and there’s a ton of force and velocity in the hip as a result. If we look at Triggs and O’Day on landing, we might spot a correlation that’s more important for the hip than arm slot.

There are some similarities here when it comes to the angle of the landing legs, how much they’re flexed and how much the pitcher is pitching across his body. I haven’t seen hard data about these mechanical quirks, but plenty of pitching coaches will tell you not to land like this. A focus on the landing leg at least would make more sense than thinking too hard about how low a pitcher’s arm slot is.

To their credit, the pitchers know that their landing point, and the shape of their body at that moment, is an issue they track. “I kind of land on my heel and grind, and the surgeon said it looked really chewed up in there,” O’Day said of his hip labrum. “I feel like I need to stand tall through my delivery,” Triggs said of his mechanical keys earlier this season.

Maybe they should further investigate how they land with their front foot, where it’s pointing, how flexed it is, and how much violence those quirks may be doing to their hip labrum. That’s more important to their long term health outcomes than their arm slot, probably.