Main dashboard for the DVS Forecaster (Courtesy of DVS)
The Dodgers selected pitcher Justin Orenduff in the first round of the 2004 draft. He advanced to Double A the next summer and was pitching well at that level in 2006, on the path towards the big leagues. Then, Orenduff’s right arm started hurting.
He underwent surgery that August, and had 80 percent of his injured biceps tendon removed. He remembers waking up from the anesthesia and hearing the surgeon say, “We haven’t done many surgeries like this. This is very acute. But we know that the way you’re throwing the ball led to this specific type of injury. You need to fix it, and if you don’t fix, we don’t really know how many innings you’ve got left.”
Baseball America’s prospect handbook in spring 2007 touted Orenduff as being “on the fast track before hurting his shoulder last year.” He never regained his pre-surgery form, however, and never reached the majors. Orenduff later returned to Virginia Commonwealth to finish his degree, but he couldn’t shake what his surgeon had told him. He wanted to know why he got hurt.
That search laid the foundation for what has become the Delivery Value System, a model of assessing a pitcher’s mechanics and risk of injury. DVS measures six components of a pitching motion related to efficient energy transfer through the kinetic chain, taking into account the lower half, trunk, and arm motion. The DVS Score runs from 0 to 24, with a higher score implying lower injury risk. Not all components are of equal importance, but their research indicates that the addition of each DVS point correlates to a 7.8-percent decrease in a major injury.
Orenduff co-authored a paper in the journal Orthopedics in 2018 outlining DVS’s statistical model. The DVS score can be used to predict the likelihood of injury, and Orenduff’s DVS Forecaster product is now available to MLB organizations. DVS has also devised an arm care system, a training protocol seeking to improve pitchers’ longevity.
“We want guys to stay healthy, accrue a lot of innings, and be able to put up consistent performance numbers year after year,” Orenduff said, while noting: “It’s not the fact that you’re never going to get hurt—because we assume that, if you were to pitch forever, you’re going to get hurt at some point—it’s just [a question of], ‘When is that going to happen?’”
The average score for big league pitchers is 13.4, but Orenduff’s statistical model indicates that a score of 16 tends to be the minimum to reliably predict a pitcher can sustain a steady workload of innings. Only a couple of big leaguers had a score as high as 20 in 2018.
Justin Orenduff with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2008. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
Orenduff said Hall of Famer Warren Spahn—who threw 245 or more innings in 17 straight seasons—has the highest-recorded DVS score of 22. In reviewing old video of himself pitching at VCU and for the Dodgers, Orenduff realized his own DVS score would have been a six.
Among the important findings of the DVS research was the emphasis on using the pelvis and trunk in a pitching motion. While some biomechanical analyses study body placement at various intervals of a pitching delivery, Orenduff said his model quantifies how a pitcher moves in and out of those positions, too.
“In terms of the orthopedic surgery perspective, we’ve been talking for years about the kinetic chain, about how it’s important to have an efficient energy transfer from the mound to your foot to your ankle, all the way up to your wrist, to your fingers, to the ball,” said Dr. Grant Garrigues, an elbow and shoulder surgeon at Chicago’s Rush Orthopedics who is a co-team physician for MLB’s White Sox and the NBA’s Bulls. Garrigues was also a co-author on Orenduff’s 2018 Othopedics paper. “Pitchers who just work out their arm and don’t have any core strength, trunk strength, leg strength—they’re going to throw out their arm. That is very clear to us. And yet we hadn’t really studied the importance of that in a large-scale way.”
Back in 2014, Orenduff was working as a coach at the Baseball Rebellion training complex in North Carolina’s Research Triangle while Garrigues was an associate professor at Duke’s medical school. After local TV station WRAL interviewed both of them for a story about overuse injuries in youth sports, Orenduff connected with Garrigues to share some of his early findings.
“Frankly, I was blown away,” Garrigues said, saying Orenduff’s work was “done with the highest level of rigor.”
A decade ago, when Orenduff began investigating this issue in earnest, clips of old pitchers were still hard to find on YouTube. So he began by printing pictures and affixing them to his wall, sorted by career innings: 2,000, 3,000, or 4,000. He found correlations and worked to understand what was seeing with Will Fox, an exercise physiologist specializing in baseball performance.
Many sports medicine studies are limited to the confines of a biomechanical lab. But according to Garrigues, medical research in other sports, especially soccer, has shown promising returns on the use of video analysis to compile large data sets. “This gives you big picture data about what are the big trends, and that’s why this technique is novel and interesting and we were excited about the things that it showed,” Garrigues said. (Data gleaned from a lab remains the gold standard, however, and DVS has plans to continue validating its work in a lab this summer.)
One of Orenduff’s old Little League and high school baseball teammates, Josh Myers, built the survival analysis model for DVS. Myers, who pitched at the University of Virginia, is also a statistical consultant in real estate. Two Duke physicians, Garrigues and Dr. Grant Sutter, helped complete the research team, although they have no financial stake in DVS. (Garrigues said that decision was intentional to remain scientifically unbiased.)
“That was really helpful for us because they were able to ask us tough medical questions that we needed to have answered,” Myers said.
The DVS Forecaster, a web-based platform, launched in January. Orenduff said he’s had meetings with six MLB clubs so far. The DVS database includes more than 1,200 pitchers, including everyone who appeared in the majors in 2018 as well as almost every pitcher to reach the big leagues in the last five seasons. A number of college and minor league prospects are included as well.
Example data visualization (Courtesy of DVS)
Orenduff is now the director of baseball operations at the United Shore Professional Baseball League, an independent circuit in Michigan, where he has access to a large sample of pro players. All pitchers in the league are offered the DVS isometric-based arm care solution to improve range of motion.
“The shoulder’s going to tell you, if you measure it, what’s going on,” Orenduff said, noting that losing range of motion after a game can indicate a longer recovery cycle is required. He added “The shoulder is essentially just trying to protect itself.”
One notable alumnus of the USPBL is Chris Dula, whose fastball reached 102 mph last year and who signed a minor league contract with the Brewers in December. Dula began with a DVS score of 13, but changes in mechanics moved that to a 16. Myers said that “certain components of the DVS score correlate with velocity,” and the DVS website notes that USPBL pitchers gained an average of 1.7 miles per hour on their fastball last year.
DVS emphasizes the efficient transfer of energy so that the burden carried by the distal joints and smaller muscles of the shoulder and arm is mitigated by the larger muscle groups. One idea behind that is that a pitcher’s full windup, which has gone out of fashion in recent years, might be a safer way to pitch. Garrigues said all pitchers should be sure to keep their legs and trunk strong and said, “Our theory is perhaps using those legs and core muscles in the right way to help prevent injury.”
“Back in the day, they termed the windup for a reason,” Orenduff said. “I’m essentially winding this body up to throw the ball. It was this natural way to create a little tempo and energy into the release of the baseball instead of hyper-focusing on the arm itself to get more out of it.”
