It piqued my curiosity after reading that Andrew Miller, the young talented pitcher with the Florida Marlins, was placed on the disabled list with an oblique strain. For those of you not familiar with the oblique muscles, they are located in the abdominal region and they are important to rotating your trunk when hitting a ball, (baseball, golf, and tennis) and pitching.
 
I'm a curious person. Johnny Sain, my favorite pitching coach, told me in 1965 when I was 26 years old that I would pitch for a long time because I was curious about what it took to continue to improve and improvise. He was prophetic. I pitched into my mid 40's, and thus, my curiosity with Andrew Miller's injury.

I was fortunate to have trained with the first strength and flexibility coach in major league baseball, Gus Hoefling. After an exercise session with Rudy Carpenter, owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, Gus was hired to work with us at our home games and eventually became a full time coach and gained a lot of acclaim for working with Hall of Fame pitcher, Steve ‘Lefty’ Carlton. Without a doubt, Gus added 7 years to my career with his knowledge and his regimen. I give you this background on Gus because I'm curious about what major leaguers are doing to exercise and work the proper muscles in an intelligent manner.

Recently, I began working with a personal trainer, Jennifer Trevino, three days per week. One day we work on the lower body, one day upper body, and one day a combination. We always do a number of abdominal exercises to include the obliques. I didn’t realize there were a wide variety of ways to work the abs!

As a result, I wondered if baseball players could prevent the large number of seemingly unusual injuries to body parts we know so little about by training smarter. It seems all the baseball players work on is pumping up in an attempt to become bigger and stronger. What about flexibility and longevity? With all the injuries to young ball players and pitchers, maybe coaches need trainers to focus on strengthening and developing the right muscles for a particular activity. Pitching requires a delicate blend of strength AND flexibility. It seems there should be different stretches and strength training for pitchers versus catchers, and so on.

As an aside from training, I am constantly asked what pitchers can do to pitch better and, my constant suggestion to all pitchers, from little league to the majors, is to THROW THE BALL MORE!

Thanks to good genes and a top personal trainer, I’m still active, flexible, and in decent shape at 70. Even after 22 years in professional baseball, I have no strains, pulled muscles, aches or pains.  It saddens me that a pitcher with Andrew Miller's talent and potential gets sidelined with an oblique strain. I’m not being critical of the current major league baseball training programs, I’m simply curious. Could we or should we be training differently?