ARTICLE: While Recovering, Rockies’ Francis Revels in Physics of Pitching
While Recovering, Rockies’ Francis Revels in Physics of Pitching
DENVER — He could not simply turn it off. As Jeff Francis exercised in a barren Coors Field last Wednesday, baby steps into his long rehabilitation from major shoulder surgery, his identity as big-league pitcher was joined by another one more personal, and permanent: the physics major.
Elastic-band stretches brought thoughts of forces and harmonic motion. In the pool, he watched every exercise obey the fluid mechanics he learned in college. As his arms pushed down paddles and his body lurched forward, Francis uttered words to his trainer that, safe to say, he would not if his Colorado Rockies teammates were any closer than Los Angeles.
“What number of Newton’s laws is that one, Scotty? You know?”
No.
“Third,” Francis beamed. “Third.”
Baseball may be 90 percent half-mental, and Yogi Berra might have cut his pizzas into six slices because he could not eat eight, but at least one major league ballplayer understands and digs the physics of his sport — equal and opposite reactions notwithstanding. Francis must sublimate his passion for forces and fulcrums while he is playing; he would be pummeled, on the mound or otherwise. But in the privacy of rehab, during his lost 2009 season, he can indulge in an interest that will long outlive his playing career.
“I think about this stuff a lot,” Francis, 28, said during his workout Wednesday. “Watching the way the sun moves and the stars move — people look up and see the moon, but I’ll see the phase it’s in and think what time of year it is, and the time since the last eclipse. You see it spinning around in a chair, the angular momentum of when you pull your legs in, you spin faster. The forces that when you’re riding a bike and lean, you don’t fall over because of the forces and vectors through the wheels. I can’t help it.”
Two years ago, during the Rockies’ remarkable World Series run, Francis emerged as one of the best young starting pitchers in baseball. He went 17-9 with a 4.22 earned run average while pitching half his games at hitter-friendly Coors Field. But shoulder trouble last season led to 4-10 and 5.01 marks, and when the pain did not subside in the spring, Francis opted for labrum surgery. He will not return until 2010.
The year away from competition has allowed Francis to indulge a physics jones that he must usually keep under wraps. Reading Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking is fine — one recent volume, “Entanglement,” dealt with the bizarre traits of quantum particles — but he said that thinking about the physics of pitching, while pitching, would leave him entangled. This player really could think too much.
Humble and downright shy, Francis also insisted that to the extent that he saw himself as a bundle of lines and levers, all major league pitchers were at least subconsciously aware of body mechanics. The trick for him is to pretend he is not aware of more — of the sines of angles robbing him of velocity or how his long axis of rotation (otherwise known as his left arm) puts torque on his fragile shoulder.
“I think pitchers know what they do more than understand what they do,” said Francis, who spent three years as a physics major at the University of British Columbia before signing with the Rockies in 2002. “Even though I do understand the forces and everything, there’s a separation when I’m pitching. If I throw a good pitch, I know what I did to do it, but there has to be a separation between knowing what I did and knowing why what I did helped the ball do what it did, if that makes any sense at all. If I thought about it on the mound, I’d be really mechanical and trying to be too perfect instead of doing what comes naturally.”
Which explains why so few M.I.T. grads reach the majors. After all, baseball does not necessarily encourage Newtonian knowledge. (A minor league coach of the former major leaguer Doug Glanville, a systems engineering major from the University of Pennsylvania, once said disapprovingly, “Doug doesn’t tell you what time it is — he tells you how the clock’s built.”) The former Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson, who for 20 years has pioneered biomechanic analysis of pitching motions, said that he shielded athletes from the physics behind what they do.
“You can’t build a car and drive one at the same time,” Peterson said. “When you talk about how the brain affects athletic performance, that’s mostly right-brain activity. The physics is left-brain. If you get too analytical, you’re going to interfere with that process. I show my guys the film, but not the measurements.”
Safely distanced from actual competition, though, Francis found himself on Wednesday transported back into Mrs. Grieg’s 11th-grade physics class. Exercises with the Rockies’ rehab coordinator, Scott Murayama, became lessons in levers and more.
Using an upper-body ergometer, essentially a bicycle for the arms, illustrated how angular force is absorbed by the shoulder. In the pool, when he punched forward using yellow vented paddles, he saw the fluid mechanics of the water cascading through the slats and providing resistance more uniform than training bands, whose elasticity varies with the length at which they are stretched. Pulling back punches against the water summoned Newton’s third law and made his body lurch forward, rotating about the friction under his feet.
But exactly as he warned, when Francis took it all out to the Coors Field grass for a brief throwing session, physics know-how was no match for the subconscious pulleys that act on every pitcher.
Francis repeatedly pulled the ball back in preparation to throw. But as he flashed his arm forward, his hand would, mind unaware, bring the ball back toward his ear rather than at full extension. It was his body essentially shortening the axis of his arm to decrease the force on his shoulder, protecting him from pain. And Francis could not stop it.
After his 10th pitch and first muffled groan of pain, he stopped.
“It’s hurting you?” Murayama said.
“Yeah,” Francis said.
“I can tell. You’re getting out ahead of your arm. Slow down, stay back a little more.”
“Does it look like I’m scared to throw a little?”
“Are you scared?”
“Not consciously.”
This is how Francis got hurt in the first place. Shoulder discomfort in mid-April caused him, unwittingly over several starts, to alter his motion and release point. Soreness ripened into pain. His shoulder refused to let his arm get his fingers in proper position on top of the ball, causing his changeup to cut instead of fade, his sinker to stop sinking, and his control to evaporate. He spent most of July on the disabled list, returned no better and learned of the labrum tear this February.
“As much as I think of throwing it the proper way, I think my body does it by itself,” Francis said. “Last summer, my body wouldn’t turn the ball over because it knew it was going to hurt.”
Turning over the ball means turning over his brain — to the instincts Francis shares with all pitchers and away from the interests he shares with few. Pitching again the way he once did, come 2010, will require months more of exercises whose physics he understands and tries not to. Such is the curse of the intellectual athlete.
An outlet does await, though. Francis and his wife, Allison, are expecting their first child in October. Fly balls might elude him or her, but you can bet their parabolas won’t.
“I hope my interest in physics and science is something I can pass on,” Francis said. “If my kid doesn’t like baseball, maybe that’s something I can mentor them in. Now that I think about it, I just bought a mobile for the crib.”
Just a wild guess — baseball hats? Team logos?
“Nope,” Francis said, all but blushing. “The solar system. I’ve got to tell you, it’s pretty cool.”
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