Hershiser Comment on hand strength

Before the game last night someone brought up the fact that grip strength is less in cold weather. Hershiser related that Koufax had told him that grip strength was important because it allowed a pitcher to throw hard and still hold on to the ball effectively.

Now this is purely anecdotal but my son had a painless arm injury that resulted in a elbow contracture and a pretty significant loss in velocity. While the arm was being stretched out at PT as part of the treatment they happened to measure his grip strength and while it was still pretty good his dominant hand grip strength was well below that of his glove hand. Interestingly, one of the symptoms when this was happening was that the ball would tend to just slip out of his hand on throws every now and then and go almost dead right. Since then his grip strength has gotten back to at least close to that of the glove hand and the ball slipping out of the hand issue is pretty much gone although you can see a bit of guarding against it in his mechanics at times.

Intellectually it doesn't seem like grip strength would relate to velocity but this one instance at least would seem to bear out Koufax and Hershiser's beliefs.

Back to the rice bucket.