Here’s a real nice interview with Josh Outman at Baseball Prospectus, with Josh focusing on his old delivery, the difficulties of changing (both mental and physical), and the challenges he’s had to overcome. This was my favorite question/answer

DL: Phillies assistant general manager Mike Arbuckle was quoted as saying that you probably would have been drafted much lower had you not changed your motion, because people would have been afraid of the injury factor. What are your thoughts on that?

JO: I think that was an assumption made under faulty information. What I was taught actually took stress off of my arm, so there wasn’t full comprehension on how my motion worked. Using a vertical arm position freed up my rotator cuff and enabled the use of the larger pectoral and abdominal muscle groups rather than the smaller deltoids and various other shoulder muscles. It used my lats to slow my arm down rather than just the posterior deltoids, and because those are larger, stronger muscles that can withstand more force it took a large workload off of my shoulder muscles. And eliminating the leg kick in lieu of a normal walking step, I was expending less energy to get the same production from my body, while sparing my throwing arm much of the wear and tear associated with pitching.

This is just another in the long line of instances where because something “doesn’t look right”, a guy is downgraded or given less attention, even though what he is doing might be working just fine. It’s good to see Josh has been able to climb the ladder and progress as a prospect while basically learning how to pitch again from scratch.