We Screened 52 Pitchers. 27 Came Back High Risk. Almost All of Them Felt Fine.
Movement Screen Report / 2026-27 Off-Season
Twenty-seven came back high risk. Twenty-four of those twenty-seven told us their arm felt fine.
Every parent of a pitcher wonders the same thing. Is my kid one bad outing away from an arm injury?
Most programs answer that question by waiting. The athlete throws, something starts to hurt, and then somebody finally takes a look. We decided to look first.
Before any VIP athlete threw a bullpen for us this off-season, he went through the Grady's VIP Movement Screen. It is a full-body physical assessment performed by a licensed physical therapist, paired with a validated arm-health questionnaire and a detailed throwing-history intake. Fifty-two athletes have completed it so far. The results changed the training plan for forty-four of them.
Here is exactly what the process looks like, and what the data is telling us.
How the screen works
Five steps, in this order, every time
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1
Intake, before anyone touches a goniometer
Every athlete fills out an intake form covering the things that actually predict trouble: how many months he has thrown continuously without a real break, when he last took meaningful time off, pitch count over the last seven days, outings in the last thirty, which pitches he throws, injury history, prior diagnoses, past surgery, and current pain by location and level. Plus age, height, weight, current velocity, and level of play.
We do this first on purpose. A 15-year-old sitting 78 who has thrown ten straight months without a break is a different athlete than a 15-year-old sitting 78 who took November through January off, even if their bodies test identically.
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2
The KJOC score
Next the athlete completes the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic Shoulder and Elbow score, a validated ten-question instrument built specifically for overhead athletes. It scores out of 100 and measures how the arm is functioning under the demands of competition, not how it feels sitting still on the couch.
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3
The physical screen
A licensed physical therapist then runs the athlete through roughly thirty individual measurements:
- Shoulder internal and external rotation, both arms
- Total rotational motion, both arms
- Shoulder flexion and horizontal adduction
- Scapular dyskinesis
- Prone internal and external rotation strength
- Scaption strength as a percentage of body weight
- Grip strength, both hands
- Hip internal and external rotation, stance leg and stride leg
- Thoracic and cervical rotation
- Y-Balance anterior, posteromedial and posterolateral, both legs
- Beighton hypermobility screen
- Rotary stability
Every measurement is taken on both sides. In a pitcher, the asymmetry is usually the story.
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4
Scoring against published thresholds
Every number is compared against thresholds drawn from the published research on throwing injury, not against a coach's eye. A measurement outside the threshold becomes a flag. The flags produce four things: a risk tier, an intensity cap, a strength focus, and a specific list of corrective work with video for every finding.
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5
The report sets the program
The athlete and his parents get the full report. More importantly, that report determines what he is allowed to do in our building on day one. The screen is not a document we hand you and file away. It is the thing that writes the first block of training.
What we found
52 athletes, ages 13 to 18
46 of the 52 had at least one physical finding. That is 88 percent of the athletes who walked in. The average athlete carried 3.4 findings.
Risk tier at first screen
All 52 completed screens
The finding that matters most
Of the 27 athletes who came back high risk, 24 reported no pain at all.
Nearly nine out of ten high-risk arms felt completely fine. Pain is not an early warning system in a pitcher. Pain is the receipt.
The KJOC scores said the same thing from a different direction. Twenty-eight athletes scored 90 or better, which is a strong self-reported arm-health score. Twenty-five of those 28 still had at least one physical finding on the table. Feeling good and being sound are two different things, and only one of them shows up on a questionnaire.
The most common findings
Count of athletes flagged, out of 52
Two of these carry real weight in the literature. A total rotational motion deficit in the throwing shoulder has been associated with roughly two and a half times the risk of elbow injury in professional pitchers. Anterior reach asymmetry on the Y-Balance test has been associated with more than double the odds of lower extremity injury. Twenty of our athletes had the first. Ten had the second.
The most common strength focus we assigned across all 52 athletes was lower extremity stability, tied with shoulder flexion mobility. You cannot screen a pitcher's arm and call it a movement screen.
The workload picture
What the intake form told us
The intake data was just as revealing as the physical testing. Only 21 of the 52 athletes had taken meaningful time off from throwing within the previous three months.
A large share of these athletes reported five to ten straight months of continuous throwing. That is the reality of travel baseball, showcases and overlapping seasons, and it is not something a family can see on a stat sheet. It shows up in a screen.
What we actually do with it
A finding that does not change the training is trivia
Every screen produces three concrete outputs.
An intensity cap
This is the first thing we set, and it is not negotiable.
Throwing intent permitted after the screen
Assigned before the athlete's first bullpen
Not because they were hurt. Because they tested into a range where we were not willing to hand them a green light yet.
A strength focus
The largest deficit becomes the athlete's priority in the strength program. Lower extremity stability and single-leg balance, lat and pec mobility for shoulder flexion, hip internal rotation work, posterior shoulder strengthening, thoracic mobility. One priority, not seven, because an athlete who is told to fix everything fixes nothing.
A corrective list with video
Every flag comes back with the specific protocol, the dosage and a video link. A sleeper stretch prescription reads "3 sets of 30 seconds on the throwing side, daily, for the next 3 to 4 weeks." Not "work on your internal rotation."
Then the athlete gets re-screened, and we find out whether the plan worked.
Why this is what makes VIP different
A radar gun tells you what he did, not what he can survive
A licensed physical therapist performs the screen
Not a coach with a tape measure. Two PTs have run our screens this off-season, and their initials are on every report.
The thresholds come from the research, not from opinion
Every flag is tied to a published finding on throwing injury, with the same threshold applied to every athlete.
The screen precedes the throwing, and it governs the throwing
No VIP athlete gets a max-effort day because he showed up excited. He gets it because his screen says his body can absorb it.
Every athlete gets re-screened
The screen is a baseline, not a verdict. The whole point is to move the numbers.
The report goes to the family
You see the same measurements we see, with the same context. Nothing about your son's arm is a coaching secret.
Twenty-four of our athletes were carrying a high-risk finding they could not feel. Their high school coaches could not see it. Their travel coaches could not see it. Their parents could not see it, and neither could they. We found it in about forty-five minutes, and then we changed what they were allowed to do about it.
That is the difference.
VIP 2026-27
Registration for the VIP off-season program is open. Every athlete starts with the movement screen and throwing evaluation, and no athlete throws for us until we have both.
Register for VIPGrady's Pitching School
All figures reflect 52 completed movement screens between July and August 2026. Athlete data is reported in aggregate only.