So after reading Driveline Mechanics' critique of Duke's mechanics a few days ago, I perused on over to his website where, to my dismay, I found this article on Tyson Ross. The basic gist of the small article is that Ross is over-abducting/hyperextending his shoulders (inverted W), similar to what Mark Prior does (or at least did when he was actually pitching). As the article states, this will cause "impingement syndrome", which is basically caused by shoulder tendinitis of the supraspinatus or bursitis in the shoulder as a result of rubbing in the subacromial space.

This flaw in mechanics significantly worries me. As well, the problem is three-fold, as not only can it cause impingement syndrome, but it can also cause timing problems and increased stress to the Ulnar Collateral Ligament (again, from the article). I am not sure if Beane takes into account mechanics when drafting pitchers (and granted flaws in mechanics don't always bare out in real life like one might think), but this flaw may derail Ross sooner rather than later, and for such a high pick this scares me. In his favor are that he has pretty good statistics playing with Cal, but they are certainly not dominating statistics. I'm hoping that the A's did not draft him based on his body, because as we have seen with numerous pitchers (T. Hudson, R. Oswalt, and T. Lincecum) it's not about how big you are (how much force you can generate), but how good you are at transferring energy from your lower torso to your upper torso. Hopefully Ross makes Beane look like his usually intelligent self, but I just don't like picking Ross quite this high.