Two people sent me this great article on Mike Marshall, the former relief pitcher who trains others to throw without injuring themselves. The problem is, no one in pro baseball listens to him:

Marshall is 64 years old, impish and hyperkinetic. At 5-foot-8½, he looks more Ph.D. than ex-ballplayer. He still holds major-league records for games pitched in one season (106), relief innings pitched (208 1/3) and consecutive games for a pitcher (13), all set with the Los Angeles Dodgers in his 1974 Cy Young season. Everyone around baseball figured Marshall some kind of genetic freak, or maybe a masochist.

He was just ahead of his time. Almost 40 years ago, when he started the studies toward his doctorate at Michigan State, Marshall had questions about how to throw a baseball without injuring himself. Millions of pitches, thousands of feet of high-speed film and hundreds of adjustments later, he believes knows the answers better than anyone in the world.

"I'm a researcher," Marshall said. "People forget that about me. That's where my heart is. I pitched baseball, really, as the lab experiment of my research to see if it worked. Turned out it did. I don't need any more validation that I know something about baseball.

"I know what works. That's the greatest truth there is. I have a responsibility to give it back. Nobody wants it? Hey. That's not my problem."

Marshall likes to tell the story about how he diagnosed Tommy John with the torn ulnar-collateral ligament that led to John's eponymous surgery, and how Marshall's suggested regimen - exercises with an iron ball, like a shot put - strengthened John's arm enough to pitch another 13 seasons after the surgery.

"We would just look at him and go, 'He's kind of wacko,' " said John, Marshall's teammate for three years with the Dodgers. "Yet you saw these feats. What I saw him do, there had to be a reason for it."

I have no idea if what Mike Marshall teaches is good or bad, if it really works or not. But I know he's going about promoting himself the wrong way:

Any suggestion that Marshall adapt his program - mix his motion with the traditional motion to make the transition easier, or cut out the terminology to focus on the end rather than the means, or perhaps collaborate with others in the growing field of biomechanics - is met with a stern no.

"I called him a few years ago and said, 'Tell me about your stuff,' " said Dr. Glenn Fleisig, the biomedical engineer who works alongside top baseball surgeon Dr. James Andrews at the Alabama Sports Medicine Institute. "He said no. I said, 'Can I tell you?' And he said he didn't want to hear what any other researcher is doing, that he never read or listened to anything because he didn't want to be accused of stealing. The concept of a researcher who's speaking up but won't listen is a big turn-off."

We're living in the age of open source. Marshall should make his work known to others. He should be writing a blog explaining what he's doing and why. He should be inviting doctors down to watch his pitchers go through their work outs. He should be listening to others as well.

He's 64 years old. That's not really old anymore, but it's old enough that he faces a risk of dying and having his work die with him. It's time he did get others involved. Much as any of us like to think so, none of us know everything. I bet Mike can teach pitchers things that will help, and others doing research can teach Mike processes that might improve his methods. It's time to start talking to others.