How Baseball Influenced the Evolution of Purdy’s Throwing Motion originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
Brock Purdy established himself as a football star, but the 49ers quarterback continues his rise in the NFL thanks in large part to an influence from baseball.
Purdy asked CORTX Sports Performance for help before being drafted 262nd overall by San Francisco in 2022. It was there that Purdy crossed paths with Chris Hess, a respected member of the motion capture space, who had a revolutionary idea to improve the game of the quarterback with the principles of another sport.
Hess detailed his groundbreaking discovery that helped Purdy become an NFL star during a exclusive with ESPN’s Stephania Bell.
“In baseball, we expect a pitcher to continue to develop after being drafted,” Hess told Bell. “In golf, we talk about perfecting a swing throughout your golf career. Why is it different in football?
“We’re trying to identify: (Is) this physical inefficiency, something that we’re able to address by working on the soft tissues? Is it structurally how they’re built, or is it just a pattern that been trained again and again?
CORTX physical therapist Tom Gormely focuses on integrating the analytics that revolutionized baseball into quarterback development, with an emphasis on not stagnating with on-field habits that stunt long-term growth.
“What you try to do is explain to them, hey, better movement, more efficient movement, makes things easier,” Gormely told Bell. “Understanding how we want you to generate power and torque will then allow you to more easily access these different arm positions, arm patterns and hip positions in the game and hopefully make you an athlete more dynamic.”
After suffering a serious elbow injury during the 2022 NFL playoffs, Purdy returned to CORTX, where he saw positive progress in his own game through work with Gormely and Co.
“They got me into different positions and movements that helped me with my hips and my shoulder capsule to be able to make throws around defenders and different windows and different moving arm slots,” Purdy told Bell. “There’s a bunch of running plays that I made where my arm slot was like a center infielder, where I was like, ‘OK, that’s all the practice we what we did with these guys.'”
Purdy’s body of work speaks for itself, as the 49ers quarterback immediately put together an MVP-caliber campaign during the 2023 NFL season after returning to work with Gormely.
The 24 year old ability to improvise and extending running plays is invaluable, and coupled with the ability to maximize different arm slots, could allow Purdy to move toward an even higher ceiling.
