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August 7, 2007

Barry Bonds' Brace

Orthotic Verisimilitude

by Will Carroll

Will talks with Mark Silva on Baseball Prospectus Radio. Click to download the mp3.

You don't know Mark Silva, but you know his work. As a certified orthotist, Silva is one of the top builders of custom sports braces for athletes. He's made them for football players in his work with the San Francisco 49ers, and he's made them for baseball players, including Rickey Henderson and Mo Vaughn. It's the brace that Barry Bonds wears while batting that Silva is best known for.

On Monday, an article was published regarding the brace, first at Editor and Publisher (a specialty publication covering the newspaper industry), purporting that the brace worn by Bonds was an illegal aid that helped Bonds hit home runs. The assertions of the author, Michael Witte, were on their surface difficult to believe, but I wanted to know more about this brace. What was it made of? Who made it? Could it possibly help Bonds hit? (I should note here that e-mails to Mr. Witte remain unanswered at the time of publication, and I was unable to find a phone number for him.)

It took me one e-mail and one phone call to find Mark Silva. I called Mr. Silva on Monday evening, interrupting a bocce game. Silva had not seen the article nor heard the assertions made against his handiwork, but he was willing to talk to me about both. In an interview recorded Monday night, Silva broke down each of the assertions and provided the facts of the brace he has made for more than 15 years. Our conversation brought out a fact that as yet has never been documented. Mr. Silva states that not only has he never spoken of this, but that he's never been asked about it.

The brace that Bonds wears was first constructed in 1992. Bonds needed a brace to protect his arm after surgery, and Silva's work with athletes was already well-known. Each year, Bonds comes into Silva's workplace and has a mold made of his arm, which allows Silva to custom-build the brace. Silva explains that "it's a pretty labor-intensive. I take a negative cast of the arm. Each year, I make a cast of Barry's arm, a plaster mold. I cut the mold off, put a lead pipe down the center for strength, then strip off the negative cast, making a positive cast or a model to work with. I then sculpt it with plaster to build out areas we don't want pressure applied to, and then choose the materials specific to the sport so they can function at the highest level." The completely custom brace, which Silva estimates weighs between four and six ounces, is designed to "not be noticed" by the athlete. The straps are elastic and allow the arm to move within the brace during the swing, protecting the arm without restricting motion.

It's the molds that bring forth the most interesting fact regarding Bonds since Game of Shadows was published. Silva states that because of the custom nature of the work, he's been asked to make casts of Bonds each year. In the first couple of years, he went through the entire process, but due to his workload, he started checking Bonds with precision calipers each subsequent year. "If I made the same brace every year for 12 or more years," Silva said, "it was because there was no size change in Barry's arms."