Trust can be a beautiful thing, but it’s so stressful compared to verification.

It’s one of the many new challenges for Major League Baseball teams who spent nearly an entire spring training building up their pitchers, only to shut them down.

Two important questions will be asked by managers and pitching coaches. The first is aimed at pitchers: How much have you been throwing? The second question comes from the manager to the pitching coach: How much do you trust what he says about how much he has been throwing?

If baseball resumes, the gap between the end of the first spring training and the beginning of the second could be as long as three months.

Ron Wolforth, proprietor of the Texas Baseball Ranch and author of baseball training books, said he has spent a great deal of time in recent weeks talking with people in the game regarding the risks of returning to work safely. Those discussions have nothing to do with COVID-19 and everything to do with the potential for blowing out arms.

“They all have the same problem, and the problem is you’re in Boston and I’m in Texas and we’re able to get out and throw and you may not be able to throw much and the facilities you would normally go to would not be open,” Wolforth said in a telephone interview.

Keeping an arm healthy while using it to perform the violent, unnatural act of throwing the stuffing out of a baseball is never an easy trick to execute. It’s become a whole lot trickier during a global pandemic that has much of the world frozen in place by edicts and fear.

“The most common months for Tommy John and labrum tears are March and April, and that’s the normal thing,” Wolforth said. “Imagine now where all these guys were ramped up and then shut down. Now the question becomes how can we ramp them up in a way that protects them? It’s the most dangerous time anyway, and yet we have this sort of thing happening on top of it.”

So how do you do it? Wolforth said he had a recent two-hour conversation with an MLB pitching coach on just that topic.

“The big thing is staying away from the one-size-fits-all process. You’ve got to categorize your guys,” he said. “For the guys who have preexisting (arm troubles), you need to put them in their own category. Their ramp-up needs to be a lot more gradual, a lot less steep, and a lot longer.”

For the Red Sox, Nathan Eovaldi would be the best example of a pitcher who falls into that category.

“For a guy like a Trevor Bauer (of the Reds) or a Max Scherzer (Nationals), they don’t ever shut it down,” Wolforth said. “They’re kind of throwing all the time. They’re not so much of a worry. You can kind of throw them in and they’ll be just fine.”

In that stratosphere between the pitchers with injury history and those who are fanatical about keeping their arms in shape lies the majority of pitchers. And within that group, more than just location, the availability of a catcher, and weather concerns come into play.

Wolforth said it’s imperative that pitchers at home do three things – keep their entire bodies in shape, not just their arms; throw, even if a catcher isn’t available; and stay on a throwing cycle.

“As it’s being prepared for the stress of the competition, soft tissue doesn’t really know if I’m throwing into a net 15 feet away from me or if I’m throwing a ball 200 feet on a field,” Wolforth said. “So what we want to do is even throwing into a pad, even throwing into a net, while not perfect, is something that we certainly encourage people to do, and we have the thing that we designed at the ranch, the throwing sock (attached to the wrist). A lot of major league teams have used it.”

He explained why getting into a sensible routine gives pitchers a better chance of staying healthy.

“Pitchers are actually creatures of cycles anyway. A starting pitcher will pitch every fifth day or every sixth day,” Wolforth said. “A reliever will have his routines. What I really recommend is that all pitchers, no matter where they are when they’re shut down in this little thing, they create their own seven-day cycle.”

Meaning?

“Out of that seven days, we designate two days for a heavier workload. We’re going to push a little bit more. We’re going to work with a little bit more intensity, or a little bit more volume, and then we have two light days, where we warm up, we move, and then we shut it down,” he said. “And then we have three medium days. So in the cycle of seven days, we have two heavy days, two light days and three medium days. And the reason this is so helpful is that for you to get the soft tissue to have an adaptation, for the soft tissue to go, ‘OK, I see you’re serious about this throwing stuff, I’m going to start preparing myself.’

“You have to have it be intense enough that your soft tissue has an adaptation. If all you’re doing is really, really light stuff, well, it’s better than nothing, but at some point that adaptation just stopped. The body goes, ‘OK, we’re good.’ You need to have two of those heavier days for the body to say, ‘Hey, you know what, I’ve got to really start to build up the soft tissue for the stress.’ ”

Sounds great, but even among MLB pitchers, some have a more difficult time prying themselves off the couch than others.

“The cycle, what it does is it saves your overachievers from doing too much, and it saves what I call the minimum-daily-requirement people from doing too little,” Wolforth said. “They’re going to have to push it a little bit.”

The pitchers at the greatest risk of injury will be those who say they’re staying on a workout cycle of some sort, but are lying, and the lie goes undetected. The potential for excessive arm injuries, more than anything, qualifies as the biggest risk of returning to work for young, healthy athletes.

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