Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man.

Better than he was before.

Better. Stronger. Faster.

Good morning and welcome to episode 455 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index.

I am Ben Lindbergh, joined by Sam Miller.

And today we want to talk about what unfortunately has become one of the biggest storylines of this season.

Teams is if every day we hear news of a new pitcher who is experiencing some sort of elbow discomfort, the latest being cliffly.

We've discussed this on the show before, but we don't know what we're talking about.

So we want to bring in someone who does one of baseball's biggest experts in injury prevention and detection and treatment, the vice president of medical services and the head athletic trainer for the Los Angeles Dodgers Stan Conti.

Hey Stan.

Good morning. How you doing?

Good. So can you explain the distinction between those two titles for people who don't know because people people know about athletic trainers and assistant athletic trainers.

They might not know what a VP of medical services does because that's relatively new position in one that maybe not every team has.

Yeah, well I think that what we're still trying to figure out, we sort of make up titles as we go along with a lot of companies do.

My background is my doctorate in physical therapy from Boston University. I've been a physical therapist for a lot of years.

Pretty much miss injuries work with giants and most of the head athletic trainer, which I'm an athletic certified athletic trainer as well.

My job is kind of multi-faceted in the fact that I work with an amazing team. My job is treatment and rehabilitation or majorly team and covering the game and somebody goes down, I have to go out there and see what's going on, but we also do a lot of stuff behind treatment.

The vice president title is one that kind of reflects some of the administrative stuff that I do as far as research at other activities to try to figure out where to put our resources on the medical side to keep players on the field and how to rehabilitation, we both take them.

Now, what most people don't understand is that there's a 25 man majorly team, but there's about 220 minor league players that are the only random country that are probably the doctor organization that I also keep track of through our physical therapist, not like trainers in the minor leagues.

So every night, last night, we went back to the clock in the morning, actually, game, on the minor league injury reports, seeing what we're doing with the myelies as well.

So it sort of reflects a bigger than running on the field and taping an ankle in between innings.

That's the best way I can explain it.

...