SPORTS
Chris Cuffaro
Target practice: Dreifort rehabs his fine motor skills on a laptop.
Big-league pitching is tough on the joints. Just ask Los Angeles Dodger Darren Dreifort. The 6-foot-2 Kansan with a nasty sinking fastball has blown out his right medial collateral ligament — a critical piece of elbow gristle — not once but twice. Both times, he had it replaced with a tendon transplanted from his wrist, most recently in July 2001.
The surgery — named after Tommy John, the first ballplayer to successfully undergo the procedure — is old hat. Whatés new is the Dodger-developed technology Dreifort is using in his rehab as he works to be one of the only pitchers to return from a second Tommy John. Dreifort spends an hour a day with a laptop connected to a contraption designed to retrain a pitcherés ultrafine-tuned feel for the ball. Dreifort watches a moving target on the screen. As it swerves left and right, he grips a wired baseball and makes tiny adjustments with his wrist and forearm to keep the target centered.-Just a tic here or there makes a difference of 6 inches when the ball gets to the plate,é Dreifort says. With a contract that guarantees Dreifort $11 million a year until 2006, the Dodgers can only hope that the big right-hander regains his feel soon.
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