ARMED AND READY
Murray’s arm doing fine making the transition from baseball to football
NORMAN — Kyler Murray planted his right foot hard into the turf and rotated his hips violently as he pushed off that foot and took a step slightly to the left with his other leg.
Oklahoma’s 5-foot10 quarterback produced plenty of torque as he let the football fly last Saturday in Ames, Iowa.
When the ball finally closed in on the ground some 55 yards after Murray let it go, Marquise Brown was there to haul it in for a 75-yard touchdown.
Yet the stress that throw put on Murray’s arm wasn’t overwhelming. It certainly didn’t put as much stress on his arm compared to the throws he makes from the outfield in a typical baseball game.
“With a football, it’s more about being always worried about the shoulder — I would do a lot of shoulder prevention stuff, always get our shoulder worked out because the release is just a whole lot higher over the top,” said Cody
Thomas, the former Oklahoma quarterback who is now an outfielder in the Dodgers organization. “Baseball usually tends to put a little more stress on your elbow — lower release, threequarters arm slot. Going between the two, they have their similarities obviously but the way you release and pronate and stuff is obviously a little different from football to baseball.”
Murray can feel the difference during practice and in games, where he’s averaged more than 24 attempts per game during Oklahoma’s 3-0 start heading into Saturday’s game against Army (6 p.m., pay per view).
“I can throw a football all day and my arm doesn’t get tired,” Murray said. “If I throw a baseball more than a certain amount of time, it’s going to get a little sore.”
One of the questions around Murray going into the football season centered around his arm strength, especially at his size. That hasn’t been an issue so far.
Skip Johnson knows as well as anything what scouts say about Murray’s ability to make throws on the baseball field.
Oklahoma’s baseball coach saw Murray rise from a player with plenty of tools who had struggled after some time away from the sport to the No. 9 overall Major League Baseball Draft pick over the summer.
“The reason why the scouts don’t think he can throw — he didn’t take infield/out(field) with us at all last year,” Johnson said. “He’s going to get better and better with throwing a baseball the more he does it. We didn’t think it was a big deal because he was throwing the football so much.
“But he didn’t get drafted for his throwing arm. He’s going because he can run and he can hit.”
Patrick Mahomes knows pretty well how different it is to make the throws in both sports.
The Kansas City Chiefs quarterback and son of longtime big-league pitcher Pat Mahomes split his time between the sports for years before walking away from baseball as a junior at Texas Tech to focus on football.
“There’s some stuff with mechanics. Of course, you throw it a little shorter with the motion of throwing the football,” Patrick Mahomes said Wednesday. “All of it’s about having touch and being able to have the fastball at the same time, have the change up and be able to throw with tough, but still be accurate.”
Thomas remembers making the transition from baseball to football could be difficult, as the coaches would have to remind him to get his arm up and his release point higher during the transition period.
But going the other way — which Murray will do in a few months when he’s expected to begin his professional baseball career with the Oakland A's — is a little quicker transition.
“You’re using your body the same — you’ve still got to use your legs to throw,” Thomas said. “The arm motion’s a little different and obviously the object you’re throwing is a lot different.
“You’ve got that big football in your hands and you grab that baseball, it feels like you’re throwing a golf ball at first.”