Darling Walks the Walk

New York Mets broadcaster Ron Darling has adopted a workout regimen this spring that emulates how pitchers prepare for the season. Darling, of course, won 136 games as a big-league pitcher from 1983 to 1995.

Now age 47, Darling is putting himself through the paces — no, this isn’t some crazy Jim Palmer comeback — so that he can gain a better understanding of what today’s pitchers go through to attain peak performance. Quoth Darling:

It’s a lot more difficult than I knew. We did more baseball stuff. What they do now is more analytical, working out stuff. And it can wear you down.

And a little further down:

We all had been tracking the progress Pedro [Martinez] was making last summer, but I knew I really wasn’t sure what he was doing. So I decided, “If I’m going to talk about it, I need to learn as much as I could.”

You know what? Props to Darling for getting out there and doing this. I applaud the attitude and effort to make himself better at his current job by learning first-hand what players today are doing. Not everyone would do that.