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As Hughes' stock declined this offseason -- an AL East scout cited in a piece I wrote in the fall described his ceiling as No. 2 starter -- Kennedy's rose.

Now both are slumping mightily, though Kennedy bounced back mildly Monday night before being hit by a liner and having the bullpen blow his win.

Hughes has permitted 24 baserunners in 11 innings with a 9.00 ERA (nine strikeouts/eight walks) and Kennedy has allowed 22 baserunners in 14 innings with a 8.74 ERA (nine K's/8BB's). Neither have allowed a homer yet, either a bright side or a sign that only good fortune has prevented those ERAs from being even more ghastly.

Is it merely a slump? Are there subtle mechanical problems in their respective deliveries that need to be ironed out? If you listen to the experts on the Web who do frame-by-frame breakdowns of pitcher deliveries, you come away thinking that slumps are caused by these differences, broken down in Zapruder-film-like fashion.

Let's see what they say. But we'll also consider some recent findings by Stanford University researchers that were published in the journal Neuron. According to them, humans are not capable of perfectly repetitive movements because we evolved to deal with physical challenges in a largely improvisational way without really thinking.

First Hughes, courtesy of Frankie Piliere's video analysis at SaberScouting.com.

Piliere asserts that Hughes's arm angle is higher than it was during his Minor League career. Also, Hughes in 2008 leads more with his shoulder and does not come over a totally stiff right leg like he does in a 2006 clip. His head is also snapping toward the first-base dugout this year despite being oriented more toward the plate in 2006.

Piliere writes, "I do think [that] could be a direct cause of his lessened velocity since over the past year. The problem is not arm speed, nor is it arm angle or the way his hands are breaking, at least from what I can tell. Through 75 percent of his delivery, essentially nothing has changed. The leg lift and follow through certainly appear different, though.

"So, what to do? I'd say the first step would be taking some pressure off of that right shoulder. And, to do that, Hughes would need to once again be aggressive with his legs and get that high rear leg lift. This will certainly make his bend at the waist much more smooth, rather being pulled down by his shoulder. In my opinion, he simply needs to get his weight transfer flowing smoothly right over and through his front side rather than his weight transferring into that front leg but not over it."

This all sounds very reasonable, I confess. But consider what the Stanford researches say. Could it be that athletes never exactly replicate their deliveries because of limitations in our neural wiring? That could mean that the very next pitch Hughes threw after the one recorded in 2008 is as different from the prior one as it is from the one taped in 2006. And the one we see from 2006 is more likely to be somewhat random rather than a machine-like representation of a uniform, Hughes 2006 delivery.

Maybe we only notice these variations when a player is slumping even though they are also present during stretches of good performance.

The Stanford researchers say that "practice makes perfect" is "impossible" if "complete consistency" is the standard of perfection.

"The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again," says Mark Churchland, an electrical engineer and co-author of the study. "The nervous system was designed to be flexible. You typically find yourself doing things you've never done before."

We're prisoners of evolution and, throughout our history, flexibility in orchestrating movement beat consistency of movement. So our brains evolved an improvisational style when it comes to that. Primitive hunters, for example, never were able to catch and kill prey the same exact way under the same exact conditions.

The Stanford research on monkeys proved that seemingly random variance in movement was predicted by small variations in brain activity in movement planning -- before the move even began.

So no matter how strongly you tell yourself you want to, say, move your arm over your leg in a certain way, the brain has its own plan. Perhaps it's these cross signals that subtly inhibit movement and decrease velocity. Maybe coaches and athletes should accept our improvisational natures rather than fight it when it come to these subtle mechanical variances. In other words, yield to the ghost in the machine and just play.

The mechanical breakdown of Ian Kennedy is surely coming. Last year, Carlos Gomez, then of HardballTimes.com and now a scout for the Diamondbacks, compared him to Clay Buchholz. The verdict: Kennedy slowed down his delivery since his draft video and has "more classic, repeatable and cleaner mechanics." Gomez said that Kennedy traded velocity for that slower delivery speed. That's a bargain only if command stays sharp. Obviously that hasn't been the case in the early going.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a similar analysis done recently on Joba Chamberlain on DriveLineMechanics.com.

They don't like Chamberlain's arm action, saying basically that he's an injury waiting to happen. They maintain his arm is too far behind his left foot when it strikes the mound just before his release. They also say he ends his follow-through too abruptly given his tremendous arm speed.

Since Chamberlain has always pitched well, no one has bothered to compare his motion from one year (or perhaps even one pitch) to the next. These concerns might well be legitimate and somewhat chronic in nature. But I believe there is pretty solid evidence that Chamberlain can't possibly throw the same exact way every time. And while that may appear to be bad news at the moment for Hughes and Kennedy, it goes some way toward reducing concerns regarding Chamberlain's long-term health.