SARASOTA, Fla. — Early Tuesday afternoon, after the big-league Baltimore Orioles have packed up and gone home for the day, a skinny young pitching prospect enters an unassuming shed at the team’s spring training complex and strips down to his underwear, revealing a body pockmarked by nickel-sized velcro discs taped to his skin.

Two young women, working in tandem, affix to each piece of velcro a small reflective ball, 44 of them in all — including four around a headband worn over his cap and one attached to the cap’s beanie.

To an outsider, spring training can seem awful weird sometimes. Maybe to an insider, too. But the prospect, like the steady flow of prospects before him, is here because of the club’s emphasis on biomechanics to improve pitcher performance and reduce the risk of injury.

Data gathered from the bullpen session he throws in his drawers, on a mound inside the shed surrounded by eight motion capture cameras on tripods, will be sent to the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham for analysis. The ASMI, founded by famed orthopedic surgeon James Andrews, will return to the Orioles an array of measurements to aid the pitcher’s development.

“Arm position, foot contact, stride length, direction of the lead foot at foot contact,” says Orioles Director of Pitching Development and longtime biomechanics proponent Rick Peterson, rattling off the information he’ll receive from the analysis. “There are some measurements where, if they’re out of the normal range, it has a direct correlation to the potential for injury.”

Pitcher injuries are part of the game for fans, an almost inevitable heartache that follows the excitement of a young hurler’s success. But for Peterson and pitching coaches everywhere, the ever-present risk of elbow and shoulder issues are a conundrum to be conquered — or at least mitigated.

On Tuesday, Peterson watched as prospects Jason Gurka, Hunter Harvey, Zach Davies and Branden Kline threw in the “lab” to a couple of obliging catchers. He’ll meet with all of them again with the results from what he calls “an MRI of the pitcher’s delivery.”

“We sit down with the pitcher, and often times a conditioning coach and the medical trainers, and we’ll look at the feedback that we get and explain to them what these measurements mean,” Peterson says. “Some of the adjustments are made in the conditioning program –- it might be a lack of flexibility, or range of motion in the hips.”

The Orioles are understandably cagey about the specific red- and yellow-flag mechanical issues they spot in the analysis, and the drills they have tested and implemented to help perfect pitchers’ throwing motions. Peterson, who first became involved with ASMI in 1989 at the behest of the White Sox’ front office while he was coaching in Birmingham, says the goal is to develop players who are “black-belts in pitching,” masters of their own deliveries.

Peterson and general manager Dan Duquette both joined the Orioles organization before the 2012 season and implemented the testing in Sarasota that season. Developing young pitchers can be a frustrating process, but the club is confident that the use of biomechanics is helping.

“We’ve had a lot of success with it,” says Director of Minor League Operations Kent Qualls. “Obviously we wouldn’t be spending the time, effort and resources on it if we weren’t all in.”

“We have a very structured program,” Peterson says. “And by comparing pitchers from year to year, we’ve seen some drastic improvements in the efficiency of the delivery.”

The Orioles are not the first team nor the only team to use motion-capture technology to improve pitcher development. And Peterson knows that the deluge of data can be overwhelming, especially as more and more of it becomes publicly available. But the Orioles are not stripping their pitchers and covering them in velcro to confuse them.

“We keep it really simple,” Peterson says. “You don’t have to know how to build a car to drive one. And we stay focused on driving the car.”