No pitchers going off the DL over the last few days, so I will just examine a few injury stories. Also, the PAIN and HURT leaderboards for younger players are posted.

• With about every pitcher who goes on the DL, I like to see if there were any glaring injury signs. With Jon Niese (torn rotator cuff), no signs really existed. His fastball velocity dropped 0.5 MPH from 2012 and his Zone% was down 0.9% points. While a declining velocity and Zone% are signs of a injury, these levels don’t usually raise any read flags. Of the 453 pitchers PAIN ranks, he was the 295 least injury prone.

Another factor I examine is his late game consistency (process is faster, it used to take over a minute to calculate and now it is almost instantaneous). Niese’s value has slow risen over the past three seasons.

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Injury information will be a little slim today, so I will examine in detail a few cases. Also, I will report the fastball speeds of three pitchers returning from the DL. Finally, I have adjusted PAIN and HURT so any value over 100 is a player at a high injury risk. Complete rankings are available.

• Albert Pujols stated he is finally feeling unhurt.

But Pujols swears he felt something.
“I was like … this is me right here,'” Pujols said. “That did it. I feel right now like my old me, like when I was in St. Louis.”
Did you ever feel that way last year?
“Not at all, man — I swear,” Pujols said. “There were some streaks here and there that I hit, but I was battling. I never got to a point where I could say, ‘Holy cow, that’s my bat speed.'”

Every player always states they feel better than they actually do, but it may be time to try to buy into Albert’s hot bat. His ISO (power) is trending up.

Month: ISO
April: .165
May: .173
June: .254

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Quite a bit injury news happened over the weekend. I will examine several pitchers returning from the D.L. and several more acting hurt.

• Stephen Strasburg returned from the disabled list to make a start yesterday. The biggest concern for me was the 4 BB in 5 IP with a Zone% just over 47%. His overall. velocity was consistent with his past speeds.

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Today I am going to examine Ryan Dempster and Jon Lester in detail. Also, I am rolling out some changes to HURT and PAIN. With PAIN (called Pitcher Abuse INdex based on a poll during the Tuesday night chat) Contact% is added and a regression amount factored in. With HURT, instead of evenly weighting the three previous seasons, I weighted the most recent seasons more. On both of them, I put the max value to be around 100, but a few players are determined to go over.

• Ryan Dempster ranks 12th in the most recent PAIN. His fastball velocity is down 0.6 mph from last year which should be expected from 36-year-old pitcher.

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After introducing HURT (hitter injury finder), I am introducing PAIN (pitcher injury finder) today. Besides a list potentially hurt hitters and pitchers, I will examine Ryan Braun, Anibal Sanchez, Kevin Youkilis and report the velocity for some pitchers returning from the D.L.

• Last week I introduced a metric to help look for position players playing through injury called HURT. Today, I introduce PAIN which looks for pitchers with traits of injured pitchers. Mainly it looks for fastball velocity drops and low, dropping Zone%’s from only the previous season. I have weighted in a bit on Pace (hurt pitchers take longer between pitches) and average fastball velocity (I have found harder throwers are more injury prone). I tried to add consistency of release points, but could not get it to work because too many pitchers have more than one release point. Finally, I am going to add in a measure of contact in the future and regress the values. Enough of the boring stuff, here are the pitchers PAIN determines to be a injury risk:

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A little bit of everything today, a few pitchers returning from the disabled list, HURT rankings (I will do a different subset of players every report) and a couple of injury related articles. I am hoping to introduce PAIN, the pitcher injury predictor on Monday.

• I found two injury-related articles interesting this week. The first is on the Nationals being too “macho” to go on the DL. The other deals with the intense schedule and the inability of players to keep up with it.

• Josh Johnson returned from the DL and Ben Duronio covered his return in detail yesterday.

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Today, I will concentrate on my newest tool, Position Players Playing Through Injury Finder, and report the fastball speeds of a few pitchers who recently returned from the disabled list.

• Injuries and their effects continue to be one of the more under-researched areas of baseball. As more and more DL data has become available, we can make better conclusions on the effects of injuries. Even with with 100% complete and accurate DL information, the times a hitter plays through injuries isn’t recorded. I have been trying to note these players and the stats which seem effected. I have found power, contact and speed (Duh) to decline as a results of an injury.

With this information, I decided to try to reverse-engineer an equation to find players with declining rates in speed, contact and power. The equation is not based off any extrapolated values, just what I thought would work (similar to the QB passer rating in the NFL). Also, I am not close to being done with it. I used previous season data and need to improve these values (weighting and regression). Also, I just can’t compare to preseason projections because they don’t calculate some values I look at like Contact%. Also, it can’t look at rookies at this point. Even with these limitations, the results have been encouraging.

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Not a lot of injury news over the last few days. A couple of pitchers return from the DL and couple of hitters fighting through injuries.

• Jered Weaver had seven strikeouts and no walks against the Dodgers last night in his return. His velocity was up, but not to 2011 or early 2012 levels.

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Today, I will look at quite a few pitchers coming back from the DL, a couple pitchers missing starts and some hitters trying to play through injuries.

• John Danks made his first start since early 2012 on Friday. His velocity is low, but not to some pre-surgery levels

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Lots of pitcher news today. Five pitchers coming back from the DL and a few others dealing with injuries.

• Johnny Cueto returned from the DL and had a bit of an issue finding the strike zone. I covered him in detail earlier in the week for the main site. His velocity seems fine for now and it will be interesting to see if he eventually fixes the twist in his pitching motion.

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