Decent information is getting thin as the season winds down. This may be my last MASH for the regular season. For the offseason, I will be posting a weekly-ish article (probably on Thursday). I will update the players who will likely miss time in 2014. Also, I will go back can look at 2013 PAIN, SLOW, HURT and Zone% leaders. Also, any suggestion will be taken.

• Edward Mujica is dealing with fatigue and it doesn’t seem manager Matheny and him are on the same page. First from Mujica (Source for both quotes):

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Truthfully, not a whole lot to go over. The biggest key for the next couple weeks is to play players who will be in the starting lineup, not resting or calling the season done. One item which will probably come up is playoff bound pitchers who skip starts in order to rest.

• Matt Harvey opted for rehab vice surgery. I am not 100% sure I like this decision. If I was his owner, I would be very skeptical of any 2014 production from him.

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Lots of decent information today.

• Miguel Cabrera is hurting and it is killing his bat speed (source)

“All that stuff has affected my offensive numbers,” Cabrera said. “My swing is not as fast as it normally is, and those are things that you must face on a daily basis. But that won’t keep me from going out on the field and trying to help this team win ballgames.”

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My main goal over the season’s last few MASH reports is to keep a good list of players out for the season, but not officially on the DL. Besides the two DL lists at the bottom, I will look at a few players and updated PAIN and HURT reports.

• Tony Cingrani is out with back spasms. I could see the Reds experiment with him to find out if he is able to contribute in the post season. I would just stay away from him over the rest of the season.

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Sorry for no report at the end of last week, I had a funeral to attend. For today’s report, I have a ton of information to catch up on. First, the official and unofficial DL lists are updated. I am trying to keep the unofficial one up to date the best I can, but sorry if I miss any players. For most of the rest of the article, I will look at couple of hitters playing through injuries and about a dozen pitchers returning from the disabled list.

• Buster Posey’s has a broken ring finger, but he does think it will affect him much (source).

“From what I’m hearing from trainers and doctors, hopefully in a couple of days, once it calms down, I’ll be able to play through it,” said Posey, who called the pain “minimal.”

He has played in one game (yesterday) since the injury and got 2 hits, including a double. I would not be surprised to see his power suffer a bit as he deals with the injury.

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September has started and that means tracking disabled players should becomes easier since no team puts players on it with the expanded rosters. Instead of taking the easy route, I am going to try to keep a list of players who would probably be on the DL if teams still had to use it. I will stay on the conservative side and list players who may be healthy. If they just DH or PH, I will still list them.

• A couple of interesting injury articles were recently published. First, the Pioneer Press examined changes in catcher masks and if they are behind the increase in catcher concussions. Also, Dustin Palmateer of Baseball Prospectus looked at forecasting pitcher injuries by their college pitch load. Short answer, he found no correlation.

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I narrowed down the PAIN list to just August vs. the rest of the season for today. Additionally, I looked at Justin Verlander and ran an updated HURT list.

• In our Tuesday night chat, someone asked Paul Swydan and me if Verlander’s decline is because of an injury. Challenge taken. The 30-year-old’s average fastball velocity and Zone% are down over the last few seasons.

Season: Average Fastball Velocity, Zone%
2010: 95.4, 52.3%
2011: 95.0, 51.0%
2012: 94.3, 51.9%
2013: 93.1, 50.7%

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Well, after a couple weeks of talking about having a mid-season PAIN metric, I finally got around to coding one up. Besides mid-season PAIN, I have a quick look at Halladay, Buchholz and a handful of others.

• Clay Buchholz was averaging over 92 mph on his fastball before going on the DL. In his first rehab game, he was in the upper 80’s (source).

Red Sox manager John Farrell said. “His velocity was in the upper 80s. He came out of it physically fine, which is the biggest thing. We’ll have a chance to discuss where and when his next outing will be, probably tomorrow.” 

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Not a ton of injury information over the past few days. I promise to get a month-to-month, vice a year-to-year, PAIN leader board. Instead, I examined the HURT and PAIN leaders for well established starting pitchers and hitters.

• I wanted to start by talking about the rash of catchers going on the DL and the fantasy impacts. First off, catching is tough. Kneeling for every pitch, having foul balls hit your head and nads, collisions at the plate. To put it in perspective, six of the last players to go on the concussion DL have been catchers. On the season, 9 of the of the 17 concussion DL trips have been by catchers.

A general fantasy rule is to never pay above or at market price for a catcher. This theme has been backed with such catchers as Joe Mauer and Buster Posey spending significant time on the DL in recent seasons. For these reasons, I try to minimize the risk I take early in a draft or with top auction dollars and not look for catcher then. Additionally, in advanced leagues, all the owners may take this rule to the extreme and catchers can be picked up for a fraction of their value.

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Quite a bit of injury information for once. I am looking at a few reader suggestions from last week and examing a few bigger named pitchers coming off the DL. Later this week, I will look at the PAIN and HURT leaders with an attempt to look at PAIN over a section of the season vice the whole enchilada.

First some reader questions from last week.

• Me and Adam Jones asked the following about Adam Jones “Is it an injured psyche from the banana incident or something more?” I am going with the banana. His power was fine (ISO and HR/9 are almost the same as 2012). His Speed Score was the same as last year (5.2 vs 5.3). Also his contact was up about 1.5% points. No sign of a real injury.

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