• Reports from Scott Boras have Matt Harvey returning at 100% health to start spring training.

….. Harvey underwent surgery on July 18 to remove a rib. The goal was to free compressed nerves traveling from his shoulder to his armpit, allowing them to function normally again. For much of this season, Harvey was pitching without complete feeling in his arm and fingers.

“When you lose that sensation, man, it’s scary for a pitcher,” Boras said. “You don’t know. He’s sitting here struggling and he’s struggling and he’s struggling, and it’s so mentally stressful not to be able to execute.”

I am little more optimistic with Harvey than other pitchers coming back from other elbow surgeries because the injury wasn’t because of damage to his arm.

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• Michael Brantley is in the news after an article by Jon Heyman stated:

Sources familiar with Cleveland Indians outfielder Michael Brantley’s shoulder surgery suggest they believe it is quite serious, and that he could in fact miss significant time next season.

Word based on those sources is that “they had to re-anchor the muscle to the bone.”

This was news to Brantley and the team and they shot back with:

“Our expectation is that he’ll be ready for spring training,” said Chris Antonetti, Indians president of baseball operations. “We were told after the second surgery that the timeline (for recovery) would be four to five months. As far as I know, nothing has changed.”

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Andre Dawson became a free agent after the summer of 1986 and he had just one request, his new home field must have grass. After 10 years of playing on Montreal’s artificial turf, Dawson’s knees were destroyed forcing him to move to from center field to a corner outfield spot. I saw him in the 2012 All-Star celebrity softball game and it was painful to watch him move. No one knows for sure how much production was sapped from Dawson by the turf, but I will try to find out. Today, I am going to look into the past and possibly future on playing on how turf ages a player.

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Last week of the regular season! Like the real baseball, I am sure many of you in fake baseball are still sorting through your playoffs. Here’s hoping that this info can be of help and use to you. Let’s get to it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the utter sadness of Jose Fernandez’ untimely death. We have discussed his injuries here in the MASH Report before, but this is just a gut punch for sure. The exuberance with which he played the game is something we will miss. After dealing with TJS in 2014 and a shoulder issue last year, he was putting up the best numbers of his young career. While not 100% back into a sound mechanical groove, he was, in my opinion, starting to show improvement. Too bad we won’t get to see the next chapter. What a career cut short. Prayers for the family.

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Today’s MASH edition is brought to you by some questions I hand listening to Ringer’s The MLB Show podcast featuring Ben Lindbergh and guest Stan Conte (former head Dodgers’ trainer). I would recommend listening to the entire podcast as there is quite a bit of information on injuries. From the podcast, a couple of pieces of information were mentioned by Conte I just wanted to verify them.

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The Mets continue to find new ways of being “Amazin’,” albeit this reference is to Jacob deGrom and his bothersome elbow. Recall he has TJS in 2010, and for whatever reason scar tissue has enveloped parts of his elbow, especially around the ulnar nerve. Recall from your anatomy classes that the ulnar nerve is also the “funny bone.” About as poorly named as “Microsoft Works.” Anyway, also recall how that feels when you hit that nerve….try throwing a baseball and hitting your spots with your elbow feeling that way. Point being is that he is most likely done for the year. Surgery, albeit minor, is required to clean the elbow up of scar tissue. No hesitations as of now for 2017.

Let’s get caught up with our friend Stephen Strasburg, shall we?

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Another great Monday to you all! I don’t have as many specific players to go over, but the ones I do have listed I want to go into a little more detail on.

To start with, let’s go with Stephen Strasburg and his curious elbow/forearm.

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Today’s MASH Report is being brought to you by Ryan Butcher and Wade Davis. The pair were given a few days off recently to get themselves back together. Butcher was sent to the minor and Davis to the DL. While both may have needed a break, one interesting note exists about them missing time, both pitchers experienced a drop in their fastball spin rate right before the decision was made

These are the first two times I have seen a major league team admit that a pitcher’s spin was used to decide on how they handle a pitcher. It has been known for a while that changes in spin rate can help detect injuries. Eno Sarris talked to FanGraphs friend, Kyle Boddy about this issue.

From that discovery flowed others. “Spin-rate changes are actually one of the best predictors of injury,” pointed out Boddy, a fact that was confirmed as a known within many parts of the baseball community by multiple sources. At Driveline, pitchers have their spin rates monitored constantly for the earliest signs of unhealthy fatigue.

The problem for the general public, we have not had good access to pitch spin data until StatCast began releasing data last year. Here is a detailed look at the two pitchers whose spin rate change cause their team to act and can we make any conclusion from them.

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A fine extra-day-off to you all…unless you have to pull the “work on a holiday” thing. Props to you for sure. Either way, thanks for reading and for all of the comments in the previous weeks.

I mentioned this last week, but I want to camp on this topic for a second. The number-one purpose of a team’s minor league farm system is to develop future talent, we all know that. However, there is a extra fringe benefit that having lower-level teams provide, and that is a place for their injured MLB guys to go down and get some valuable game experience before their official return back to the show. You can “simulate games” all you want, but that extra kick of adrenaline that comes from real competition is something practice can’t provide. For the majority of the season, it’s a regular thing to send a guy down to the minors for a game or tow or three. Now we are the point in the year where most minor leagues begin playoffs today or tomorrow, and it is a little much sometimes for a minor league manager fighting for a title to be expected to throw a random guy from the big-league team into their mix for one game.

Which leaves really the fall instructional leagues as a team’s only viable option for rehab assignments for their players at this point in the season. Made up mainly of AA-and-below level players, and even then, doesn’t start for about another 2 weeks. This “black hole” of games is definitely something to be factored into how fast/slow a team decides to bring an injured player back, or to shut him down altogether.

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Last week, I examined hitters who had a known injury they were playing through and then determined how their Stat Cast exit velocity changed. Today, I am moving on from back looking at injuries (reactive) to forward-looking (predictive). Any important conclusions drawn this early in the process should be taken with a grain of salt, but I will trudge along on anyway.

One issue I will continue to run into when looking at this data is the lack of data. Having less than two season’s worth of data is frustrating to work with. Five to six years from now, we will likely be laughing at the work that was done with so little information. Just be skeptical of the information provided as I am trying to be at the tip of the spear so I am likely to get cut a few times.

The more I looked at the data, it seemed a large drop of around 5 mph to 6 mph was indicative of a major injury. The one problem I ran into was players like A.J. Pollock who have both speed and power. Charlie Blackmon and Starling Marte as other similar players. They have wider normal ranges in exit velocity, so instead I went with looking at a half of the standard deviation of the player’s exit velocity to help flag injured players. Most of the time this value is around 5 to 7 mph.

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