Hitters Who Played Through a 2024 Injury

With the season over, it’s to find out how hitters performed who didn’t let an injury heal and played through the pain. Whether these hitters cause permanent damage to their bodies or pick up bad habits, they continue to underperform their projections. Besides collecting the names myself, I’ve asked for some help (article) for this past season’s list.

First, here is a look at how 2023 hitters performed compared to their Steamer projections.

The overall difference aligned with the historic values, but the adjusted rate took a hit with the league-wide OPS dropping 23 points (previous editions: 2017 to 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023).

By combining all the previous values, here are the historic adjustments.

A 36-point drop in OPS might not seem like a lot, but it’s just over a 10% drop in production (-10 points of wRC+).

With the historic numbers out of the way, here are all the batters I could verify played through an injury.

And here are the guys I suspect played through an injury but I could not verify the information.

One hitter who made the second list and could be included in the first list is Adley Rutschman. Until July 27th, when Rutschman missed a couple of games with a hand injury, he was hitting .300/.351/.479. After the injury, he hit just .189/.279/.280. The best info I could find was his GM stating that something happened and Rutschman will have to say what.

That’s it for now but if any new information comes up during the offseason, I will add it to this article.