MASH Report (10/31/13) – Cabrera and His Groin

Injury news is really beginning to come to a halt. I moved the MASH Report to just once a week and soon it may go to every other week. To keep it going  more regularly, I could look at look at specific injury types and their recovery rates. I would like to run analysis on different injuries like I did with groins today. If there are any specific injury cases you want compared, please let me know in the comments. Next week, I will probably look at pitchers who recently had Tommy John surgery, but I could use other injury types as the off-season goes on.

• The big injury news of the week was Miguel Cabrera having groin surgery which altered his game at the season’s end. He basically could not lift his front leg (source):

“The doctor said he didn’t understand how I could have played with so much pain,” Cabrera told Rojas. “It hurt so much that I almost couldn’t lift my right leg, and that was the reason I couldn’t reach the outside fastballs at the end of the season.”

Cabrera looks to be rehabbing for 6-8 weeks. Froglegs Jackson asked in a MASH comment last week, what should we expect from Cabrera going forward. First, remember he will be 31-years-old with a skill set on the decline.

Second, how will the groin injury affect him. My injury database doesn’t have a ton of information on in-season surgeries and no off-season ones. I was able to put together a list of hitters who had groin surgery and/or missed 45 days or more because of a groin issue. Here are the results (average age of player at time of injury was 31-years-old)

Time frame	AVG	OBP	SLG	ISO
Year Before to Year of Injury	-0.018	-0.016	-0.032	-0.014
Year of Injury to Year After Injury	-0.004	-0.006	-0.009	-0.005
Year Before to Year After Injury	-0.012	-0.012	-0.020	-0.008
Normal Aging Factors (30 to 32)	-0.006	-0.004	-0.014	-0.008

The projections during the injury season were down quite a bit. I am not surprised with these values at all. Hitters would try to play through the injury, like Cabrera did, and their game would suffer. Looking at the numbers from the season’s before and after the injury (compared to the normal aging factors), AVG seemed to be affected the most. While OBP and SLG are down, it looks to be driven by the AVG decline. The player’s ISO declined by the normal aging factor.

In all, I don’t expect the groin to be a problem for Miguel Cabrera in 2014.

• Josh Reddick had wrist surgery and expects to be back to 100% by spring training.

• A trio of Nationals, Stephen Strasburg, Adam LaRoche and Bryce Harper, all underwent successful minor surgeries. Each should be full recovered by the time spring training rolls around.

Possible Players on the DL to Start the 2014 Season

(*) 15 Day Disabled List
(**) 60 Day Disabled List
(***) 7 Day Concussion List
(****) Free Agent
Red colored entries are updates since last report.

Major League Report

Minor League Report