MASH Report – PAIN, HURT and SLOW Reports

As promised, here are the updates reports on some of my injury finding metrics.

HURT (Hitter’s Under-performance from Recent Trauma) Rankings (introduction/explanation) :

Any player with a HURT value over 100 (red) has the traits of a batter playing through an injury.

2014 Data

Many familiar names of hurt players.

• Jacoby Ellsbury was a player I didn’t remember being hurt. His drop is because of both a lower power and contact rate. He missed a couple of days in early June for his hip, but before the data he had a .122 ISO and .124 after. No real change. The possible injury seems to have affected his entire season. It will be interesting to see if he says anything about an injury this offseason.

July and August

More extreme values, but still an interesting list.

• J.J. Hardy experience back issues late last season and into this season. Also, he just had a thumb injury which cost him some time. He has seen is ISO go from .170 to .108 and his Contact% from 88% to 82%. Either or both injuries could be bring him down.

PAIN (Pitcher Abuse INdex) Rankings (introduction/explanation)

Any player with a PAIN value over 100 (red) has the traits of a pitcher likely to be hurt.

Comparing 2013 to 2014

• Alex Cobb sticks out on the list. The main reason for him showing up is his drop in Zone% from 47% to 42%. Besides this drop, everything else is good. His BB% is down from 8% to 7%. His velocity is up. His results seem fine. Zone% is used to help find pitcher who are unable to throw strikes. It seems Cobb has made the move intentionally and it has led to good results.

• Kevin Gausman with a 1 mph drop in velocity a Zone% decline from 46% to 41%. The velocity decline can be explained by the extra speed he had throwing out of the bullpen in 2013, not the Zone%. It has been slowly decreasing over the season.

Unlike Cobb, Gausman’s results have been effected. Strikeouts down from 24% to 16%. Walks up from 6% to 10%.

Comparing March-July 2014 to August 2014

• Ian Kennedy seems to be struggling since he missed a start with an abdominal strain in late July. Here are some numbers from before and after the injury:

Time frame: Velocity (FF), Zone%, BB%
Before: 91.8, 52%, 7.5%
After: 90.9, 45%, 12.2%

He is not the same pitcher as he was before. I would just stay away from him for the rest of the season.

SLOW (Swinging Late or Whiffing) Hitters

2014 SLOWest Bats

I created SLOW to help find if a player is able to solidly hit fastballs (>92 mph). A value of 100 or more means fastballs are owning the player.

I have no good way to filter out the pitchers. A quick way to find regular hitters is to look for a Heart value over 100.

• George Springer is on the list which should not be a surprise with his 33% K%, but I love how Brooksbaseball.net describes how he handles fastballs:

Against All Fastballs (779 seen), he has … a disastrously high likelihood to swing and miss (37% whiff/swing).