New In-Game Injury Information
A plethora of information is available to fantasy owners with most just a repeat from one season to the next. For this reason, it’s tough to find anything new or helpful. Joe Rosales has stepped forward this year to provide six pages of useful injury nuggets in the Bill James Handbook, especially relating to catchers. Here are some of the highlights
1. Baseball Info Solutions is now collecting detailed injury information
Finally, and good luck. Building a comprehensive database is the key component to really understanding injuries. From personal experience, it’s just a pain-in-the-ass to track in-season injuries and also compile the end-of-season database. While, I’m sure the information is not going to be free to the public, at least the information is being collected for someone like Mr. Rosales to compile.
2. Most injury occurring events happen at home plate
One of the most informative pieces of information is this information on when the events occur.
There is a lot to digest but here are some highlights
- 85% of all injury-causing event happen at home plate.
- A hitter is more likely to be hurt “on a swing” than sliding or running into a wall.
- On average, 87 pitchers a season are hurt during a game for an injury while pitching
3. The most common events are least likely to cause an injury
The next major table is the percentage chance a player had to leave the game because of the above injuries. It’s almost the exact opposite order as the above table.
I was a little disappointed the author didn’t take the data one step further and combine the totals by the percentage chance. It was just 12 data points to copy over, so I ran the numbers. Here are the estimated 2015 to 2017 totals of when a player will need to leave the game.
| Injury type | Instances |
|---|---|
| Throwing a pitch | 134 |
| Running the bases | 126 |
| Stuck by batted ball/bat | 94 |
| Hit by pitch | 89 |
| Fielding a batted/thrown ball | 73 |
| On a Swing | 57 |
| Other | 43 |
| Collision with player | 37 |
| Sliding into a base | 34 |
| Collision with wall | 25 |
| Foul off Body | 15 |
| Throwing (non-pitch) | 13 |
I find it a bit interesting that more hitters must leave the game from a swing injury than sliding or a collision with a wall.
4. Body location for injuries
With most of the injuries happening at home plate, the lower leg, foot, and head injuries lead the list. And not surprisingly, most happen to catchers. Of the fielding injury events, catchers have over 4000 injury events over the three years while the other seven non-pitchers barely broke 100 events.
5. Catchers take a beating
The final third of the article goes over and over how much “catchers take a beating”. It’s a truism owners need to take into account. In this year’s BHQ’s Forecaster, I determined a significant effect this beating has on catchers by comparing their first half and second half performance.
Summary
The six-page article provided information and answers on several injury topics. Too bad it was only six pages long. With the dataset, I feel a researcher could find the answers to many possible questions. Hopefully, more will be available next year.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
Speculating about ‘other’…if the date range were broader that might include being run over by the phillie phanatic, or eaten by the tarp monster.