Travis d’Arnaud, Yasmani Grandal, Yan Gomes and Injury

Injury is perhaps the greatest vehicle of luck in sports. The haphazard bounce of the ball, twinge of the tendon, strain of the muscle — these things not only rob the player of playing time, but they also keep them from performing at 100%. And though we’ve had some success predicting injury, mostly on the basis of past injury, we haven’t come that far. Even the most basic advice with respect to injury wouldn’t have helped us avoid this trio of injured backstops, anyway.

Yasmani Grandal, Travis d’Arnaud, and Yan Gomes averaged 92 games played this year. They hurt shoulders, brains, elbows, knees, and hands. They took time off, they rehabbed, they played through some. They were hurt.

Rob Arthur looked at position player injury and created an equation that predicts future injury based on past days missed and age. It’s a great piece of research. It predicted that these players would miss some time — d’Arnaud the most, since he had two major injuries in the two years heading up to 2015 — but it also didn’t nail the mark with any of them.

Catcher’s Time Missed, Actual and Projected

Catcher	Projected Time Missed	Actual Time Missed	DL Stints
Travis d’Arnaud	26.0	90	2
Yasmani Grandal	2.3	18	1
Yan Gomes	9.3	46	1

Time missed measured in days.

I suppose you could look at the d’Arnaud projection as a win. Being projected to miss a month is about as extreme as the projections get — if he were 35 instead of 26, you’d still only add .04 days missed to the projection. He’s injury prone, the numbers told us he was injury prone, and if we bought, we should have known. It was worse than the projection, but he’s now missed 90, 19, 104, and 71 days in the past four years due to injury.

But track down to Grandal’s line and you’ll see that it’s not always about missed days. Sometimes it’s about what happens when the player plays through the injury.

For example, the first official missed day as a result to shoulder injury for Grandal came on August 13th. Let’s just split his season around that date, even though he was most likely feeling something in that shoulder before August 13th.

Yasmani Grandal, Before and After Injury

Time Period	BA	OBP	SLG	BB%	K%	Pull%	HR/FB	Hard%
April-August 13	0.284	0.389	0.489	14.5%	20.3%	34.1%	19.5%	32.2%
August 13-October	0.052	0.229	0.091	17.7%	26.0%	49.1%	4.8%	20.8%

Anybody who owned Grandal knows about these splits, as disgusting as they are. Anybody who considered picking him up after his owner turfed them knows the splits, too. We should probably do our best to forget these things. We know they won’t have a huge effect on his projected days missed, Jeff Zimmerman’s work seems to suggest that Grandal’s power projections for next year will be unduly dimmed by this injury, and he’s still a mid-20s catcher that has shown great power and patience.

But how do we deal with this in general? Is it possible to take something away from this group as a whole?

The last catcher in the trio didn’t have a lengthy injury history, and was 28 going into the year. Are we going to just shake our heads at the whole position? The problem with saying that catchers get hurt more is that they might not, actually. Not in a way you’d see easily in a chart at least. Here’s 2010’s chart, from Jeff Zimmerman:

Unless you’re also ready to dock second basemen and left fielders for playing time, you shouldn’t take much time from a catcher. And most of our analysis is within a position, anyway, so unless they are about to switch to designated hitter (which may have helped Evan Gattis but didn’t help John Jaso), it’s not very helpful to say that ‘catchers barely get hurt more than other positions.’

Are all three of these guys on your don’t draft list next year? That would be a shame. None of them are turning 30, and all three of them have power without great flaws. Two of them still have space between their past production and their most likely peak production level. If you decided to avoid them all, you’d probably lose out on a great season next year, or two.

But, even in this group, there are differences. The one with the longest injury history — d’Arnaud — missed the most time. The oldest one, with the second-most projected days missed, missed the second-most time. So consider injury history first, and then age. That’s an easy lesson, and the equation tells us the same things.

What do we learn from Yasmani Grandal? If you’re in a redraft league, and your hitter starts complaining about a shoulder or wrist injury and playing through it for the good of the team… that’s the time to drop them. There’s a physical reason that player is not producing, and it often won’t go away until offseason surgery, like the one Grandal is currently scheduled to undergo next week.