2058 - A Divisional Look At Injuries at Mid-August

[RonCo]

As a general rule, I tend to tabulate injury data more toward the end of the year, but I admit I’ve been focused on it this season, and then a conversation on Discord got me to thinking about the impact on the competitive environment. And then someone asked for divisional breakdowns of my defensive metrics, and it suddenly struck me that it might be interesting to look at injuries with a focus on divisions, too.

So. There you have it.

The foundation for this little fancy into injuries, despite there still being roughly seven weeks left in the season.


OVERALL:

First let me say that in the big picture injuries seem to be pretty much exactly as they were last year, and the same as they have in all years I’ve looked at since whenever it was in the 40s when something changed to ramp them up. So, yes, the OOTP controller is still working however that controller works. Fr completion’s sake, and if I remember, I’ll do a final end of year tabulation. But trust me for now that the numbers across the league look pretty much where they “should be.”

So, let’s look at injuries and divisions, starting with:


Heartland

Team	Division	OUT	DTD	Setback	Total
Yellow Springs Nine	HEA	7	23	1	31
Des Moines Kernels	HEA	7	21		28
Madison Wolves	HEA	9	17	2	28
Chicago Black Sox	HEA	7	17	1	25
Twin Cities River Monsters	HEA	9	12		21
Omaha Cyclones	HEA	8	11		19
Nashville Bluebirds	HEA	3	13		16
Louisville Sluggers	HEA	6	7		13

Cellar-dweller Yellow Springs leads the league in overall injuries, though with fewer lost time incidents than Madison, Twin Cities, and Omaha. Of course, Nashville, th team that can “afford” injuries the most has incurred a quite clean run of it so far in 2058, incurring only 3 lost-time injuries (which is very low), and 13 DTD instances (which is also on the low end of the distribution.

The biggest oddity is Louisville, with the Sluggers having lost six players, and suffered only seven DTD bumps and bruises. That adds up to the “safest” profile of any team in the Heartland. It is maybe worth noting that of the six lost-time injuries, two each were to SP Ford Prefect and RP George Souder, essentially hobbling them most or all the year.

Bottom line, with the odd exception of Louisville, you could almost invert this order and get the ranked standings of the division. Or at least get the power structure right. I’m not sure what this means, but it’s interesting to think about.

Staying in the Frick League, we’ll move to:


Pacific

Team	Division	OUT	DTD	Setback	Total
Bikini Krill	PAC	8	26		34
Long Beach Surfers	PAC	6	24	2	32
San Fernando Bears	PAC	8	21	1	30
Portland Lumberjacks	PAC	9	18	2	29
Hawaii Tropics	PAC	8	11		19
Valencia Stars	PAC	5	10	1	16
Vancouver Mounties	PAC	5	10	1	16
Sacramento Mad Popes	PAC	4	8		12

Here we see a distribution that isn’t quite so correlated to the standings, but a piece of that could also be that the win distribution among the division is more cohesive (meaning there is no mega-beast at the top like Nashville stands atop the Heartland). Regardless, bottom-dweller Portland leads the league in most lost-time injuries, as well as tied for the lead in set-backs. They’ve also incurred 18 DTD injuries, a substantial number, but not a number that puts them at the top of those charts.

That leader would be Bikini, a team second from the bottom in the standings.

Long Beach and San Fernando, though, also register high, and the Surfers and Bears are currently vying for second place in the division, sandwiched between Sacramento at the top and Hawaii in 4th. Sacramento, at the top, has been the healthiest team in the league, followed by Vancouver—though that Vancouver number is a little misleading because it does not include the long lost time of Phil Cole, who incurred his injury last year, and lost the first half of this season as a result.

Moving on, let’s go to…


Frontier

Team	Division	OUT	DTD	Setback	Total
Rocky Mountain Oysters	FRO	8	28	1	37
Edmonton Jackrabbits	FRO	13	23		36
Mexico City Aztecs	FRO	8	15		23
Phoenix Talons	FRO	7	14	1	22
Calgary Pioneers	FRO	3	14	2	19
Las Vegas Hustlers	FRO	7	11		18
San Antonio Outlaws	PAC	8	9		17
Boise Spuds	FRO	3	13	1	17

Relative to the rest of the league, the Oysters have been getting shucked and the Jackrabbits stewed. I think Edmonton was expected to be bad, and they have been. Rocky Mountain has managed to weather the storm and remain competitive, though they have been “lucky” in that only eight of their league-leading 38 incidents have caused lost time. (I should note that two of their lost time injuries were for 1 day and 3 days, so they might make this view look a little bleaker than it should.

Boise is an interesting case. I, for one, did not see their early season dominance on my bingo card, yet—though they are fading a bit now—it happened, and you can’t take that away from them. They have, however, been quite healthy. Or at least they had until they lost SP ace Jeremy Nickerson for the season in July (which, arguably, was the beginning of their downslide).

Front-runners Calgary, Vegas, Phoenix, and Mexico City have all been “relatively” healthy, with division leader Calgary being best in class with only three lost-time injuries.

San Antonio is a bit of an outlier, as their 17 total incidents make them seem quite healthy, but their eight lost-time injuries push them down the pack a bit. It’s of curiosity that of the Outlaws 17 incidents, only one has been to a pitcher (and that was in spring training).

So, that brings us to the end…where, last but not least, we look into:


Atlantic

Team	Division	OUT	DTD	Setback	Total
Brooklyn Robins	ATL	11	18	3	32
Charlotte Flyers	ATL	4	23	1	28
Montreal Blazers	ATL	5	16	4	25
Atlantic City Gamblers	ATL	5	15		20
New Orleans Crawdads	ATL	7	8	2	17
Charm City Jimmies	ATL	7	8		15
Rockville Pikemen	ATL	2	12		14
Jacksonville Hurricanes	ATL	2	8		10

Wherein we see the Brooklyn Robins leading the division in both lost time injuries (by a very large degree) and incidents over all. I mean, it’s not really close.

Of course, the rest of the teams are kind of jumbled up, though, when it comes to winning records and injury rates. Division leader Montreal, arguably known for their aversion to injury prone players, is upper middle when it comes to injuries around the division. They’ve had 26 incidents, though only five lost-time problems. In second and third, though, Charm City and New Orleans have been fairly healthy. One might argue that Charlote would be a tad more competitive than their already solid 65-56 record if they were not toward the top of the injury board (Note, Robert Menzies is “only” good for two DTD and on lost0time incident, so the issue is deeper than just him—counting Menzies, the Flyers have had six players register multiple injuries in 2058).

Jacksonville has been the healthiest team in not only the Atlantic division, buit all of baseball. They sit at 60-61, though.


SUMMARY:


So, what do we make of it? Obviously, injuries make a difference, right? Sometimes the best ability is availability, as the old saying goes. But how much of this is a chicken and egg thing? Does injury rate define who wins? No. Of course not. Except to the extent that it does. And we all know that baseball in real life is actually quite brutal. We just don’t think about it much. We tend to ignore the fact that teams who suffered big injuries in the middle of the year and faded were really good teams, even if they won only 82 games, or whatever.

In real baseball, injuries are injuries, and that’s that. I mean, we can cast insinuations about one team’s use of the IL over another’s but in the end it is what it is.

Then there’s the meta-game of OOTP in which, unlike the real world, we have an actual toggle to say how many players get hurt. Is “Realistic” actually realistic these days? “Is Very High?” I know we are on “Normal,” how does it compare to real life (as I recall, the injury rates we seen now are about 25-30% higher than they were when we had then a notch lower, but I still don’t know how they relate to “real baseball” (vs. “realistic”). So, whatever, right?

At the end of the day, all we can do is lace ’em up and play. [grin]

[jiminyhopkins]

At the end of the day, all we can do is lace ’em up and play. [grin]

[CTBrewCrew]

Wonder how each teams trainer is rated. Cause-ation or correlation ?

My injuries are part of why my pythag is so bad

[BaseClogger]

I wouldn’t think of injuries and pythag as related. That difference with pythag has been brutal for you.