Under The Knife 6/28/23

The Halfway Dissertation and 2,000 Words on the Tigers

Get ready for a long one, folks …

It’s the halfway point. I know that the All Star break is supposed to be that, but they push it back for TV. Why? I’m honestly not sure. But that lets us look around the league at the surprises, the disappointments, and the new friends we’ve made along the way. There’s plenty of those around the league and plenty of stories will be popping up detailing them. I’ll skip that here.

If there’s one shock statistic, it’s that elbow and shoulder injuries are up 44 percent. Even without that number, it feels like almost every rotation is down one or two guys, that depth is being tested on every team, and that many teams will be struggling just to find innings by the end of the season. I spoke with one AGM this week who was using a model similar to my injury risk model to try and find pitchers who would just stay healthy, let alone be good pitchers. “Right now, I’d take 100 league average innings as having more value than upside right now,” he said. With the cost of that in both dollars and prospects, it’s going to be interesting.

The flip side of this is that injuries might go down. Call that regression to the mean or survivor effect, but if they do go down or level out, it’s not because MLB did something and not even because some teams figured something out (though I think one team did.) No teams I know of are using biomechanics differently despite near-universal access. No teams I know of are using something like The Kinetic Arm to help with arm injuries. Only a handful are doing workload models and even those are doing them inefficiently.

There’s more to be done, but MLB itself isn’t pushing this. The league level initiatives such as Statcast haven’t translated into reduced injuries and yes, that was one of the touted benefits as well as centralizing the costs. The league level research is low, but it’s almost always been that way. Worse, the league level influence on best practices and being heard is at a low, largely because of turnover and because Rob Manfred and other suits simply don’t seem to value it enough to push it.

Imagine Manfred putting the same emphasis on pitching injuries as he did on the pitch clock. Instead, Manfred will defend the pitch clock to the death, even in the face of growing evidence that the clock is contributing if not causative to the injury increase.

Which all means there’s plenty of injuries, so let’s get to it:

MATT MANNING, SP DET (fractured foot)
EDUARDO RODRIGUEZ, SP DET (sprained finger)
TARIK SKUBAL, SP DET (strained forearm)
MATTHEW BOYD, SP DET (sprained elbow)

The Detroit Tigers aren’t going to win the World Series this year. With a new GM in place and an odd mix of talent, the team has been in transition, leaving 2023 something of a bridge year. It’s not a tear down, it’s not a rebuild, but it’s also not showing a clear direction. A lot of that is due to injury and basically looking at the season and saying “Well, we’ll get Casey Mize back and Tarik Skubal will get half a season, and that’s the top of the 2024 rotation.” It’s a bit of wishful thinking on top of a timeline.

What it doesn’t do is get them through 2023 in any sort of fashion and adding losses to it, whether big like Matthew Boyd needing a Tommy John revision after coming back last year from flexor tendon surgery, or small like Eduardo Rodriguez having a finger pulley issue that will cost him a month, leave AJ Hinch and Scott Harris looking at the board to figure out where the next 400 innings of starting pitching is going to come from and whether it can be much better than replacement value.

In a lot of ways, the Tigers aren’t all bad. They’re not in last. There is talent, and some young talent coming. The payroll isn’t out of whack. The front office is solid, new, and Hinch seems adequate if not ideal. If healthy, this team would be better, which is a doubled edged sword indeed.

But they’re also not good, at -70 on run diff, 3 percent to make the playoffs, and running out of live arms, even with some coming back. They’ve used 23 pitchers so far this season — as Prince says, it’s June — and they’re under 6 wins of value from them. Two of their best pitchers, Tyler Holton and Jason Foley, are middle relievers.

With Matt Manning returning from his quirky foot injury, Rodriguez throwing his rehab start on Thursday, Alex Faedo about to start his rehab, Skubal throwing well on his extended rehab run in Toledo, and Spencer Turnbull back on a mound, there’s ways to look at the pitching situation and think there’s the makings of enough innings there. But when you look at how many re-injuries this team has had - Boyd, Turnbull, Beau Brieske - it’s easy to think there’s a lot of ways there’s not near enough injuries and not much left in ready reserve.

The Tigers, then, are in one of the worst places in baseball. The starting pitching is a land of uncertainty with a depleted backup on a team that’s not good enough to trade for assets unless they can contribute to a larger plan. Even if this goes well, it’s hard to say how any of this helps them in the next three seasons, where Harris and Hinch will have to find a path to better.

JAZZ CHISHOLM, OF MIA (turf toe)