UTK Special: End of Season 2022

Rounding Up The Year In Injuries

$835 million dollars.

That’s the total lost payroll as a result of injuries in Major League Baseball in 2022. The Ricketts family purchased the Cubs a decade ago for slightly more than that amount. Every franchise is valued more than $835m now, but the Rays and A’s are only slightly more so. You could work out the financing. You could hire a CEO. You could buy the Rockefeller’s art collection. You could buy 10 million square feet of industrial space. At today’s price of around $145, you could buy 5.75 million shares of Apple or about 0.004 of the company. Sounds less impressive that way. Companies with a market cap around there include IMAX, Sleep Number, and Guess.

But back to the Ricketts, as an example. If one of their businesses, such as their former keystone of Ameritrade, had a department that was losing $44m, their highest loss in a decade, I imagine there would be major changes in that department. Maybe it would need new leadership, more focus, or more investment. A source with the Cubs told me the team did not plan any significant changes for their medical or performance staff this offseason.

There’s a clear success story and if I still gave out an award for best medical staff, it’s clear that Lonnie Soloff and the Cleveland Guardians would be receiving it. (Anyone want to sponsor its return?) That would be back to back, with a decade plus of success. The Guardians were multiple-time winners* back when the award was being given out, with Soloff’s staff pushing out people like Nick Kenney, who went on to win with his Royals staff. It’s telling that I can’t find a single interview with Soloff on YouTube!

The Guardians had a ridiculous total, losing only 700 days and less than $2.5 million in salary. With both the average and median at around $27.5m, that’s a $25m savings attributable to the medical staff and given the contribution to the Guardians winning the division and heading to the playoffs, that savings vastly understates the contribution to the bottom line. A playoff share will be nice for them, but I hope that the Guardians front office and ownership reward them as well.

The intriguing thing is that the biggest injury losses aren’t an indication of success. Teams like the Dodgers, Mets, and Yankees choose to take on risk with a high talent ceiling. The Mets signed Max Scherzer knowing that at age-38, he was likely to miss time, and he did so. He also certainly pitched as well as could be expected, with the oblique strain causing only a minor hiccup in his and the team’s season. The same is true of the other “big wallet” teams, though with all team’s owned by a collection of billionaires, there’s no reason all teams couldn’t do this.

On the other hand, we’ve seen the smaller spending teams make more of a focus on health. If the Rays and A’s won’t spend $100m on payroll, they certainly can’t lose the $46m that the Yankees did. However, on a percentage basis, it’s even more problematic. Much of the Rays lost payroll was focused on a couple high dollar pitchers lost to Tommy John surgery. The A’s losing less than $10m on the season, despite a high number of injuries tells you both how good the medical staff is and how low the payroll numbers really are for the stuck-in-limbo franchise.

There’s a gulf of $70 million dollars from top to bottom, a vast difference that simply isn’t possible in any other American sport. (It’s worse in European football.) That makes WAR/WARP a better proxy for how it affected a team and for those, the affect can be telling. The Reds, Twins, and Rays lost the most days, but ranked at or near the midline for dollars lost. Lost WARP again shows the Twins and Rays at the bottom, an unusual position for both franchises, but the losses to the White Sox and Red Sox are clearly related to why their seasons went the way they did.

Indeed, we can look at the delta between the White Sox and the Guardians and see a clear correlation between their 10 game gap in the standings and a 5.5 WARP gap in their injury stats. We don’t see that with the Braves and Mets, where the Mets, even with high profile and long losses from key pitchers, finished slightly ahead of the Braves (0.3 WARP). Indeed, so many of the low WARP teams were low payroll teams, which correlates with low talent in too many cases.

I’ll also note here that the Orioles were among the lowest in all categories, which suggests team health had something to do with their unexpected surge. While the team certainly has a front office that understands the important of team health, I’m not sure we can credit the surge as much to the health as to the influx of talent. Separating the two is something I’ve struggled with over the years and is one of my holy grails.

The downside of data is that it often comes without context, especially in an area where most don’t pay attention, like injuries and workload management. A low dollars lost can come from low injury totals or a low payroll and have to be taken in context, often utilizing percentages and weights. Days and dollars are easy measures, but they don’t always tell the story in detail. In aggregate, that $835 million dollar number should shock some owners, but we’ve had big numbers for the last twenty years which has created little change. I don’t expect this one will be different, sadly, which means players should be taking more control of their own fate and health.

Looking at both the highs and lows of the season is a good exercise, but I would note that any one-year result can be luck, good or bad. The Guardians make this very easy, with the lowest lost days and dollars across the last two years and yes, any data from 2020 can be tossed aside. We’ll spend the next decade trying to figure that out, including the problems with Tommy John surgery. For any other, I look at three-year trends in most cases, though it’s also interesting to see when staff changes are made. Those are difficult to track and often require an insider knowledge, which is tougher to type out without burning sources!

I must note that the data used here comes from my own database, but owes much to the work at Spotrac and by Derek Rhoads at Baseball Prospectus. They make it far easier (and public) to see this kind of data, especially with Rhoads’ great data visualizations. They, along with Rotowire, deserve your respect and support.

*I’m all the way through the regular season and I don’t think I referred to the Guardians as their past name once all year. I’ve done that with the Commanders in two different ways already, just four weeks into the NFL season. Here’s my question - how do we refer to the Guardians in past-tense? Do we just now pretend they were the Guardians all along, or do we use the past name for those references?