2010 Disabled List: Injury Locations
In a couple of previous articles, I looked at the 2010 disabled list data for all the teams and player positions. I have finally gone through and compiled the data on body part locations.
Last year Josh Hermsmeyer compiled an injury database with 2002 to 2009 DL information. In it, he set a format for selecting the various body parts. I have gone ahead and used the same categories. I have made another spreadsheet (Sheet 2) with these various designations for people to use. I will format the 2010 injury information so it can be combined with Josh’s data once the new retrosheet data set is released after the playoffs are completed.
To make the body location data easier for interpretation, I have combined Josh’s categories into a few broad categories:
Arms and Hands – hand, wrist, forearm, upperarm
Elbow – elbow
General – generalmedical
Hip – hip
Legs and Feet – ankle, foot, knee, thigh, lowerleg
Neck and Head – face, head, neck
Shoulder – shoulder
Trunk – upperback, back, chest, abdomen
First, here is the injury location data for total days and trips for pitchers and hitters to the DL:
No real surprise here with pitchers dominating days lost to elbow and shoulder injuries and hitters mainly having injuries to their arms and legs.
Finally, here is a comparison of the average number of days lost for pitchers and hitters.
Pitchers take longer to get off the DL, excect for hip and general injuries. Well that is it for today. My next project is a little more ambitious as I want to find the chances of a player going on the DL knowing a set of conditions (i.e. previous injury history, age, etc).
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.
can’t see pictures
It must be some internet filtering issues. I had 3 people check and they can see the images just fine.
Awesome work. Do certain types of injuries more often strike certain age groups of players?
One interesting thing I noted is that while pitchers lost more days to shoulder injuries, hitters actually had more trips to the DL due to shoulder injuries.
Yes that did standout – Jeff is this real or a mistake? Hitters had 3x more DL trips for shoulder issues than pitchers? (maybe the numbers got reversed by accident?)
It also does not seem consistent with the 3rd graph. (The 3rd graph should essentially just be the 1st graph divided by the 2nd)
There must be a mistake somewhere in one of the graphs on the shoulder data point.
I will re-check, give me a bit
Corrected, sorry about that.
The body parts labels in the text of the document state “Arms and Feet,” which should be “Arms and Hands.”
Did you intentionally use the Mets’ team colors for this injury chart? Or was that a subliminal choice?
+1
Really interesting stuff, especially your next project. Thanks.
So, how could data like this be translated and used to argue the decision for or against having a 7-day DL only for concussions?
It seems maybe unnecessary to me, to implement such a specific rule with the lack of head injuries that take place throughout MLB. I understand they probably want to give teams incentive to report and treat such medical issues, but limiting the trip to a specific head related injury seems really tricky to regulate and possibly easy to abuse.
is there data for…
injury locations by fielding position?
average injury durations for a location related to fielding positions?
injury locations from a hitting, base running, or fielding situation?
and even a break down for situations of how concussion related injuries usually occur
Nice
Looking at the concussion rule, I see some merit in it.
Player has head injury, maybe a concussion, maybe just an external bruise. The team doesn’t know for sure, but wants to have player available ASAP. I would make the team within 12 hours of the injury contact MLB that they are putting the player on the DL. There is chance for abuse, but I would rather have it that way than people “forced” to play before we know they are 100%.
The data I linked at the beginning states the player’s positions. Answers first 2 questions.
MLB transactions don’t have how the player was injured, but with the spreadsheet, each concussion could be looked up.
Cool!
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