The Verducci Issue
Tom Verducci has made a tremendous career for himself, writing for Sports Illustrated, appearing on the MLB Network, and penning Joe Torre’s book to name a few components of his resume. He garnered plenty of fame over the last several years for what has since been termed “The Verducci Effect,” a theory that pitchers under the age of 25 are significant injury risks the year after they exceed their previous year’s innings pitched total by 30 or more frames. If Pitcher A was 22 years old, threw 100 innings in 2006 and 175 innings in 2007, he would be considered to be a risky asset.
The theory makes intuitive sense and studies have been attempted to both confirm and deny its validity. Still, because of the logic involved, it has become our nature to suspect that pitchers meeting the aforementioned criteria are in fact injury risks.
Last February, Verducci predicted that Ian Kennedy, Yovani Gallardo, Chad Gaudin, Fausto Carmona, Tom Gorzelanny, Ubaldo Jimenez, and Dustin McGowan would fall prey to his self-named effect. As he pointed out in an SI article yesterday, all but Jimenez suffered injuries in one form or another last season. Verducci acknowledged in his article that not all of the injuries were arm-related, but the idea that he was a successful prognosticator and that said predictions were correct is a bit questionable, especially given the acknowledgement that not all of the injuries were arm-related, and because I see no proof of how the injuries not related to the arm were caused by the taxation of pitching.
How would pitching 30+ innings cause Yovani Gallardo to tear his ACL? Or how it hurt Fausto Carmona’s hip while covering first base on a routine play? Or, perhaps how it caused Chad Gaudin to slip off of a curb and smack his back on a dumpster… and yes, you read that correctly. I am in no way criticizing the theory itself but rather the idea that these guys were correctly predicted simply because they happened to get injured at one point or another throughout the season.
We need to get more specific and look for pitchers to have arm issues, like McGowan and Gorzelanny did. The pitchers with injuries not related to the arm should not be touted, unless they are somehow proven to have been related to the act of pitching. This doesn’t rule out all all injuries not related to the arm but it does merit much further investigation on such injuries. Kudos to him for identifying the likes of Kennedy, Gorzelanny, and McGowan, but Gallardo, Gaudin and Carmona fell victim to other forms of injury, not the conditioning problems suggested by the 30+ innings idea. They may have fallen prey with more innings if not injured previously, but that is not the point here. These guys do not need to be touted if they are not proven victims of the theory.
Eric is an accountant and statistical analyst from Philadelphia. He also covers the Phillies at Phillies Nation and can be found here on Twitter.
Sure, Fausto didn’t sustain a pitching injury, but he didn’t throw many innings either. Perhaps a grade of “incomplete” is most appropriate.
The point isn’t grading the injuries, it’s that the injury the guy actually did suffer had nothing to do with the arm. Could he have suffered an arm related injury with more innings? Sure. But he didn’t, so he shouldn’t be included with the likes of McGowan or Gorzo.
Until you do a side-by-side comparison, none of this matters.
While there is strong cicumstansial evidence, there is no proof that the number of innings pitched leads to arm injuries.
What about the guys who increased their innings pitched and didn’t suffer an inuury? How come we never see that chart? It’s selecitve bias to prove a point that doesn’t exist.
When this guys shows me both charts side-by-side for comparison, and can show me his theory is correct, I’ll believe it. Until then, none of this matters.
Gallardo was actually hurt before he tore his ACL costing him most of the season. He missed most of spring training and the first month of the season.
It is still possible for non-arm injuries to be related to pitching fatigue or overwork. The arm is not the only part of your body that is taxed by the pitching motion, and even if the arm is where fatigue takes the greatest toll, fatigue in the arm can lead to compensation elsewhere that could lead to injuries. I’m not saying that is or isn’t the case here, but I don’t think we can flat out rule out all non-arm injuries as non-pitching-fatigue/workload related. Injuries like Fausto’s, for example-under normal circumstances, a professional athlete should not injure himself running to cover first base. It’s possible that his hip was under additional stress because of pitching-related fatigue that caused him to transfer some of the stress from his arm to other joints with small changes in his mechanics. It’s also possible that the injury was completely unrelated.
I agree that these can’t necessarily be considered victories for Verducci’s theory (particularly Gaudin’s injury), but I don’t think there is a solid enough reason to simply throw out all non-arm injuries as unrelated, at least without much deeper study into all the factors involved in the injuries. At the very least, Marco is right that these pitchers’ injuries kept them from providing any evidence contrary to Verducci’s theory, and in no way should he be considered having been wrong about them whether they directly support his theory or not.
Yes, still possible, but the investigation is definitely needed. Whether he’s right or wrong isn’t the issue… it’s that the results are touted WITHOUT this investigation.
I would agree with that. I think attempting to judge the results based on who got injured or even how they were injured is a sort of dodgy way to determine causation to begin with, and especially when they are presented without a baseline to measure against, or some sort of context, and when he’s looking at a couple dozen players over a span of a few years without clear definitions of what he’s looking for besides just getting hurt (or apparently a worsened ERA?). It seems that a deeper, multi-faceted approach would be more appropriate here, with medical examinations, mechanical breakdowns of pitchers when healthy and leading up to injury, Pitch F/X studies like Josh Kalk’s Injury Zone work, etc. all being used to try to pinpoint likely risk factors or causes of injury. I guess the issue is that most of those things aren’t available to most people, so the easy answer is to use (or at least report) more simplistic means. I suppose Verducci could be glossing over his results simply because of the target audience, and that he has something more legit than what he is reporting, but we can only go by what he reports even if that is the case.
It does seem to come down to your point that the claims, right or wrong, are simply not properly justified, and rather than tout the results as a superficial success, deeper study and wider investigation would be more appropriate. Maybe we shouldn’t hold that too much against Verducci: he seems to have put a lot into this theory and taken it as far as he can with his means, so I guess that leaves it up to someone else in another field to quit taking his word for it and push the research further. Hopefully that will happen, especially now that Josh Kalk, as a leader in the Pitch F/X approach, got a job in MLB and is not publishing.
Has there been any comparison of injuries to players in Verducci’s set (young and high increase in innings) and outside of his set (young and small increase/no increase/decrease in innings)? I’m willing to believe Verducci is correct, but it’d be nice to be able to say these pitchers seem to get hurt x% more than expected or something like that.
I’m sure Verducci would concede Gallardo’s injury, considering Gallardo missed most of 2008 due to a non-pitching injury, too (tore his ACL after a collision covering first base). He’d also get an incomplete.
But I’m really more interested in how all the Verducci Effect candidates (except Jimenez) regressed.
By ’07/’08 value wins:
Carmona: 4.3 / 1.0
Gaudin: 2.2 / 0.9
Gorzelanny: 2.8 / -1.1
Kennedy: 0.4 / 0.1
McGowan: 4.0 / 2.4
Jimenez: 1.2 / 4.4
Could be selection bias. The young guys chosen to pitch a ton more innings were probably having breakout seasons. So they were much more likely to regress the following year.
Kincaid,
One of the things I’m working on as a side project for here, BP, wherever, my personal use, etc is the combination of Pitch F/X (which I do at BP) and physiology. One issue I’ve seen with injury trackers with regards to Pitch F/X is not understanding how the human body works and what is affected by pitching. For instance, a shoulder injury corresponds to different expected Pitch F/X results than a forearm injury, etc.
So I’m waiting until I become a mini-injury expert before I publish anything.
That’s great to hear: I’m excited to see what kind of work you come up with, even if it takes a while. It’s definitely a major area in the game that seems to be lacking proper understanding right now, and with all the strides made in other areas of player analysis and projection, I’d love to see more work to catch up this part of the game as well.
I don’t think this is worth getting upset over. He’s pointing out data, and he makes the necessary qualification in the article. You and I are free to draw our own conclusions.
And you really don’t know that the arm injuries are related to the Verducci effect, either.
(and I think it’s fair to point out here that it was Will Carroll (I think), not Verducci, who came up with the name “Verducci Effect.” I don’t see Verducci guilty of shameless self-promoting, which seems to be your main beef. Maybe he is, I don’t know much about him and haven’t read that much of him, but I don’t see it in that particular article)
I’m not angry about the term at all, which is fine, and yes Verducci did not name it himself. That is not the beef at all. The beef is that the results were touted without further investigation into how the players were hurt. If I said that 10 players were going to get better in 2009 based on really low BABIPs in 2008, and then 8 of them did but 4 of those 8 players still had low BABIPs, I shouldn’t tout my predictions as being correct unless I can prove something with regards to the BABIP being directly related to my theory. That is the point.
Gorzo may have very well fallen into Verducci’s criteria, but the common thought around Pittsburgh isn’t necessarily the number of innings, but the distribution, that manager Jim Tracy rode Gorzo hard in the last month of 2007 in a quest for win #15, and then compounded when the pitcher didn’t report his pain to the team until a year later.
Oh Jim Tracy… why couldn’t you be managing the Dodgers right now? (I know, I know, it doesn’t matter THAT much…)
The interesting aspect of Gallardo being put on Verducci’s list in 2008 was that he didn’t actually exceed his workload from 06 to 07 by 30+ innings. Verducci forgot to include the innings (at least 12) that Gallardo pitched in the minor league playoffs in 2006. Not only did Gallardo not really qualify for the Verducci Effect but he also had a fluke leg injury. Shenanigans!
The effect is not self-named. Will Carrol of BPro started using this name after the discoverer of the effect; its named after it’s discover, but not by its discoverer.
I think there is too much emphasis on just the arm in his analysis. Their arms are not used a in a vacuum, but as a part of the whole body in motion. The art of pitching causes strain on all joints and muscles, and when these young players push their bodies to new extremes for extended periods of time there is a chance than any one of the moving parts has a higher likelihood of breaking down. I think the Verducci affect should just injuries to the pitcher, not focusing only on their arm.
This analysis desperately needs a control group.
Kennedy is a regression candidate? He only pitched a few games in September ’07, so hopefully Verducci is not attempting to classify him as a regression candidate based on ’08, since Kennedy has yet to prove himself on the MLB level. A pitcher can’t regress until he’s established success. I think he can pitch in the majors, but that’s still to be shown. He pitched quite well in AAA, which was a higher league than he pitched in most of ’07 (AA).
Kennedy was injured for part of the season, yet here’s the issue. Where is the control group? It seems likely that younger pitchers do get injured more, regardless of innings pitched. Eventually, a pitcher who can’t withstand the pitch volumes required to make it in the pros will surface through injury, and at a young age, and those who can withstand the innings and pitch counts will move forward. These guys are most likely identified before they are 25. Not really all that surprising. Is it also really surprising when a young pitcher has a break-out season that he will probably regress to some degree as the league adapts? Perhaps the young pitcher who regresses, but was not injured, had other stats pointing to a regression, such as BABIP, or a low strike-out rate. Why is a 30-inning increase the magic number, instead of 25 or 40? Are we supposed to believe that a younger pitcher who throws 29 additional innings is okay, but one who throws 30 is not? Once a pitcher goes past 30, is there any difference in the the liklihood of injury if he pitches 50-70 additional innings?
This is not meant as a knock to Verducci. The spirit of what he’s saying is correct. I hope MLB teams are doing specific research here to address many of the above questions, and certainly the SABRE community can do a better job here than Verducci.
All injuries that are NON-BASEBALL related should be thrown out. But if they were playing ball and got hurt, they should be kept. It’s just like a rookie-wall in basketball. The significant jump in minutes from college ball to pro ball means they almost all wear out a month or two before the pro season ends.
Same thing happens with a significant jump in innings, it may not be their arm, it may by legs or back or something else that gets hurt while playing, but the fatigue that their body wasn’t used to caused some sort of baseball related injury (pitching is more than just their arm). Players that get hurt off the field though shouldn’t be considered.
What about injuries like Gallardo’s?
Tearing your ACL covering a base really has nothing to do with pitching, but obviously it’s a “baseball” injury. Or if a guy gets hit by a pitch and breaks his hand, it’s a baseball injury, but nothing to do with stress. Yes, non-arm injuries should count, but only if they are pitching related. If a guy hurts his knee because he’s got a sore knee from pushing off the rubber, that’s fine, but if he hurts his knee sliding into second, that has nothing to do with the Verducci effect.
Gallardo was injured before he tore his ACL. He already missed 4 starts.
Rob: Gallardo wasn’t even a candidate for the Verducci effect. Poor research was done by Verducci. Gallardo only increased his IP by 21 innings from 2006 to 2007. His missed 4 starts prove nothing. They don’t matter in any context to this story.
Nice article. Who are the 2009 Verducci Effect candidates? I know Buzzsaw and Kershaw are two of them, I think. Who are the other prominent ones?
This could just be the nature of pitching. One could pick seven under-25 starting pitchers right now and the majority of them will probably have some sort of injury over the course of the season.
Rudy at Razzball has put together a similar analysis to Verduchi’s but with more specific factors than a simple 30 IP increase. Instead of innings, he focuses on total pitches thrown and pitch selection:
-Percentage of Curves/Sliders – Above 27% is bad. Above 30% is worse. Etc.
-Pitch count difference between 2007 and 2008 – Anything above 700 is bad.
-First year above the 2,700+ MLB pitch threshold in 2008 – Yes is bad.
Check out the full article, as well as his Risky Pitchers for 2009, here.
http://razzball.com/can-previous-year-pitch-counts-help-identify-risky-pitchers/
Thank you for calling out Verducci. He should not be tooting his own horn over players that his effect doesn’t apply. Gallardo’s injury obviously had nothing to do with pitching and as most had pointed out, he didn’t even belong on the list on first place. I feel that guys on this site do a much better job on that research end and deserve more props then the poor reporting that SI and ESPN do many times.
What a pleasant blog post! I’m so delighted you decided to talk about it.