Which Teams Have Suffered the Most From Injuries?

Major League Baseball’s injured list is the sport’s unofficial 31st team, one that never makes the playoffs but always plays spoiler. In the last week, 22 players were placed on the IL. The biggest name was Will Smith, who late last week landed on the IL with a bone bruise on his hand, courtesy of a rather rude foul tip off the bat of Nick Gonzales.

The Dodgers aren’t known for having a great deal of injury luck, but as injuries go, Smith’s appears to be far less consequential than it could have been. Smith’s tests revealed no fracture, minimizing the amount of time he’s expected to miss. The 30-year-old catcher is having the best offensive season of his career, with a .296/.404/.497 slash line and a 153 wRC+, all except slugging percentage representing career bests. He has played in fewer games than usual, but that’s largely due to the team’s roster construction; he started 39 games at designated hitter in 2022-2023, but Shohei Ohtani’s presence now makes it far more difficult to sneak him into the lineup here when he has a day off of catching. The injury would be a big deal… if it were a big deal, but Smith could return as early as this upcoming weekend. It could have been even sooner, but Smith’s start last Tuesday after missing five games meant that the retroactive IL date was later than September 3, when the Gonzales foul tip occurred.

Smith and the Dodgers seem to have gotten lucky, but the Astros and Yordan Alvarez may not see the same fortune. Less than a month after returning from a broken hand that had cost him more than half of the 2025 season, Alvarez turned his ankle while touching home plate in an awkward fashion that is only appropriate on your Stretch Armstrong doll. He has not yet been placed on the IL, and the exact consequences are still to be determined, but it’s all but official that he is going to miss some time. We’ll know more after his MRI on Tuesday. A serious injury to Alvarez could imperil the Astros in their tight playoff race and beyond if they make it to October.

Alvarez has already spent 115 days on the IL this season, and the Astros have certainly felt his absence, but how do their losses this season compare to those of other teams this season? More broadly, which team has lost the most production to the injured list? If you ask the fans of an underperforming team, the near-unanimous answer will be “us,” but I think we can do better than that!

To get an answer for that, I took every IL stint in 2025 to estimate how much potential WAR loss there was due to the missed playing time for each injured player. It’s hard to give a precise answer in term of “injuries cost X team Y wins” because it requires a lot of alternate history, but we can at least get a general idea of how much baseball value disappeared into the aether. So please don’t quote these as actual wins lost or I will [A LEGALLY ALLOWED ACTIVITY UNDER STATE AND FEDERAL LAW]. To make this as close as possible — and to give myself as much work as possible — I projected each player at the point of their final game before they landed on the IL. For the rest of the season, I counted players already confirmed out for the season or with no timetable for return on our injury chart as missing the rest of the year. For players currently on rehab assignment, I assigned them the earliest date they’re allowed to return, according to CBS Sports injury table. Adding in the nagging day-to-day injuries that didn’t result in an IL stint would be interesting, but also nearly impossible to execute, and by definition, those are all lower-impact ailments. Also, I cannot include injuries that have not yet happened, for reasons I hope are obvious.

If you forced me, at the threat of severe bodily harm, to guess without looking up which team lost the most value due to injury, I would have guessed the Dodgers, plus I probably would have commented that theirs is the type of horror story that would be just as scary as any premise for a Saw sequel. But it was Alvarez’s Astros, not the Dodgers, that came out as the team most harmed by injuries. ZiPS estimates Alvarez’s loss — which doesn’t include any possible missed time for his current injury, as he is not yet on the IL — as the biggest potential WAR loss in terms of impact (3.3 WAR), ahead of Reynaldo López for the Braves, Corbin Burnes for the Diamondbacks, Shane McClanahan for the Rays, Justin Steele for the Cubs, and Gerrit Cole for the Yankees. A half-dozen other Astros injuries from this season also project to cost the team at least a one win of value: Isaac Paredes, Ronel Blanco, Spencer Arrighetti, Cristian Javier, Lance McCullers Jr., and J.P. France.

The Orioles come up second using this methodology. This is good evidence that poor health should be considered at least a mitigating factor in their disappointing season. That said, it’s also not a get-out-of-jail-free card; the Orioles quite obviously knew going into last offseason that Kyle Bradish and Félix Bautista would miss huge chunks of 2025, and that Grayson Rodriguez was shut down for the last two months of 2024 due to injury. Barring a miracle, Baltimore will finish this season below .500, and injuries are far from the only explanation for the team’s underperformance.

Of course, we knew the Dodgers would rank highly on this list, just with the bronze medal instead of the top spot. Blake Snell was the biggest loss, but the team had, overall, slightly fewer star injuries than it did last year, and compared to the pitching staff, the lineup was actually quite healthy overall.

If the Red Sox end up missing the playoffs, injuries may arguably be the biggest deciding factor. If they don’t make the postseason, it’s unlikely to be by more than a game or two, and they’ve certainly missed out on more than a few wins in value to the IL. Some of those impactful players who hit the IL include Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford, Triston Casas, Alex Bregman, Roman Anthony, and Marcelo Mayer. The Mets and Diamondbacks are fighting for the final NL Wild Card spot, and both teams have also suffered more-than-average injury losses in 2025. So have the Braves, but they’re so far back that they can’t reasonably cite injuries as their reason for not making the postseason.

On the flip side, the Zack Wheeler injury is a devastating loss for the Phillies, but its larger impact will be on their postseason and 2026 performance rather than on the 2025 season itself. (On Monday night, Philadelphia clinched the NL East title.) Some of baseball’s worst teams land at the bottom here (White Sox, Nationals, Rockies), in large part because they weren’t projected to have many wins to lose in the first place. The Cardinals need to have a hot finish to avoid finishing below .500 for the second time in three years, something they haven’t done since the 1990s, so the fact that they’ve struggled despite getting better-than-average health is not an auspicious sign for the state of their roster. No St. Louis injury stint in 2025 amounted to even a 1-WAR loss, with Iván Herrera’s injury coming closest at 0.94 (though ZiPS could be underrating him still).

Injuries will likely always be a big, unpleasant part of baseball, until flesh-and-blood humans are phased out for robots and cyborgs in… uh… 2020. Anyway, injuries aren’t going away, and the teams that best prepare to manage their impact tend to be the ones that overcome them.