Collateral Damage: 201... (11/07)
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November 9, 2012 Collateral Damage2012 Year-End Injury Summary: NL CentralThis was the last season of the NL Central’s six-team division, but it still represented the best and some of the worst in baseball in TAWL. Division: National League Central WARP lost Divisional Ranking (Overall Ranks—Best to worst):
Pittsburgh Pirates I was less surprised that the Pirates performed so well in the TAWL rankings than I was by their performance on the field. Pittsburgh was the best team in baseball in TAWL in 2012 after coming in ninth in 2011, which strengthens the notion that the Pirates’ front office and administration is finally making noticeable improvements. The club ranked fifth in the number of DL stints used and third overall when factoring in DTD injuries. Neil Walker’s herniated disc was the most costly hitter injury. He missed 28 games and 0.18 TAWL. Andrew McCutchen had the only other hitter injury that registered over five percent of the team’s TAWL. He missed three games due to an illness and a sprained wrist, but those maladies cost 0.08 TAWL, or 11.3 percent of Pittsburgh’s TAWL.
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I wonder if there could be some sort of "expected days lost" based off the injury history and age of the players; if the front office or training staff is going to get credit/blame for lost WARP, I would feel more comfortable with a system that measured relative to a risk-adjusted baseline. E.g., if you keep Lance Berkman and Rafael Furcal healthy for a full year, you get more credit than if you kept Anthony Rizzo and Starlin Castro healthy for a full year.
Obviously this wouldn't be super easy, since the injury history of players who have been with the team a long time is a function of the quality of the training staff, so there's a bit of an endogeneity problem if you were to try to measure the training staff based on projected days lost, if that projection is based on injury history... the best information would come from players who changed teams and exhibited a difference in their injury profile after the change: Do injury prone players stay healthier? Do healthy players get hurt more when coming to the team?