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February 7, 2005

Team Health Reports

Assessing the 2004 Evaluations

by Will Carroll and Dave Haller

If predicting the future were easy, then surely at least half of the Baseball Prospectus staff would have seen the Boston Red Sox' championship season coming. After all, forecasting is a large part of what we do here. Just ask Nate Silver.

Yet for each of the countless variables impacting a player's statistics, we take solace in the gift of sample size. Over a full season, many fluky statistics tend to stabilize.

Injury risk analysis, however, presents a dilemma. One bone-crushing outfield collision, one awkward dive into the front row, one sticky tract of mud on the pitcher's mound can derail a ballplayer's career; even faster his season. Sure, there are Matt Manteis and Rusty Greers, but each year dozens of strapping twenty- and thirty-somethings are introduced to the disabled list for the first time.

It comes with the territory. There's no nice way to predict someone will get injured, and obviously there's no flawless way to project how the human body will respond to rehab and treatment. Caveats aside, new tools and technologies are always being developed to help get more accurate information. BP is hard at work on an injury accounting system that will help translate injuries into a win-loss calculation. We're also trying to increase the transparency for team reports of injuries, both by journalistic pressure and by our valuable team sources. When a team sees an elderly gentleman leaning on a fence at their Florida training facility, they may be seeing one of UTK's best sources.

Each spring, in Team Health Reports, we use a points system encompassing several factors to quantify injury risk as much as possible. The reports classify players as "red light" (high injury risk), "yellow light" (moderate injury risk) and "green light" (low injury risk).

Now, to be consistent with BP's approach and use objective, relevant information, it's time to appraise our methods:

                DL stint    No DL    Total    % of Total
Red lights        37         26       63         59%
Yellow lights     54         93      147         34%
Green lights      81        149      230         35%