How Many Wins Did Teams Lose To Injury?

by colintj on Feb 21, 2010 3:49 AM EST

I thought I might be able to whip up a quick but interesting and possibly useful metric to gauge the number of wins lost or saved due to injury from the table Jeff whipped up. I like the percent of salary measure, but I thought the total days tally might be more telling of training staff aptitude. If you assume that the team loses a 1.5 WAR/150G player and has to call up a replacement level player and .85*Days Missed = Games Missed, then we can use the table and say

.85*DM*1.5/150 = .01*GM = WAR lost to injury

I'm guessing most actual team coefficients are somewhere between .005 and .013. 1/100 is nice and round. .0088 is 33 WAR per 25 players per season. If the best players get by far the most playing time, I assume they will get injured the most. So, .01 it is. Presumably there's a correlation between cost and talent, so if a team tends to lose expensive players to injury, this metric will understate the actual wins lost. But I assume that injuries are distributed such that good expensive players get injured relatively little.

Chart?

Chart.

Team	Total Days	Avg Days/Season	WAR Lost/162G	WARLAA/162G
ANA	1864	233	1.98	-4.05
CHW	2135	266.875	2.27	-3.77
HOU	3888	486	4.13	-1.90
SF	4202	525.25	4.46	-1.57
PHI	4540	567.5	4.82	-1.21
PIT	4759	594.875	5.06	-0.98
MIL	4862	607.75	5.17	-0.87
TBA	4898	612.25	5.20	-0.83
MIN	4917	614.625	5.22	-0.81
OAK	5211	651.375	5.54	-0.50
TOR	5243	655.375	5.57	-0.46
SEA	5245	655.625	5.57	-0.46
CHC	5444	680.5	5.78	-0.25
CLE	5499	687.375	5.84	-0.19
BOS	5556	694.5	5.90	-0.13
COL	5768	721	6.13	0.09
SD	5964	745.5	6.34	0.30
FLO	6007	750.875	6.38	0.35
NYY	6107	763.375	6.49	0.45
ARI	6347	793.375	6.74	0.71
STL	6370	796.25	6.77	0.73
ATL	6574	821.75	6.98	0.95
DET	6621	827.625	7.03	1.00
LAD	6717	839.625	7.14	1.10
CIN	6894	861.75	7.32	1.29
KCR	7206	900.75	7.66	1.62
WAS	7395	924.375	7.86	1.82
BAL	7716	964.5	8.20	2.16
NYM	7922	990.25	8.42	2.38
TEX	8521	1065.125	9.05	3.02

WARLAA = WAR Lost Above Average, so negative is better. Anyway, the White Sox are apparently good at this health stuff. I assume this explains some of the disparity between their projections and performance. It looks like team health is worth +/-3 wins or so per season, which they and the Angels made the most of. That's obviously a very significant number of wins, the equivalent of adding another above average player to the team. It would also appear that percent salary lost and this little metric correlate okay, but that's only employing the eyeball test. Thoughts?

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Cool idea.

For the guys with Rally’s WAR database, you could use a player-by-player estimate of how good the player on the DL is. Losing Belle for 30 days is different from losing Hampton.

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by Sky Kalkman on Feb 21, 2010 10:15 AM EST reply actions

you could

but if you want to simply measure how good they are at preventing injury, i think this might be the better way to go

I'd rather have Rios steal 50 bases than hit 50 home runs. I want production.

by colintj on Feb 21, 2010 3:06 PM EST up reply actions

exactly what team is ---ANA---?

I love how a team changes their name and gets no respect. No one still calls them the ‘Devil Rays’ they changed the name and people respected it. The Angels deserve for you to at least get their name correct.
It is like in the playoffs when the national announcers who never have seen and ANgels game can’t get the names of the players right, and tell stories about players in the wrong context or even attribute them to incorrect players.
Maybe I would take your cute little chart more seriously if you didn’t just loose me on the first line

It was a smart idea for a post, and probably had a lot of good info, too bad I didn’t read any further

My prediction as of 12-11-2009- Wood .265 avg, 20 HRs 70 RBIs and an above average glove at 3b

by Sinatrasratpack on Feb 22, 2010 2:33 AM EST reply actions

are you serious?

i just c/p’d from Jeff’s table, as stated in the piece. but from now on, i’ll be sure not to disrespect the Tustin Angels.

I'd rather have Rios steal 50 bases than hit 50 home runs. I want production.

by colintj on Feb 22, 2010 2:39 AM EST up reply actions 1 recs

It's not like that joke has gotten old

After 300+ times…

WOOT WOOT! Baseball's back!

by Figgi4life on Feb 22, 2010 3:44 AM EST via mobile up reply actions

Tustin Angels has been done?

damnit. i thought that was good.

I'd rather have Rios steal 50 bases than hit 50 home runs. I want production.

by colintj on Feb 27, 2010 4:24 PM EST up reply actions

Maybe it's because

their name change was a cynical attempt to associate themselves with LA to boost merch sales?

by dtro on Feb 22, 2010 8:13 AM EST up reply actions 1 recs

Maybe who the hell cares

The point of the name change was a real attempt to get a huge TV deal and attempt to reach out to a larger fanbase.

We get it. The name is stupid. Doesn’t mean you get to ignore it, although Jeff seems to really enjoy it.

http://inplaynoouts.blogspot.com/ - A blog about teams I like, written by me.
#34

by Carl Johnson on Feb 22, 2010 9:47 AM EST up reply actions

Actually, I hate the ANA change, freaking sucks for running queries because you have to added both of the teams, LAA and ANA together

- .-. ..- … – / – …. . / .—. .-. - .. . … …

by Jeff Zimmerman on Feb 22, 2010 10:15 AM EST up reply actions

Yes, he may have ignored the name change.

Is that really worse than you ignoring the rules of the English language? I hope I didn’t loose you there.

"Pinch-bunters don't have a ton of value, even with the Twins"

by Steven Ellingson on Feb 24, 2010 3:35 AM EST up reply actions

Angels

retroid for the team has remained “ANA”. BDB has changed it to LAA.

I’m shocked that they show up as relatively the most healthy team. I don’t know how that’s possible considering they lost the last 2 years each of the Colon and Escobar contracts. But as bad as some of the injuries have been (and I doubt this counts the one fatality) maybe other teams have had more.

The HK-47 hitting droid is the finest line drive machine ever built

by RallyMonkey5 on Feb 24, 2010 9:38 AM EST up reply actions

they do poorly at pct payroll

but well in this metric. so it could be that they give out contracts to whomever, but do have an excellent training staff. the Sox seem to do both.

I'd rather have Rios steal 50 bases than hit 50 home runs. I want production.

by colintj on Feb 27, 2010 4:21 PM EST up reply actions

Ok, so

How much of this should we attribute to bad luck, or poor decisions in who to sign/trade for, or poor medical personnel, or manager abuse, etc? I’m having trouble interpreting what teams should do about this. TX has the worst line here, but I’ve seen praise recently from some about their medical personnel.

Freude, schoener Goetterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische dein Heiligtum.

by t ball on Feb 22, 2010 12:14 PM EST reply actions