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Disabled List Trends and Team Information

Trends

I recently found out about an article published named Disability Days in Major League Baseball by Stan Conte, Ralph K. Requa and James G. Garrick in the 2001 American Journal of Sports Medicine about time on the disabled list.  The article looked at days on the DL from 1989 to 1999.  I took this information and  Josh Hermsmeyer's DL database from RotoBlog.com and looked at the trend of DL trips and days on DL since 1989.  There is no data on the years 2000 and 2001.  I used trips and days per team as there was team expansion during this time period.

Here is the data graphed for both days and trips:

Dlteam_medium

Dlteam2_medium

Data in table format:

Year DL Trip Average Per Team Total Days Average Per Team Days per Trip
1989 266 10.2 14869 572 55.9
1990 231 8.9 12603 485 54.6
1991 260 10.0 15830 609 60.9
1992 283 10.9 17656 679 62.4
1993 300 10.7 17810 636 59.4
1994 259 9.2 15724 562 60.7
1995 295 10.5 15552 555 52.7
1996 321 11.5 19432 694 60.5
1997 351 12.5 20454 731 58.3
1998 349 11.6 22127 738 63.4
1999 367 12.2 23614 787 64.3
2000 unk unk unk unk unk
2001 unk unk unk unk unk
2002 418 13.9 23008 767 55.0
2003 392 13.1 21175 706 54.0
2004 417 13.9 24311 810 58.3
2005 379 12.6 23101 770 61.0
2006 395 13.2 21824 727 55.3
2007 460 15.3 28505 950 62.0
2008 496 16.5 27689 923 55.8
2009 466 15.5 25976 866 55.7

It can be seen (from the graph equations) that the number of trips and days have increased steadily since 1989 by about the rate of 0.3 trips per year and 16.5 days on DL (both per team).


Team DL Data

Using Josh's database, I went ahead and looked at the number of days and trips to the DL for all the teams and here is a graph and table for the data.

Dlteam3_medium

Dlteam4_medium

The White Sox trainers again stick out as being pretty impressive.  At least KC finally has ditched some of their training staff after being the 8 year leader in total trips