Derek Rhoads

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As you might guess, while trending up is a good thing, 2% is not enough to fend off a potential price increase. So here I am asking again to help us keep our price an insanely affordable $45.95 for what you get. It's a great time to subscribe with our Midseason 50 out and the deadline coming up.

I was pushing hard for "Things are looking (O)blique".

Some interesting data in here on how 2025 has played out very differently on the injury front.

The ILs of March (and February), 2025 | Baseball Prospectus This year’s spring training injury toll.

The ILs of March (and February), 2025
by Derek Rhoads (@drhoa3.bsky.social) and Rob Mains (@robmains.bsky.social)
buff.ly/pCVeMvH

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PECOTA 2025: An Introduction | Baseball Prospectus PECOTA has made strides heading into 2025, thanks to an infusion of StuffPro.

while you're checking out our standings, please take a look at @bachlaw.bsky.social's introduction to 2025 PECOTA to see what's changed about the projection system and why we're particularly excited about some gains made on the pitching side:

It's a very challenging data issue because teams, players, and reporters might use terms interchangeably or with lack of specificity.

Jon Roegele, @MlBPlayerAnalys over on X, is the goat at tracking this. His database on TJ and IB procedures is incredible.

What Tommy John surgery looks like today: Revision surgeries, internal brace procedures Tommy John surgery is ubiquitous in MLB, and players now undergo variations based on what they need and how many times they've had it.

From what I understand, internal brace with full reconstruction is more about fortifying the new ligament, not about speeding recovery time.

This article has some more details about the distinctions.

www.nytimes.com/athletic/540...

However, surgeons are now including an internal brace even with full reconstruction. It makes it extremely challenging to know that everyone is talking about the same thing.

Repairing native ligament should be a quicker recovery than reconstruction. But it's not always an option.

Let me preface this first by saying I am very much not a doctor. But what we are trying to capture in the data is repair (repair native ligament, and fortify, adding internal brace) vs. full reconstruction with Tommy John Surgery (replaces UCL with tendon).

Cont.

I'd lean more towards the cynical side. They can absorb injuries because of the talent depth. I think they sign players who might have a riskier health profile because they know they have the depth.

We actually used projected WARP lost for this very reason. Its heat map in blue along the bottom.

Heat in the Infirmary is a new injury tool over at BP. It's a different way to see multi-year trends. E.g., over the last 3 seasons no team has had more IL stints than the Giants (noted by the tone of gray in the bar chat), but they are only 10th in IL games lost over that same stretch.

Introducing BP's new Arsenal Metrics | Baseball Prospectus A new way at quantifying not just individual pitches, but how they work together.

Be on the lookout for these metrics to arrive on our leaderboards and player pages, and for them to become incorporated into our pitch models. We are thrilled about this work and hope you are as well!
www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article...

Best of BP: When Your Second Plate Appearance is Your Fourth | Baseball Prospectus Familiarity breed success.

I didn't post out our weekend Best of BPs, so a little catch up here:

@timjacksonsays.bsky.social on what the Phillies (and other teams) are doing to prep for funky pitchers pre-game, and how it works:

Best of BP: Dissecting the Injury Bug 2024 | Baseball Prospectus Stacking up the injuries of yesterday against the ones of the day before yesterday.

We have some of the best injury data and visualizations around, thanks to @drhoa3.bsky.social. He and @robmains.bsky.social write some great, insightful pieces using it throughout the year, like this one dissecting 2024's injury bug:

Who is playing you in this biopic?

Dissecting the Injury Bug 2024 | Baseball Prospectus Stacking up the injuries of today against the ones of yesterday.

@robmains.bsky.social and @drhoa3.bsky.social with a great example of all the great injury viz BP subscribers have access to, and great analysis of 2024's injury landscape:

@robmains.bsky.social with a great piece on some of the IL trends we saw in 2024. I thought it was especially interesting to see IL stints down noticeably for batters.

The player is an athletic outlier. Ninety-eighth-percentile footspeed and 99th-percentile arm strength have made him an elite defender by any measure; he nearly hit 106 mph on a throw and tops out at around 30 feet per second when he's sprinting. To put those cartoonish features into cartoonish context, he's what you'd get if you gave the Popeye's strength to the Road Runner without weighing him down at all. The player can hit the ball hard too, topping out at a solid 111 mph off the bat, but he'll have to trade some of his spinach for carrots if he really wants to improve on offense; his swing decisions made him the worst batter by DRC+ among any with his number of plate appearances. Coupled with a penchant for whiffs, those decisions resulted in a nearly 30-percentage-point difference between his strikeout and walk rates (also the largest among hitters by that cutoff). If he can get his bat into “well-below- average” territory instead of whatever last season represents, then his secondary skills will make him into a star.

Our first BP Annual Comment giveaway, for a premium subscription courtesy of @blandalytics.pitcherlist.com is below! A reminder that these come from the 2024 Annual and thus are referring to the 2023 season:

There is definitely one logo that is out of date.

I made alternate city logos/icons for every MLB team a couple of years ago. I decided to dust those off for an injury viz. This is every IL placement in 2024. If you click through to the link the viz is interactive.

Does anyone have a favorite icon?

public.tableau.com/views/2024IL...

As extensive as these tools and articles are, they represent a small fraction of the content open to BP subscribers!

In addition to those constantly updated tools, @robmains.bsky.social and I publish many injury-related articles throughout the season. They feature Rob's great writing and analysis, accompanied by timely visuals to help dig into injury trends as they occur.

The Pain Points tool gives context to what injuries are spiking in a given year. For instance, the great hamstring plague of 2021. #neverforget

The IL Team Totals tool displays various stats on a team level from 2018-2024. Total games missed, total days missed, projected WARP missed.

The Injury timeline shows IL stints in a timeline-style format. You can easily see the shape of a season from an injury perspective. There is both a team view (any single season from 2018-2024) and a player-specific view (all seasons from 2018-2024).

The Recovery Dashboard is a detailed IL database. Data dates back to 2016. This is a great place to research how long it takes to recover from a specific injury. Or you could use it to see how many times a player has gone on the IL due to a ruptured testicle. (Thankfully just once, sorry Mitch.)

As @cdgoldstein.baseballprospectus.com points out BP subscribers get access to a ton of stuff. I work with our injury database and associated visuals. Below is a thread with a glimpse of our injury content.

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