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February 18, 2013 Baseball TherapyWhat Really Predicts Pitcher Injuries?A couple of weeks ago, I took on the "Verducci Effect". Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated has hypothesized that a pitcher who is under 25 years old and who had an increase in his workload of 30 innings or more in the previous season is at greater risk for injury or for a steep decline in performance. This is a great hypothesis, but for the fact that it is not actually true. It's nice that people can stop worrying about their favorite pitcher on the Verducci list (for now), but if all I do is play mythbuster, then I'm not really adding anything to the conversation. At that point, I'm the guy walking around with amazing hindsight talking about how amazing his hindsight is. In other words, I'm every caller on every sports talk radio show ever. So, let's get constructive: What actually does predict pitcher injuries? Warning! Gory Mathematical Details Ahead! To that end, I constructed a few binary logit regressions modeling what variables were associated with a pitcher suffering an elbow injury. Then, a shoulder injury. Then, any injury whatsoever. Then, any injury that landed him on the disabled list. Similar to my Verducci analyses, I looked only at pitchers for whom 80 percent or more of their appearances came as starters. I used a forward stepwise model to enter the following variables:
For those unfamiliar with how a stepwise method works, it considers all the predictors, finds the strongest one (assuming that at least one of them is a significant predictor), and runs a regression using that predictor. Then, it looks for the next-strongest unique predictor once the first variable has been controlled. In this way, we can look at which variables are strongest in predicting injuries. First, shoulder injuries. In order of strength of prediction, the best predictors of whether or not you will have a shoulder injury in the coming year are whether you had a shoulder injury last year, how many pitches you threw last year, whether you had a shoulder injury two years ago, how many extra batters you faced last year from the year before (with a greater increase meaning that you were less likely to be injured), and the two-strike foul rate (just barely). It's clear that guys with pre-existing conditions are a risk. This shouldn't be too big a surprise. But if you were entrusted to face more batters last year, it might be a sign that the team thinks your shoulder is okay. It’s hard to tell whether the two-strike fouls issue is cause or effect. If you're not able to blow that fastball by hitters, it might be because there is some shoulder damage that's really the beginnings of an injury. For elbows (in order): Home run rate (lower HR rate guys have elbow injuries more often), whether you had an elbow injury last year, the number of batters you faced last year, the change in the number of innings you pitched last year (again, a bigger increase leads to a lower rate of injury), and ERA (the higher the ERA, the more likely you are to get hurt). For any injury at all, there were two factors: You are more likely to get injured if you threw more pitches last year, and if you had an injury last year. For spending time on the disabled list, we see a similar pattern: the number of pitches thrown in the last year, spending time on the DL last year, and the change in the number of batters faced (once again, a big increase meant a drop in injury chances.) How big is the risk? I compared players who had an elbow injury last year to those who did not, and the frequency at which they suffered an elbow injury in the present year. Then, I did the same thing for whether a pitcher had a shoulder injury last year and the chances of a shoulder injury. The results were rather startling.
Are you looking to avoid injury risk this year? Look for the guy who had a clean bill of health last year. And no, just because you made it through last year without getting hurt, it doesn't reset the clock (although it does seem to ameliorate the problem). I eliminated all players who had a relevant injury in the previous year, and instead looked whether injury history two years earlier predicted current-year boo-boo chances.
As to extra pitches, it's harder to show the effects of what an extra pitch does to the chances of injury next year, owing primarily to the way that logistic regression works and that there are other factors involved. (For the initiated, the exponentiated B on the final model for DL stint was 1.000989073323). To give you some estimate of the effect that might have, imagine that a pitcher went from 3000 pitches in a season to 3300 (the equivalent of going from 30 starts with 100 pitches per start to 110 pitches per start). The increased chance of a DL visit is on the order of a couple of percentage points. Given that the baseline rate for a pitcher who is not previously injured is 4.9 percent, that's not trivial. Managers, please see to it that your pitchers never throw another pitch. For what it's worth, I ran similar logistic regressions with several interaction terms (most of the above factors by age, and by injury history last year). The message remained the same. Injury history was still the top predictor, along with raw number of pitches thrown, and as you might expect, having a previous injury or being older made things somewhat worse. What to make of it The take-home message is one that is probably not very shocking to anyone. An injured body part is more likely to get hurt again. A pitcher who has thrown a lot of pitches is more likely to have a lot of wear and tear on that arm. It's not rocket science, although I do wonder if people understand the magnitude of the effect size. For those of you preparing for fantasy drafts by combing through the BP player cards, take a look at each pitcher’s injury history and pay attention to how many pitches he's thrown. Also, pay attention to whether he's a high or low pitch efficiency guy. There's a difference. I'd love to say that there was some sort of magic formulation that predicts injuries. If nothing else, the Verducci Effect was a little more interesting than "things wear out." It "explained" really highly emotionally charged injuries (catastrophic ones to young pitchers) with a formulation that could be easily controlled. According to the Verducci Effect, teams needed only to avoid extending their young pitchers to maximize their odds of staying healthy. My model doesn't offer as much comfort. Once a pitcher is damaged, he's damaged goods. And it's not like you can tell a pitcher not to throw another pitch; that's what pitchers do. And sometimes they get hurt. That's life.
Russell A. Carleton is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @pizzacutter4
23 comments have been left for this article.
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This is awesome. It's such an important area of research, and it's great to see that we now have some tools to even begin to tackle it.
I'm trying to reconcile how throwing more pitches increases risk of injury, but a large increase in innings pitched corresponds to a reduced risk of injury. Did I understand that correctly? Wouldn't more pitches and more innings seem to go hand-in-hand?
Also, is there any way to consider single-game factors? (e.g. "having a game with 130+ pitches thrown corresponds to X% increase in likelihood to go on the DL next season [same season?])
It's all regression-based, so you have to interpret that as "holding everything else constant, another inning actually predicts a lessened chance of injury."
A lot of it comes down to pitch efficiency. The big message is that it's the number of pitches, not the number of innings that you rack up.