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Training_Health
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Well, there’s a kick in the pants for you.
“Science is banging heads with intuition and gut instinct,” said Glenn Fleisig, the research director of the American Sports Medicine Institute, who has conducted studies on breaking balls and young arms since 1996. “For years, we told people that curveballs were bad. Then we set out to prove it. We did not prove curveballs are safe, but we could not prove they were dangerous.”
Like a pitcher and a catcher disagreeing on pitch selection, the opposing sides in the debate could not be more closely allied. Dr. James Andrews, the orthopedic surgeon to many athletes, is a founder of the American Sports Medicine Institute and has written with Fleisig some of the studies that have failed to prove that curveballs are hazardous to young arms. It has not stopped Andrews from challenging the results.
“What we found out in the lab is true,” Andrews said. “For pitchers with proper mechanics, the force of throwing a curveball is no greater than for a fastball. But that’s not what happens in reality on the baseball field. Many kids don’t have proper mechanics or enough neuromuscular control, or they are fatigued when throwing curveballs. Things break down.
“Those are the kids I’m seeing every day in my operating room.”
Little League Baseball imposed strict per-game pitch limits five years ago, but Andrews said he performed about seven times the number of arm operations on young pitchers that he did 15 years ago.
So, what’s our Bayesian prior now?
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Great list. Now, someone do a study in 2012.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
What the players felt strongly about were two aspects of this. One was, they felt strongly that the union does have a responsibility to try to ensure the health of its members. And there are provisions in here where, jointly, we will work on that, in terms of cessation and in terms of treatment.
Players also embraced the idea that kids look up to them. And players look forward to the idea of being involved in a public education program, working with the Partnership at Drugfree.org, an organization we’ve worked with for a couple of years now. We will now expand what we were doing with them to include smokeless tobacco.
So the players felt strongly about the health issue and about the education issue.
... to a point…
They also did feel strongly that it wasn’t the job of the union or management to tell players that they could not use this on the field. So we made changes in restricting the ability of players to use it in interviews and things of that sort. But notwithstanding the view of many that we should ban it on the field, that was a line that the players weren’t prepared to cross.
Reminds me of when the two Corey’s in the 1980s said they were involved in the “Just Say No” campaign with Nancy Reagan, and after they did their public service announcement, they’d “Always Say Yes”.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
In MLB, you can make a DL move retroactive. This is sort of like insurance: rather than put him on the DL (for 15 days) for what you think is an injury, you wait. This way, if it’s not really a 15-day injury, you still have the player available. But, if it really is, you make it retroactive (but you play shorthanded until then).
The A’s and Rangers like to do this apparently, and the Yankees don’t:
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Lincecum and Hughes:
But how much to throw, and how exactly to throw, has become one of the game’s great debates. Lincecum, for example, credits his late-season surge a year ago — he went 0-5 with a 7.82 ERA in August, then went 5-1 with a 1.94 in September — to going back to the extreme long-toss program he utilized as a high school and college pitcher. After a deliberate warm-up routine, Lincecum routinely airs it out on his off days, playing catch at farther than 300 feet for five to 10 minutes to build his arm strength. There were even days when Lincecum was spotted long-tossing with a friend in a park in San Francisco. His jump in velocity from August to September and October was almost four mph.
Not everyone has had the same success bouncing back as Lincecum. According to the velocity-tracking website FanGraphs.com, Pelfrey recovered most of his velocity (getting back to 92 to 93 mph) during the second half of the 2009 season, but has dipped again for parts of the last two seasons. “I am a believer in long toss,” Pelfrey says, “Especially in spring training, it’s a great physical and mental exercise. In the beginning of the spring, I struggle to throw the ball 120 feet, and by the end of the spring I’m throwing it 250-300 feet easily. That’s great evidence that your arm is strong.”
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Kyle looks to see what we can find. MAYBE elbow injuries are somewhat linked to sliders and release points.
The more likely culprit is either a person’s body (if we can somehow quantify the body), or just plain (bad) luck.
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Jeff would like to know.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Verducci.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Some interesting tidbits about the conditioning of players.
Glove-slap: Kyle.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Will’s got them at Sports Illustrated.
Go to the sidebar to see each team.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Whoah, great stuff from Jeff, with a nearly 40 point drop in wOBA! That is enormous, turning an average player into a replacement-level player.
As you know, I’m skeptical of any claim from anyone that can find a split effect in any category that is more than the handedness effect (20 points in wOBA). And one would think that returning from a concussion means that you’ve had enough rest before coming back. Clearly, that’s not the case. I would like to see a longer-term trend in terms of how long before the player finally has recovered. It’s no surprise that your performance is much worse following a concussion. It does seem to me to be a surprise that your performance is this much worse after given the selective rest you needed (or thought you needed enough of).
This is huge no? That you might simply say “you need at least 30 days off” or something before being allowed back on the field.
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
Will:
Many will ask how I know this to be true, and I’ll direct you to look at the massive gap between the best teams and the worst teams when it comes to keeping players healthy. This isn’t a flukish statistic, but one based on a decade of numbers. Looking back through 2002, the gap between the best and the worst teams is almost $100 million dollars.
It sounds like alot, and it sounds like there’s not much luck there, but, we’d need to test that.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Fantastic stuff from Jeff: part1, part2.
First off, the mean forecast for any starter is 40%. So, Jeff’s got his forecasts, at the extreme, at +/- 15%. I have to believe the uncertainty of his estimate is going to be mighty high, some +/-20%.
Secondly, the median stay is some 50 days or so.
Conclusion: pitchers are expected to miss ALOT of time.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
"Yeah, expand it because [standard reasons].”
“No, leave it as it is because [standard reasons].”
Please, do not post if you are going to give [standard reasons].
What I am surprised about is this:
Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt is concerned that adding wild-card teams or increasing the length of the division series would make a long season even longer.
“If they’re going to do that, they need to shorten the season then. That’s a lot of games and that’s a long time. Even in the playoffs now we’re going potentially to Nov. 5,” he said. “Sometimes they think we’re just robots, but you’ve got to think of potential injuries. On pitchers, that’s a lot of throwing. Position players, some play every game all year. It just takes a toll on the body. If they’re going to do that, they’ve got to think a lot about the ramifications.”
Does Affeldt realize that if they cut the number of regular season games that he’s going to be paid less? The number of games is a workplace safety issue. If it was up to the owners, they’d have the players play for ten months. If it was up to the fans, we’d have them play for eleven months. (What, you’d rather hear Harold Reynolds talk from November through March? I didn’t think so.) The players should play for as long as they think they can play, AND THEN, their salaries would be based on that (i.e., revenue collected). Really, if players said that they should only have a 120 game season for health reasons, and that their salaries would be cut by 25%, then the owners would fight and eventually give in.
The reality is that players have always been willing to sell their body for money. It’s not the owners and fans who think the players are indestructible, but the players themselves.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Jeff posts the 2010 data.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Now here’s some new ground being broken:
As an example, let’s consider hitters who went to the disabled list with an injury to the lower arm (hand, wrist, or forearm). It’s widely accepted in baseball that wrist injuries have a lingering impact on a hitter’s ability to hit for power. This gives us 77 hitters to study, with 32,763 total plate appearances the following season.
Using the same method we used to look at Ichiro Suzuki yesterday, we can come up with an expected batting line for these hitters. As a group, weighted by playing time, they were expected to hit .266/.333/.427 the following year. Instead, they hit .270/.344/.439. So we can see that these hitters as a group tended to exceed their baseline forecasts.
It will be interesting to see how much is real (causation) and how much is best-fitting (correlation). But, definitely, this is one of those untapped areas. I have to believe that this will impact pitchers far more than non-pitchers. This will be pretty fun to watch develop.
And, this warms my open source heart:
So what we’ve done is taken a publicly accessible injury database, created by Josh Hermsmeyer of RotoBase, and worked on proofing it and improving it for incorporation into PECOTA. (Once we’ve finished updating the database, we will be releasing it at some point during the offseason, for other researchers to use.)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Using the Rotobase or Dawkins Injury Database leads to fun stuff, as you can see from a widely cited academic paper, or the non-doctorate saberist paper, or from Neyer‘s points regarding selection bias.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
By , 02:15 AM
About 3 weeks ago, Matt Swartz wrote an article on BP that concluded fairly emphatically that players (pitchers and hitters) who sign multi-year deals with their own teams aged and performed significantly better than those who did not. To be honest, I did not re-read the article carefully and it is not real clear what the criteria were for the various groups of players.
Here is what he wrote at the end of the article:
What appears to be happening is that teams seem to have some sense of the aging curve of individual players, especially if they are already in their organization. There are probably a variety of reasons that this subset of players aged well, but the team knowledge about the player’s medical and scouting information appears to contribute to the decision to give a player two-year deals. This is important to keep in mind when we hear of a player signing a new contract and look to a projection system to figure out how smart the deal was. Chances are that there is additional information—especially about aging—which teams have that we may not.
Today, he wrote a long article telling us why the Ryan Howard contract might not be as bad as some analysts are making it out to be. One of the reasons he cites that it may not be so bad is that because Howard is signing with his own team, he may age better than we think (using comparable players, the traditional aging curves, etc.).
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Monday, March 22, 2010
Great stuff:
Year before LASIK: 97 wRC+
Year after LASIK: 109 wRC+
Now that looks pretty significant. However, you figure that players would be more likely to get something fixed after a bad season than a good season, right? Let’s narrow this group to the 24 players for whom we have three years of big league data.
Two years before LASIK: 112 wRC+
One year before LASIK: 96 wRC+
Year after LASIK: 109 wRC+
Well there you go. Definitely a response to frustrating seasons.
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