Could we have planned around the injury problem?

This is my ESPN Insider column for the week.

Back on May 11, I received a trade offer in the Tout Wars Mixed Auction league. At the end of the email, the owner added this P.S.:

I’m jealous of how healthy your roster is.

I hadn’t really thought about it at the time, but he was correct. Up to that point, my only hobbled player was Wilson Ramos, who was on the disabled list when I drafted him.

The irony was that he was inquiring about Kenta Maeda (pictured), who would hit the disabled list later that very day. But all in all, was I unusually lucky?

I don’t think so. Injury avoidance was part of my draft plan.

At RonShandler.com, I write about a program called the Broad Assessment Balance Sheet, or BABS. One of the many facets of BABS is the evaluation of talent by separating assets and liabilities, or skill and risk. BABS promotes the idea of having a “risk budget.” Depending upon the size of your league and penetration into the talent pool, this budget designates how many roster spots you can comfortably devote to risky players without negatively impacting your ability to contend.

BABS takes a different approach to injuries. We already know that as many as 50 percent of the top-ranked 300 players are going to spend some time on the DL. We cannot project which players are going to pull up lame at any time, so we have to attach some injury risk to pretty much everyone.

BABS starts by assigning a starting point for the health of each player, a minimum baseline of 25 percent odds of spending some time on the DL. To that, we add greater odds to those players with an injury history or current health concerns. Those with injury concerns are rated as having either Minor injury risk or Major injury risk. These ratings are all assigned prior to Draft Day.

Minor risk players spent more than 20 days on the DL last season or were hurt on Draft Day with a positive prognosis for the upcoming season. I gave them 26-50 percent odds of missing significant time.

Major risk players spent more than 50 days on the DL last season, spent more than 30 days on the DL in each of two consecutive seasons, or were hurt on Draft Day with uncertain or negative prognosis for the upcoming season. I gave over 50 percent odds that they would miss significant time this year.

BABS defines “significant time” as enough missed games that it hurts. If Ubaldo Jimenez goes down for two weeks with a hangnail and you replace him with Jered Weaver, that’s not significant. And if this is a real move you need to make, you have a lot more problems than worrying about injuries.

Needless to say, this is all just history. We cannot directly project future injuries from past injuries. However, research at BaseballHQ.com indicates about 40 percent odds of a player hitting the DL if he had a DL stint last year. Players with DL stints in each of the previous two years have nearly 50 percent odds of seeing the DL again this year.

Coming into this season, BABS assigned Major or Minor injury risks to 128 of the players in the NFBC’s top 300 ADP ranking list (43%). The question is, how many of this year’s hobbled players came into the season with elevated risk according to these ratings? Currently 91 of the ADP top 300 have spent at least some time on the DL. Could the BABS process have helped us avoid some of these players?

As it turns out, 45 of those 91 were rated as having some injury risk (49%). By comparison, only 83 of the remaining 209 players came into the season with injury risk (40%). It’s not a huge advantage, but those who avoided those riskier players at the draft would have been able to avoid 9% of the injuries.

Breaking it out further:

NFBC Top 300 Players Identified as Having Injury Risk on Draft Day

                                        BABS RISK RATING
                                No.     Minor      Major        Total
                               ---     -------    --------    ---------
Those who went on the DL        91     24 (26%)   21 (23%)     45 (49%)
Those who stayed off the DL    209     55 (26%)   28 (13%)     83 (40%)
TOTAL                          300     79 (26%)   49 (16%)     128 (43%)

This detail is revealing. The variance seems to be centered wholly on players with Major risk. So if you had avoided players that BABS marked as having Major injury risk, you would have had an advantage. You would have avoided players like A.J. Pollock, Trevor Story, Hunter Pence, Rich Hill, James Paxton, Aaron Nola and 14 others.

Still, all this prep would not have helped with many of this year’s critical injury losses. Madison Bumgarner, Noah Syndergaard and Freddie Freeman were players in the first two rounds who were not tagged with any elevated risk coming into the season. Similarly, closers Zach Britton, Aroldis Chapman, Mark Melancon, Jeurys Familia and Roberto Osuna were among those “healthy” players whose DL stints have thinned out the talent at an already scarce position.

So, maybe I’ve been a little bit lucky. Or, at least I was on May 11.

Since May 11, my luck has turned in the worst way. My DL list is not much longer than it was back then – Maeda is already back – but I lost my offense’s biggest gun in Freeman. Sometimes the biggest impact is not in quantity, but quality.

It goes to show that preparation can only take you so far. All it takes is one errant pitch to put an entire season at risk.