Fantasy Pitch F/X

I’ve started to get some questions about what the injury tool is and what it isn’t and I realized I’m getting the questions in part because I never fully explained the injury tool.

Background

I’m an Athletic Trainer who has worked at several levels, including a major Division I college, a small Division III college, and a summer camp which has over a thousand athletes on campus at a time. Contrary to the belief of my coaches at times, my main goal has always been prevention of injuries to my athletes and trying to “project” when athletes need the extra time off.

As I began my fantasy baseball career, I knew that I could use my knowledge of medicine and baseball to give me an edge over other owners. So I was stunned to not be able to find a sufficient injury history tool like mine. I’m sure that all the clubs have it, but there was no aggregate area on the internet where you could easily find it. Therefore the injury history tool was a long running desire of mine to make it easier for me to look up someone’s history during my league’s draft. Knowing that a pitcher has experienced occasional elbow soreness in 3 of the last 4 years will throw up a nice big red flag for me and immediately cause me to look elsewhere. It’s also good to see how “brittle” a player is and have that history in front of you.

The best example I can give is Chipper Jones. At this point in his career, you can what hope for 100-120 games. If you knew that he’d go on the DL for 45 days then you could plan for it. But you can’t know that for sure. He’ll miss 3 days here, 4 days there, 2 days next week, 7 days in 3 weeks. Obviously everyone knows that from Chipper, but what about that younger player or journeyman reliever. While that journeyman won’t help everyone, it will help some people in deeper leagues.

What it is

By searching for an active player’s name, you’ll get a detailed view of a players injury history as well as a summary at 1, 3, 5 and total back to 2001. I could only go back to 2001 for several reasons. First, it was too hard to find accurate injury information for most of the players before 2000. I’d love to have it back as far as I can go, but for now it only goes back to 2001.

I chose the active players as those who have been a part of my pitch fx database. If they had an AB, threw a pitch, or even was on someone’s roster then they were in my database. I currently have over 2100 records in the database, that’s over 800 different players and that’s 95% DL transactions and 5% of other transactions in my database. Entering in that many records took probably well over 300 hours and so that’s the main reason of only getting active players at this time.

Finally you can see how many times the player has injury that particular body part since 2001. If he hurt the elbow 0 times, 1 time, or 5 times you’ll see it.

What the future holds

In the future, I plan to:

• continue to address the format of the tool to give it optimal effectiveness.
• enter in day to day injuries from here on out
• include minor league injuries
• include a complete injury history for all players back to 2001, not just the active players.

If you have any questions or suggestions, I always love to hear feedback. I truly do. It makes this site more user friendly, more effectively, and ultimately better for everyone. So please do not hesitate.

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