Rotoblog

I’ve been completely floored by the quality and velocity of the research that has already come out using the injury database. I’ll be using this post to catalogue links to all of the analysts’ amazing work.

First though, check out this awesome inforgraphic courtesy of Ed DeCaria (analyst at BBHQ):

Thanks for allowing me to post your work here Ed.

Percentage of Team Payroll Lost to DL.

and

Players that Cost Their Teams the Most Money While on DL

Incredible work by Jeff, who as Tom Tango points out, deserves to be recognized for this work by someone in the mainstream media. The fact that MLB teams lose 15% of their payroll each year to injury is an important finding.

It should also be noted that Jeff performed these analyses a year ago with proprietary data, but had been forced to sit on them until injury stats were freely available.

This is precisely why I released the database, and shows just how much we stand to lose when we refuse to make important data available for study.

The Verducci Effect

Jeremy Greenhouse at Baseball Analysts used a subset of the data to test the veracity of the Verducci Effect. The Verducci Effect is a “negative forward indicator” that states that “pitchers under the age of 25 who have 30-inning increases year over year tend to underperform.”

Jeremy found no statistically significant evidence of such an effect.

Independently, JC Bradbury, an economist and author of the book The Baseball Economist, came to the same conclusion.

More Testing of the Verducci Effect

JC writes:

A change in workload by more than 30 innings for pitchers under 26 is not associated with more days on or trips to the DL. I would like to reiterate that there needs to be further testing of Verducci Effect, but so far there doesn’t appear to be much empirical support for the hypothesis.

Amazing work, one and all. It warms the cockles to see how much knowledge creation can occur is such a short period of time.

Free the data!