Reese Kaplan -- A Look at the Narrative of Injuries

A lot of column inches have been devoted to the seemingly never-ending rash of injuries afflicting the Mets and derailing them from their post season aspirations.  You would think the seemingly snake-bitten Mets were alone and in this regard and it would always result in a horrific impact to the a team’s place in the standings. 

Well, surprise, surprise…the team most adversely affected by injuries was the Los Angeles Dodgers and by a very wide margin.  They had 27 players hit the disabled list and they lost a total of 1829 days of their players taking the field. The combined salaries of the players missed totaled over $56 million.  By contrast the Mets had 19 players hit the disabled list and they missed 1404 days.  The Mets’ payroll of affected players was $44 million ($20 million of which belonging to David Wright). 

If you go down the top five in terms of teams hit hard by the injury bug you’ll also find the Boston Red Sox who, though fighting back from seemingly certain elimination by the Houston Astros, won their division despite having had injuries.  Ditto the Washington Nationals.  Hmmn…they seemed to have weathered the injury storm just fine.

Now cumulative totals are not the whole story, of course.  You have to take into account the quality of the players who hit the DL and how long they were unavailable.  Noah Syndergaard, David Wright, Matt Harvey, Jeurys Familia and Michael Conforto have all been All Stars.  Throw in Steve Matz for good measure.  Rosterresource.com assigned a value of the pre-season projections to each player and using that yardstick to gauge impact you had the Mets dubiously at the top of the heap.

Of course, this type of analysis is not without its own problems.  Cody Bellinger was on the DL for the Dodgers, earned minimum wage and should be a unanimous choice for Rookie of the Year.  He was not projected to make the major league roster.  Consequently, the results become skewed. 

The Mets made headlines recently when, after granting the training staff a vote of confidence, Sandy Alderson announced that Ray Ramirez was being shown the door.  The move bought him some good press and positive reaction from the fans, but it’s not getting at the root of the problem.  What is being done in the lowest levels of the minor leagues to condition athletes properly?  Ray Ramirez may or may not have been good at his job, but he’s not in Port St. Lucie, Binghamton, Brooklyn, Kingsport or Las Vegas.  He had people who he entrusted to deal with injuries AFTER they happened, but the issue would seem to be more about training and conditioning.

Towards that end the Mets have announced that the Barwis training facility is being retained and no word has filtered out about any changes to the exercise regimen to which developing teenagers are subjected on a daily basis.  Dom Smith came into camp notably heavier than when he was in Spring Training.  You would think that the prevention, conditioning and nutrition side of the equation needs addressing as well.

What’s needed is strong leadership that wants to address the root cause of problems and not simply make empty PR gestures.