(*) MASTER NOTES: Body types and injuries
May 2 2014
Not long ago on an edition of the BaseballHQ Radio podcast, the subject of player injury came up.
Of course anyone who plays fantasy baseball is concerned about how to manage player health. It would be a pretty significant advantage to know how we could avoid the players at higher risk of injuries, especially among our top-round or top-dollar picks.
In the course of the chat, the idea came up that maybe we should be trying to look at players by body type. Anecdotally, it seemed that players like Alfonso Soriano, who was once described as "a wiry bundle of fast-twitch muscle," seldom miss a lot of time. You know the type--Ken Griffey Jr., Derek Jeter and even Barry Bonds, who was what our dads called “rangy” before his hat size started catching up with his uniform number. They all seemed to be on the field every day.
Meanwhile, stockier, more overtly muscular players like Josh Hamilton, Travis Hafner, Mark Teixeira, Carlos Quentin and Kevin Youkilis seem to be on the DL (or in the O.R.) more often than the 25-man roster.
I think there’s something to this, but at BaseballHQ.com, we don’t just think there’s something to things. We check it out.
So I looked at baseball-reference.com for all the hitters in the free-agent era (1975 to 2013) who had averaged at least 500 Plate Appearances (PA) per season over careers of at least 14 years.
It’s a short list. Only 82 batters rang up enough PAs to qualify. Led, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear, by Ichiro Suzuki, who has his picture in the dictionary next to “wiry.”
I also used the baseball-reference data to divide each hitter’s listed weight in pounds by his height in inches. The average was about 2.6 pounds per inch, or roughly one-tenth the benchmark for a decent kosher salami.
And guess what? Only 15 of those 82 durable hitters on the list were 10% or more beefy than the average, and only three—Carlos Lee, Albert Pujols and Dave Parker—were over 3.0 pounds per inch. Lee was the heaviest guy on the entire list, at 6-2, 270 a svelte 3.6 pounds to the inch. Other weighty guys among the PA leaders included Vlad Guerrero, Todd Helton, Adrián Béltre, and Scott Rolen, each of whom had injury issues throughout his career.
To be fair, some heavier guys, like Paul Konerko, Frank Thomas, Manny Ramirez and Miguel Tejada, were very durable, while lean machines like Harold Baines, Paul Molitor and Andre Dawson were often affected by injury. But at a glance I can tell you that the leaner, more wiry hitters did not jump off the page as injury-prone.
Before I declared victory, though, I thought I'd do a second check, looking at hitters in just the last five years. And instead of their average PA per season, I’d find the hitters who had 500 PAs in every season—the very definition of durable. Only 31 hitters met the mark.
The first thing I noticed is that all the players had higher weight-to-height ratios than in the longer test across more and earlier years. The durable hitters now averaged 2.9 pounds per inch, up from the 2.7 in the earlier test.
But the percentage of hitters 10% or more above that height-weight average stayed pretty constant, at around 13% (four hitters) in the later test versus 18% in the earlier one. The four heavier hitters on the consistently-durable list checked in at or above 3.2 pounds per inch: Prince Fielder, who is about three vegan platters short of clearing (or crushing) the 4.0 bar; Matt Holliday (3.3), Billy Butler (also 3.3) and, of all people, Alberto Callaspo (also 3.3, and who’da thunk it?).
So it appears that in addition to all the other metrics we need to watch in our roster management practices, we need to add some measure of body type. But I’m not confident that the baseball-reference.com height and weight data are accurate enough.
After all, weight generally increases as we age (believe me, I know), so the baseball-reference data are necessarily a compromise, especially for players with relatively long careers. Just for example, Barry Bonds is listed at 6-1, 185, which seems a trifle short of his weight in the latter part of his career, when his king-size noggin probably went a buck-twenty by itself.
Also, the official height/weight stats are not actually measured; the stats providers take the player’s word for it, or the teams’, or someone’s, but as yet there are no mandatory public weigh-ins (or height measurements) to rely on.
For all that imprecision, though, this feels like an area where further research could pay off. At the very least, I know I’ll be watching for the Ichiro or Soriano builds next draft season.
Oh, by the way, I didn’t look at pitchers, because I already know the leading cause of their injuries: me drafting them in Tout Wars.
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