Just give him one more day

You look at the teams who have suffered the least and how few “retroactive” days they had it maybe that’s because they simply DLed them and let them rest before the injuries became serious. Since they knew they’d be out 15 days, they rested and took it easy and slow instead of constantly trying to push the injured body part of choice every couple of days to see if it’s really hurt or not.

Is it Perl? I’ve been trying to get completely up to date on the edge of sabermetrics but I must say parsing data using something like Perl is by far my biggest weak point.

    There are many factors as to why players end up on the DL. Some of the reasons are what I call casualties of the game. Crisp’s fracture sliding into 2nd base had nothing to do with his shoulder injuries which I would classify as injuries that occur due to repetition which medical/training staffs should have a more control over. The most obvious examples of repetitive injuries involves shoulders and forearms, i.e. rotator cuff injuries and tendinitis respectively for pitchers. Please don’t bring up Duke, he’s an entirely different matter.

   Brett Anderson is an example of a pitcher who has a history of tendinitis in his forearm and as we saw in his performance against the Indians, his velocity and the sharpness on his curve/sliders was not there. The ability for the staff to act upon or anticipate a compromise of the structure / function of a player’ s body parts eg L forearm in this case is the greatest challenge.

   Perhaps, with Anderson just getting the big contract, he was reticent to admit anything and thereby stayed quiet hoping it would go away. We now as fans are in a position where we really don’t know how long his recovery will take. I will refrain from my input at this point.

   The reason I titled this the way I did is because I have interacted with some of the medical staff for Milwaukee recently at a conference I attended. The Brewers use of osteopathic physicians , trainers and surgeons was enlightening with regards to the frequency they are used during Spring Training and the season. While their lag time was 1.37 days which is middle of the road compared with other teams, they may have an advantage over other teams with the type of treatment they are providing.

    While no team can’t prevent the rare injuries that occur such as the one to Crisp (maybe blame Rickey for inspiring him to dive head first into 2nd) or the one to Barton who recently suffered a distal volar fracture (but hasn’t prevented him from playing). There are factors that have to be identified which may help prevent an “older” player such as Ellis and his hamstring from getting strained to the point of landing him on the DL.

   I truly can’t knock the A’s and criticize their current methods of identifying proclivities toward chronic injuries because I don’t have access to that information (nor would I share it if I did). But Bob Allejo recently described the system-wide process necessary at all levels of the organization that take a few years to implement which we are only in year 2 of since his return. We can only hope that the frequency of injuries decreases as the recognition of musculo-skeletal strain patterns depending upon which position a player plays, increases so that further injuries can be reduced.

My mistake. But that would explain the outlets!