Consider it the anti-breakout season. When a MLB player gets injured, there’s some collective breath holding — or if it’s Albert pulling up lame on the basepaths, heart stoppage. When a prospect gets injured, it can quickly become a death knell. They lose out on critical development time, someone else swoops in and takes their job and they can get labeled “injury prone”. How do we reconcile obvious talent and past performance with a current breakdown?
In 2007, Jon Jay missed significant time due a shoulder injury. The impact on his performance when he was playing is hard to pinpoint but it’s a reasonable assumption that his power numbers were supressed. He gained significant ground this year on all the prospect lists. Did his true talent level change? Probably not. Is he moving up because he was healthy or because we have a more accurate indicaiton of his talent? Probably a combination of both. Without dallying on the subject of Jay for too long, opinions varied more on him this year than in the past with some seeing him as a top 10 prospect and others as more of a 4th outfielder/quasi-everyday player. Part of that discrepancy, likely stems from the injury of 2007.
Colby Rasmus somehow managed to disappoint in 2008 despite playing in AAA at age 21. A knee injury cut his season short and last year’s mid-season slump was attributed to a sinus infection. Born from a underwhelming season and an injury the questions of whether he can stay on the field for an entire season have crept into the mind of doubters. How much do we blame the player when an injury takes place? The answer, of course, varies from person to person and player to player. The inability to predict what are largely random events leads to differing perceptions of their causes. In the case of Rasmus, that will likely have little impact to his ranking within the system as he should be at the top of all lists again entering 2009.
The above examples, however, are short term in their impact. After transitioning from starting to relieving and an abbreviated 2007, Jaime Garcia went down with a torn elbow ligament and Tommy John surgery in his immediate future. He’d established himself as the premier starting pitching prospect and perhaps the only one who projects to the front of a rotation. What do you do with an injury that, while increasingly routine, is still a surgery and constitutes the loss of an entire year? If Garcia fails to pitch in 2009 or pitches poorly, I’ve set myself up for quite the conondrum by ranking him #3. I’ve great confidence that Dr. Paletta can correctly replace a ligament but little that the Cardinals can properly manage an injury. While the rankings of Garcia will vary, I expect the more common response to be that of erik and roarke where Garcia falls just outside the top 10.
More players than we can count have had their careers derailed by injuries. Some after they make the majors, some before. The less common but more interesting storyline may be the reverse. The Cardinals signed Ryan Ludwick to a minor league contract in 2007 and he decided to hit the ball. Hard. And often. The partial 2007 year followed up by a 5 WAR 2008 is near the forefront of many baseball fan’s minds. It serves as a illustration of talent overcoming numerous maladies and setbacks. The rewards of a find like Ludwick are on the order of $20M in a given season. Would Ludwick have ranked on any top 10 list headed into 2007? Given his age and injury history, it’s unlikely.
The nature of an injury is obviously important as well. If Garcia had gone down with a torn labrum or injured rotator cuff, he would have been well outside the top 10 for me. Shoulder injuries still equate to career ending in my mind for pitchers. A slugger breaking his hamate bone is a signifcant development and more conerncing than say a broken finger. As a lay person, interpretation of the significance of the injury is woefully uninformed compared to someone with medical training. But how many doctors do you know that are bloggers?
Healthy or hurt? It can make all the difference.
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when projecting players all u r really doing is putting a large number of variables into an equation(some variables hold more weight than others) and coming up with a projection. for example using a 1 to 10 scale(to keep it simple) garcia is a 8 in talent, a 6 in performance, and was a 6 in health. he gets hurt he goes to a 2 or 3 and new answer. nobody can predict injuries for sure but u just plug it in like a formula.
to get specific with garcia, what i would do is look at all pitchers within a year or 2 of his age that have had the surgery. i would look at which ones came back to be healthy(if not effective). anyone who gambles a lot knows what im talking about. its just numbers and odds.
I agree that it’s a conundrum evaluating players who’ve had injuries. As you say two years of injury/illness for a prospect can be interpreted by some as damaged or fragile goods. To the extent that we can evalutate this I think, like you said, it depends a lot on the nature of the injury but also on how the player responds to it. In the case of a severe injury, ligament tear for a pitcher, broken bones etc. I think all you can do is listen to the expert’s odds on recovery and go with that until it’s proven wrong. Far more important, I think, is the player’s history of dealing with strains, sprains, pulls, hernias and other painful but not totally disabling maladies. On the major league level we have the ultimate role model for playing well, returning early etc. from an injury in the person of Albert Pujols. On the other hand we have had a player like Cesar Izturis whose play seems to be very much affected by those semi serious kinds of injuries. There’s a temptation to put this down as a character issue and in the case of AlBert I do think that his yearning to play and will to win plays a role. But I do think that it’s mostly a matter of a player’s body and the kind of role he plays in baseball. Cesar, who I (not popularly) think is actually a very good ball player when not injured, has a very different body from Albert and needs his legs, above all else to be in tip top shape to perform well. As much as I like him I agree that he’s not a good guy to depend on and we were better off letting him go solidify another team’s defense for half a season. Having said that I don’t think we should assume there’s any kind of character issue. He’s a little guy who needs a healthy body to perform at his best.
In the case of prospects it gets much murkier of course because they haven’t been around long enough to get a read on their ability to play through injuries. Regarding the three prospects mentioned I would deal with them this way. Jay seemed to have a pretty serious shoulder injury and shoulders are very important in all aspects of baseball. I’d say we chalk it up to that and take last year as the best read on his prospect status. Garcia’s injury is common and, unless his pitching style and motion make re injury inevitable, I’d say we should expect a return to very good prospect status. Colby worries me a little more because of the big time slumps he’s had and the fact that he hasn’t put together a full great season. They’ve been excused by his youth, sinus infections, injuries, and disappointment at not making the big squad and all of those are legitimate reasons. One thing I know about sinus infections though, since I have them repeatedly, is that people who have them tend to have them repeatedly. They make you feel weird and spacey and I can’t imagine hitting a baseball moving 90 miles an hour with one. I assume that Ted Williams never had one but Colby is going to have to play through sinus infections, if he’s prone to them, other injuries and disappointments if he’s going to achieve the stardom we hope for him.
Type of injury is the big thing for me. Wrist/hand and knee injuries for hitters are major red flags for me. Of course Labrum/Rotator Cuff injuries are the kiss of death for pitchers.
If I was doing a prospect ranking I would rank players that have a chance of passing the injured player ahead of the injured on the depth chart due to the lost development time. No pitcher in the system really has a shot of passing Garcia no matter if he misses a year. But last year I might have ranked Jones ahead of Jay because he had the opportunity to pass him.
I think we need to pool our cash and get Colby a FRB neti pot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8sDIbRAXlg
I understand that Mather injured (broke) his hamate bone right? Will this affect his power going into the season? Is there a chance that he won’t be 100 percent healthy? Is his injury difficult to overcome?