The White Sox and the Brewers, among other teams, seem to have made some real progress in preventing injuries. But there's so, so much more money to be saved.
Feb 2, 2011 -
Writing over at SI.com, Will Carroll finds a billion dollars just sitting around not doing anything, and discovers that at least a few teams are actually taking real steps to limit injuries:
Over the last decade, teams have spent more than a billion dollars on players that were on the DL. That's billion with a B, all spent on players shelved for injuries that could be preventable. Certainly there will always be injuries in sports -- which keeps me employed -- but there doesn't have to be quite so many and they don't have to be quite so serious.
Many will ask how I know this to be true, and I'll direct you to look at the massive gap between the best teams and the worst teams when it comes to keeping players healthy. This isn't a flukish statistic, but one based on a decade of numbers. Looking back through 2002, the gap between the best and the worst teams is almost $100 million dollars. In fact, the team that saved the most money over that time period -- the Chicago White Sox-- saved almost exactly enough money to have bought their entire 2005 roster. You might remember them as the team that won the World Series. Thanks to Herm Schneider and his staff, the Sox got that one for free. You can think of a good medical staff like a "Buy 9, get the tenth free" deal at Costco.
--snip--
The Brewers have been second only to the White Sox in preventing injuries over the past decade, in part because they've decided that random isn't good enough. They made the unusual move of putting their medical staff under the direction of assistant GM Gord Ash. Ash has focused effort, resources and thought onto his medical staff, leading to a reduction in injuries and a better understanding of the intersections of health, performance and development. The team has used this "one page" approach, aligning the scouting, medical and minor league departments to generate results.
I started beating this drum a long time ago, just imagining how much money teams could save if they could prevent injuries by just some small percentage. I was thinking mostly about pitchers, because they suffer more catastrophic injuries. Obviously, you want to keep the hitters healthy, too.
In the post-Moneyball era, we love to talk about market inefficiencies. First it was (supposedly) sluggardly sluggers who wouldn’t eschew the walks, then it was secretly excellent outfielders, and lately I suppose it’s secretly great baserunners or something.
Really, though, that’s just sort of playing around on the margins. You can’t win without great players, and generally speaking everyone knows who those are. Secretly effective players might push you from 85 wins to 87, but it’s a great player or two that gets you from 85 to 94 and into the playoffs. And great players on the market are almost always cost almost exactly what they should. Because that’s the easiest part of a general manager’s job.
No, the real path to exploiting inefficiencies lays somewhere else. What if you could buy a super-sophisticated pitching machine that cost $2 million and would lift your team’s batting average by two points. Would you do it? You should. What if you could invest just $500,000 extra and cut your team’s DL time by five percent. Would you do it? You should.
Granted, those two points and that five percent are merely speculative. Still, I’d probably give them both a shot, because the potential payoff/outlay is massive. Generally, though, teams don’t think that way. They’ll happily spend $8 million for a below-average shortstop, but not $800,000 on a medical staff that just might help win a division title.
Most probably wouldn’t, anyway. That’s obviously changing, just like everything else in the game. Twenty or 30 years ago, the state of medicine was just slightly better than the version practiced by Theodoric of York. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good leeching as much as the next guy. I’m just not sure it’s the best way to protect a roster full of tightly strung millionaires.
I don’t mean to suggest it’s easy to keep these guys healthy. There has been a massive difference between the Brewers and the White Sox and the teams at the other end of the scale. Before drawing any overarching conclusions, we do have make sure it's not just luck. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some teams have started to figure things out, and some still have not.
11 comments
Comments
A clarification...
Rob,
It’s not really ‘saving money’ right? That money is spent the moment the contract is signed. Each team’s productivity per dollar spent would increase, as they get more innings from the high priced players, but they’re not really saving money.
If you argued that that team spending is higher than it otherwise would be, due to those injuries, I would agree with you. They are going to save the fraction they otherwise wouldn’t have spent. But that fraction is not going to represent the the whole sum of the of money going to those players on the DL. We’re still talking millions, but probably not the full billion Will cites.
by jakeruss on Feb 2, 2011 11:56 PM EST reply actions
Those roster spots still need to be taken up. You put a guy on the DL and now you have to pay someone else to play instead. So not only are you losing out on probably having a worse player on the team, but you have to pay him as well.
by mhanson324 on Feb 3, 2011 12:37 AM EST up reply actions
I think his point is that, on average, the replacement is paid less than the guy on the DL. Thus, purely in terms of overall salary paid, preventing an injury saves less than that player’s salary.
In the game of chess, you can never let your adversary see your pieces.
by jsimon66 on Feb 3, 2011 1:35 AM EST up reply actions
exactly right
When the $15 million dollar pitcher goes down with the arm injury mid-season, teams usually call up the 3A guy making between $400k-$1Mil once he’s in the Majors. So, yes, they’ve increased the budget by that $400k, but the team is on the hook for the $15mil regardless (assuming no insurance payments).
In effect, the team is not saving $15mil, but $400k, by not having the injury occur. (One should also factor in the added service time the replacement player accrues if would impact future arbitration status.)
Now if the team goes out and acquires a high-cost replacement, they’ll be spending money they otherwise wouldn’t have. The avoided injury saves this expense.
I’m arguing that typically an injured player is not replaced with a high-priced player. Thus the medical treatment “saving a billion” over the decade is misleading. Surely these millions are nothing to scoff at, teams should invest in the best medical care, but the total ‘saved’ is an order of magnitude smaller than what Mr. Carroll is suggesting.
The argument we should be offering instead is this: how much production value is lost due to these injuries? (Granted this is harder, because we’d have to speculate on what the injured player would have done if he’d have remained on the field.)
by jakeruss on Feb 3, 2011 2:30 AM EST up reply actions
Right.
Imagine accounting for the guy getting paid 15m for sitting in the sauna while my high school classmate’s cousin gets to start for the team! No offense, but that shit cost money. A guy you’re paying to train becomes a millionaire to train on TV and embarrass and you’re moneymaker is at the spa on the company card…I’m buying the 500k machine, f that.
by thebigtizzle on Feb 3, 2011 4:30 AM EST up reply actions
Three Wrongs For the Price of One
No. Its not an annual aggregate. If you’re going to add economics to accounting, or vice versa, then you have to follow the rules. Inherent in his argument is 1) you’re losing money with the highly valuable product unavailable, 2) the replacement is an admission that you’re losing money (value) with a replacement. Over the course of time building a system that is more proactive in preventing or quickly addressing injury amounts to protection of company assets, which is the HUGEST determinant of the bottom line. If people hear that the ace is out on an average team thats in the running, that may cost you a game of revenue. When Bucky Jr from Wichita gets pulled in the third inning, your season MAY NOT RECOVER. Not only does investing 500,000 (1/10 WAR?) increase the odds of getting the player back to bringing back the company bread (fans, TV advertisers), but it increases the overall team WAR and leads to wins. If you don’t know how wins increase the bottom line, then go to the game and have a blast; this article is above the game board and exploring how to make it even better for you and you don’t need the ingredients to sausage. I’m with Rob on this one. In the meantime….GO ANGELS!
by thebigtizzle on Feb 3, 2011 4:25 AM EST reply actions
Economic analysis
I’m with Rob and tizzle on this one, but I understand what’s “misleading” to others. The lost money Rob is talking about isn’t cash out of pocket for salaries. One of the most complicated parts of Economics is quantifying the value of intangibles that are hard to evaluate on the same scale, or at all. It’s typical that these things are converted to dollar values for purposes of comparison. For instance, after 9/11, the compensated value of the lives lost had to be converted to dollars. Of course you can’t literally put a dollar value on a life, but that’s what Economists do. In this post, Rob is using player salary as an estimate of their economic value to their teams. It’s as good as anything and better than most.
BTW, WAR and win share do the same thing but for baseball value. That’s what makes them so useful.
by Moooooose on Feb 3, 2011 8:54 AM EST reply actions
Another ineffeciency
seems to be the way money is spent in the minor leagues. the players don’t eat well or travel all that nicely when they’re in the minors. i forgot who wrote about this a while ago (might have been Neyer) but what if a team spent $60K for each minor league team to have a nutritionist and another $40K for better food. (Not sure if these numbers would work, but just a hypothetical). So you’re spending another $100K for 6 teams, so $600K/year. I definitely think it would be worth that minimal investment.
by WhereItAllStarts on Feb 3, 2011 12:32 PM EST reply actions
by the way, I understand that the minor league teams pick up the tab on a lot of the costs for these players, but my proposal is about the major league team giving the minor league club money to invest in these items.
by WhereItAllStarts on Feb 3, 2011 12:34 PM EST up reply actions
We would need to know more detail
The SI article suggests that if you look over 10 years, it can’t be a fluke. But I’d need to know what they are doing that had this quantifiable difference. I think there are many things that occur over many years that are still flukes or are at least just attributable to the basic fact that someone has to be the outlier.
The best example for this is brokers/financial analysts. Ignoring transaction costs, despite being professionals, almost exactly 50% of all brokers beat the market and 50% lose to the market every single year. Now, I am willing to believe that there are people who are better than others, who do better and more work, or who cheat/have inside information/whatever other things that might give them an actual edge. But for the most part, 50% are on the plus side and 50% on the minus side of the market. Therefore, when Money magazine or Fortune or what have you does their picks for the year and puts forward a guy that has beaten the market 5 straight years, I don’t doubt that he has beaten the market 5 straight years. I just doubt that it means anything (and if you go back and check (as I have), these magazine picks beat the market precisely half of the time). When you have, say, 100,000 people working in the financial markets and making picks, over 3,000 of them should beat the market five years straight (1/32). And those 3,000+ have a 50% chance of beating the market the sixth year, about the same as the 3,000 who got the last 5 straight wrong (and I say “about” the same because I am allowing for the idea that some of the 100,000 are just plain incompetent).
The point being that even with a decent sample, there are always random outliers. Over a ten year period, even with everything equal, some baseball teams will randomly suffer from injuries a lot less than others. The question is: Are all other factors equal or can we actually point to something much different that the White Sox are doing? If we can’t point to something major, then the White Sox may just be a random outlier with no greater chance of preventing injury in year 11 than the other teams.
by Brad Newberg on Feb 3, 2011 2:19 PM EST reply actions
I think the White Sox tend to have a more veteran-laden roster, don't they?
I realize this analysis takes place over ~10 years, but the White Sox tend to invest in pitchers who are past the injury nexus. That’s the luxury of mid-to-large market payroll. Some teams have systematically taken more injury gambles over the past 10 years, due to a smaller payroll.
I think those details have some impact on the teams’ DL time data.
The Oakland A's: If you have a no-trade clause in your contract, we're in it.
by notsellingjeans on Feb 5, 2011 11:08 AM EST reply actions
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