While I know that almost none of my readers are professional baseball players, I do know that many of you are baseball fans. More importantly, though, a large number of you either play baseball or have kids that play. So when I read a new study in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, I thought it had some value for a number of you.
The authors found that there were 3072 players placed on the disabled list from 2002 to 2008. They found a surprising 37% increase in these injuries between 2005 and 2008. While it seems to me that this increase could be a statistical anomaly or short-term fluctuation, the authors feel that it represents a true increase over time.
More important to me are the trends with timing of baseball injuries and who gets them. As one might expect, pitchers tended to get a larger percentage of the upper extremity injuries, while field players got more of the lower extremity injuries. Overall, pitchers had a 34% higher incidence rate for injuries during this study period.
Far more players were placed on the disabled list in the month of April, the first month of the Major League Baseball season. The number of players placed on the disabled list dropped each subsequent month, with September being the lowest. Now the low numbers in September could be a reflection of MLB rules allowing teams to increase roster size to 40 players in that month, so teams might not make players ineligible to play for 15 days more often in September.