Buyer Beware: Analyzing Injury Risk of the Top Free Agent Pitchers

As consumers get ready for the holiday shopping season, MLB general managers are doing the same as they evaluate their team needs and available free agents. Nearly $2 billion dollars have been paid to pitchers while on the injured list in MLB since 2015. Injuries have led to significant buyer’s remorse.  The DVS Analytics team used our proprietary Injury Risk (IR) model to assess this year’s free agent pitchers to see their likelihood of playing through their contract without succumbing to a major throwing-related arm injury*.  We focused on the top of top free agent pitchers, according to mlb.com’s Mark Feinsand.  Let’s dig into the results and to our GM friends, buyer beware.

The first step is to apply the Delivery Value System pitching biomechanics model to these players to get a DVS score.  The average DVS score of a MLB pitcher is 14.1 and this group of free agents is representative of this with an average DVS of 13.92 and a range of 9 to 20.

The DVS mechanics has been proven to correlate with injury risk.  The relative injury risk due to mechanics of each of these pitchers is shown below.  The larger the number, the more likely that player is to get injured compared to a pitcher with a lower value.  As you can see, there are some pitchers that at first glance should be avoided.  

However, there are additional factors to consider.  The IR model considers the DVS score as well as pitcher usage, injury history, and other factors.  The IR model then determines the probability of injury as a function of innings pitched.  This enables the pitchers to be studied to determine what would be a reasonable contract length for each of them given their risk of major injury.  A greater chance of avoiding injury leads to a greater expected return on investment for MLB teams. We calculated the probability that each of these pitchers would avoid a major injury during the entirety of a series of contracts from one to five years in length, see the chart below. The range of probabilities diverges as a function of contract length as expected, showing that there is a growing disparity in risk between players under longer term deals.  This is very important to consider when evaluating free agents and determining a contract offer.  In addition, about half of these pitchers have approximately a 30% chance of major injury during a five year contract whereas they have a 15% chance of major injury during a three year contract.

Let’s compare two of the top free agent starting pitchers to study this further.  We decided to compare Jake Odorizzi and Charlie Morton as they represent both ends of the spectrum.  Their DVS scores are 18 and 11 respectively resulting in Morton being about 70% more likely to have a  major injury than Odorizzi due to mechanics alone.  Odorizzi has avoided major injury during his career and Morton has had one.  This along with the other IR model inputs results in the probability chart below and you can see that Morton has a greater probability of injury.  This higher likelihood of injury then results in a riskier signing.  You can see in this graph that a GM may be reticent to offer anything more than a one or two year deal to Morton but can have a lot more confidence in signing Odorizzi to a longer deal with respect to injury risk.  The Atlanta Braves recently signed Morton to a one year deal, nice work Alex Anthopoulos!

With the significant number of injuries occurring every year, injury risk should be a major input in the free agent evaluation process.  The DVS Injury Risk model provides a data based framework to enable GM’s to do this more effectively than in the past. To learn more about the DVS Injury Risk model, please see our published article in Orthopedics Medical Journal or watch our presentation from the 2020 SABR Analytics Conference (presentation begins at 6:23:49).  DVS Baseball offers pitching mechanic assessments, pitching development, predictive injury analytics and more.  Contact us to learn how we can help your organization.

* A major throwing-related arm injury is defined here as a throwing-related injury in the dominant upper extremity that results in a pitcher missing at least three months of a season.