One of the best features of our site is Derek Rhoads’ injury visualizations. You can access the Injured List Ledger, the Recovery Dashboard, and the Four-Year Injury Map from the Tools pulldown on the site. You can use them to learn various aspects of injuries during each of the past five seasons.
The IL Ledger provides a good answer to the question, “Which teams got hurt the most by injuries in 2024?” Scroll down to the IL Team Totals graphic, and you’ll see that the Dodgers (1,834), Red Sox (1,658), Astros (1,617), Angles (1,562), A’s (1,558), Reds (1,536), Brewers (1,535), and Yankees (1,513) all had over 1,500 players’ games lost to the IL this year. At the other extreme, the Blue Jays (570), Tigers (632), Padres (786), Royals (870), Phillies (884), Nationals (961), and Mariners (970) all lost fewer than 1,000 days.
But some injuries are costlier than others. The Braves lost 13.1 wins, measured by WARP, due to injuries this year, losing Ronald Acuña Jr. and Spencer Strider for most of the season and suffering large absences of Sean Murphy, Michal Harris II, Ozzie Albies, and Austin Riley. The Dodgers lost 10.6 wins. Note that this is based on preseason WARP. We didn’t project much WARP this year from the likes of Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May, who entered the year on the injured list and thus weren’t projected to add a lot (0.2 and 0.3 wins, respectively), or the total would have been higher. No other teams lost more than 7.6 wins. The Padres lost the third-fewest days but the 11th-most wins, with costly injuries to Fernando Tatis Jr., Ha-seong Kim, Yu Darvish, and Joe Musgrove. The Nationals lost only 1.5 wins, the Royals 1.8, the Tigers 2.1, and Rockies 2.2. Nobody else missed out on fewer than 2.5 wins.
Overall, injuries were down in 2024 compared to 2023, when they were up slightly compared to 2022, which in turn was down a lot from 2021. The 2021 season remains an extreme outlier from other seasons, as the return from shortened pandemic season led to an explosion in injuries. (Workload management to prevent overuse injuries may make sense, but not when the workload is only 60 games.) There were 778 players assigned to the injured list in 2024, compared to 849 in 2023, 831 in 2022, and 976 in 2021. If you were wondering whether we’ve returned to pre-pandemic levels of injuries, the answer is no, not even close. There were only about 700 injured list stints in 2018 and 2019.
One of the themes we’ve discussed this year is the disparity in trends for hitter injuries and pitcher injuries. That’s borne out by the annual numbers.
The seasonality of this is interesting.
Hitter injuries were down compared to the prior two years in every month of the season. Pitcher injuries were lower than in both 2022 and 2023 in the months of June, July, and September, but they were higher than the prior two seasons in August, the same as in 2023 in May, and higher in February-April (199; months combined to account for the 2022 lockout) than in 2022 (146) and 2023 (185). The takeaway here is that 2024 suggested real improvement in keeping hitters on the field but none for pitchers.
With that in mind, here’s the number of IL stints per team in 2024.
The distribution of injuries was much more democratic than last year. In 2023, the Astros placed only 14 players on the injured list, while the Giants had 46, the Angels 42, the Twins 39, and the Yankees and Reds 38. This year, no team had fewer than 16 or more than 36.
As you might expect, avoiding injuries leads to more success on the field. As you might not expect, though, the relationship is quite weak.
The trendline’s telling you that for every five additional injured list stints, a team loses about two more games. That’s not a lot. The correlation between injuries and winning percentage is -0.22, which is pretty much saying there isn’t one.
Maybe there’s a difference between pitchers and hitters. Pitchers get hurt more frequently and stay on the IL longer than batters. Let’s break down hitter and pitcher IL stints.
There was a pretty wide disparity in hitter injuries. The Guardians (Angel Martinez, Will Brennan, and Steven Kwan twice) and Mets (Ronny Mauricio, Francisco Alvarez, Starling Marte, and Jeff McNeil) placed hitters on the injured list only four times all season. The Red Sox put eight hitters on the injured list before the end of April. And you’ll notice that the top five teams in hitter injury avoidance qualified for the tournament. The relationship between injury avoidance was stronger (more than a win per injured list stint) and better-correlated (r=-0.33) for hitters than for players overall.
Pitcher injuries were more frequent and more widely distributed.
There was almost no relationship between pitcher injuries and team performance, though.
The winningest team in baseball tied for the most pitchers on the injured list. Two of the three teams tied for the second-fewest had losing records. There’s really no relationship to speak of here.
Do older teams get hurt more? Baseball-Reference calculates average age for hitters and pitchers. The calculation weights every batter to appear for a team by at bats plus games played. It weights pitchers by three times games started plus games plus saves. Based on those formulae, Cleveland had the youngest hitters, with an average age of 26.1. The Dodgers’ were the oldest, 30.3. The Marlins had the youngest pitchers, 27.0, while the Rangers’ averaged 31.7. These are not perfect measures. The Dodgers’ average pitcher age of 29.7 would have been higher had a quartet of 36-year-olds—Blake Treinen, Joe Kelly, Ryan Brasier, and Clayton Kershaw—not spent substantial time on the injured list. But it’s the best we’ve got.
How well do hitter IL stints map to hitter age?
This isn’t what you’d expect. Injuries declined, slightly, with age. The Mets (blue dot) and Astros (orange) were relatively old teams with few injured hitters. The Red Sox (red) were young and hurt.
Youth didn’t prevent injuries for pitchers, either, though the relationship was more in line with expectations.
Every three years of age equated to about one more IL stint, and the relationship wasn’t strong. The fourth-oldest pitching staff, the Cardinals, with an average age of 30.8, had barely over half as many pitchers on the injured list, 11, as the Marlins’ youngest-in-the-majors staff, 20. The second-oldest staff, the Braves, had only 14 pitchers on the IL, while the considerably younger Cubs had 27.
What drives injuries? It’s not clear. Maybe it’s training regimens, maybe it’s the physiology of the players the teams have acquired, maybe it’s something else. The role of age, at least in 2024, was not a large factor. And while we’ve made progress with hitter injuries, we’ve made none with hurlers.
The is the fourth year we’ve tracked these numbers. Over those seasons, three teams have been the best at injury prevention. Cleveland’s put only 22 hitters and 42 pitchers on the IL, 64 total, all the fewest in MLB. Baltimore’s tied for the fourth-fewest injured hitters (34) and the third-fewest pitchers (50). And the Astros have tied the Orioles with only 84 IL assignments, comprising 30 hitters (the second-fewest) and 54 pitchers (the fifth-fewest).
On the other side of the ledger, the Giants have put the most players on the injured list over the past four seasons, 167, due in large part to their league-leading 95 hitter IL stints. The Twins, with 150, are second, with the second-most hitters getting hurt, 78. The Reds have consistently had problems keeping their players on the field, with the fourth-most hitters (62) and the third-most pitchers (84) going on the injured list. Ditto the Cubs, with 60 hitters and 82 pitchers, each one spot lower than the Reds. And rounding out the only teams with more than 137 injured list stints, the Dodgers have been relatively good at keeping their hitters off the IL but they’ve had a whopping 102 pitchers—that’s over 25 per season—on the IL, for a total of 143. Their ability to win games at a pace unseen since before expansion while often having more pitchers on the injured list than the active roster is remarkable.
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