Hello and welcome to episode 905 of Effectively Wild Detaily Podcast from Baseball Perspectus,

presented by the play index at baseballreference.com and our Patreon supporters,

I'm Ben Lambert, I'm 538, joined by Sam Miller, a baseball perspective. Hello. Hey,

I just tweeted that the Dodgers are leading the major leagues in both total number of injuries.

They have 53 and day is lost to injury, 500 and they are way ahead of any other team in both

of those categories. Well, not way ahead, I guess there's the Rockies and the Tigers and the

Phillies and the Brewers are all over 400 and they're at 500 but still they're leading the majors

and it's kind of curious because of how much public attention they have devoted to injury

prevention and research and there's the section of Jeff Passons, the arm about how they're

hiring cutting edge researcher James Buffey to try to prevent pitcher injuries and we've had

their former trainer and head of the medical services Stan Conti on the podcast before and he

was trying to quantify everything years ago. So it's kind of curious but maybe not curious, maybe

this is exactly what you would expect the team that is devoting the most resources to injury

prevention. You would expect them to acquire injury-plagued players which they have done

and unless they are really really good at it then you would expect those players to get hurt a lot.

I don't know whether they would say this is part of the plan, probably not but you'd think that

it is one potential pitfall of trying to be the team that is really good at preventing injuries

is that if you actually believe it and you think you are good then you'll go out and you'll get

Brandon McCarthy and you'll get Brandon Anderson and if your stuff doesn't work then you'll end up

leading the list instead of at the bottom. I think you're presuming a bit to say that it isn't

working unless you have a baseline for how many injuries they should have. It's conceivable that

in fact hypothetically they've signed a club that they expected would have a thousand days of injury

...