Soft Tissue has become an Issue

During our last April owner’s meeting, Peshastin owner Phil Smith commented that he’d never seen so many injuries before. At the moment, though the Tornadoes had their own injury worries, I wondered if it was just a biased observation seeing as though he had just lost Dustin May for the season after losing James Paxton a few weeks before, while Juan Soto and Jazz Chisholm sat next to one another in the training room. 

But a few days later, Athletic writer Ken Rosenthal released an article titled, “MLB injuries are up again in 2021, and the sport is nowhere near solving the problem.” In it, he included information from an independent firm studying the rise in injuries:

“Data shows placements on the injured list increased by 15 percent in a comparison from the first month of 2019, baseball’s last full season, to the first month of ’21. The increase for pitchers was 22 percent, and the overall increase in soft-tissue injuries, including hamstring and oblique strains, was 97 percent.”

97 percent! I do not have the time to comb through each of our rosters to see which players are currently injured, though I am fairly certain that every EFL team is dealing with injuries to key players. Just one week into the month of May and we already have three EFL teams with at least 20 replacement PAs (Cascades, Balk and Pears), and another three teams knocking on the door of 10 replacement innings pitched (Cascades, Cheese and Dragons) already. 

In some ways, winning in the EFL (and the MLB, too, I guess) is as much about performing well as it is about avoiding serious injuries (especially to key players) and being able to weather injuries through roster depth which includes players who are somewhat better than replacement players. And at least some of the mediocre play in the MLB thus far could be chalked up to the increase in injuries. 

(Do you know there are currently 0 MLB teams with a winning percentage over .600? The closest is the Red Sox with a .594 winning percentage. Contrast that to the EFL, where we have 5 teams over .600!)

So Phil was right – there are more injuries this year than there ever have been before. And I don’t think it is good for the game. In the 90s the answer to decrease injuries was to look the other way as players used performance enhancing drugs which made injuries less likely (among other side effects, some positive and others much more negative). This season it seems some teams, like the Yankees and Dodgers, are taking an approach that has built in rest days for players from the very beginning of the season, especially those who might be more prone to soft-tissue injuries due to violent swings or aggressive defensive play.

Hopefully a solution can be found, one that is ethical and also sustainable, because we (EFL and MLB) need our best players on the field and not on the bench.

EFL Standings for 2021