I made two more charts in the past week that are worth a brief discussion. The first looks at injuries by team, and the other considers team winning percentage at home or on the road.
Injuries
A long, unimportant1This technically remains to be seen, but I’m making my call. train of thought and research led me to notice the Brewers seem to have quite a few injured players. That led me to make this chart comparing how many players on each team were listed as injured, and the average length of time they are listed for. Note that in MLB, the injured list is divided into chunks like 10, 15, 45, and 60 days. A player on the 60-day injured list is removed from the 40-man roster, so using the designated injured list is only a rough proxy for injury severity. Some players on the 60-day injured list will be out for an entire season, while others half a season. Technically the team hasn’t “lost” that player on the roster, but they may be a key piece of the team that isn’t available.
With all that in mind, this chart represents the total “injury impact” of a team based on players listed on their roster. As the snarky labels that one must apply suggest, the lower-left quadrant contains teams who have very few injured players, and those who are mostly have minor injuries that they should be back from in a week or two. The top-right quadrant is precisely the opposite: many players are injured to a degree that they will miss at least two months. Some of them may be replaced, but only on the roster, not necessarily on performance.
Winning at Home or Away
Home field advantage is an accepted reality among most athletes and fans. In my (unlived) history, this was most notable with the 1987 Minnesota Twins. They won 69% of their home games, and only 36% of their road games. Luckily they had home field advantage for the World Series as well, because they went 4-0 at home, and 0-3 in St. Louis.
This chart shows that most teams, 23 by my count, win at least as much at home as they do on the road. Only the Red Sox are so egregiously against this trend that you have to wonder if their roster is constructed in a way that is thoroughly not optimized for Fenway Park. The other six teams that win more on the road are not too far off the trend.
The fact that the Giants are so excellent at home also matches my gut-check based on games I’ve watched this year.
- 1This technically remains to be seen, but I’m making my call.