Does an Injured Royce Lewis Lock Mickey Gasper Into the Twins' Opening Day Roster?

[saviking]

23 hours ago, chpettit19 said:

My answer is the same. We know why arms get hurt more now. Max effort. On velocity and spin. It's not surprising that when you test the very limits of what the human body can do you break the human body. That doesn't make guys now "more fragile" it means they're doing things the guys back then couldn't do. That's the natural progression of the world. In order for me to beat you I have to be able to do more than you. And in order for the next guy to beat me they have to be able to do more than me. Well we're getting to the limits of what the body can physically handle. 

And, for the record, pitchers aren't used for shorter stints now because of pitch counts for arm health, but performance. Teams have figured out where starter's peak performance is and are trying to maximize that. Again, it's about getting the most max effort out of them. It's about the number of times they go through a lineup, not the number of pitches they throw. From there the teams are tracking far more advanced things than pitch counts. They're tracking spin, extension, arm angle, release points, etc. to determine when guys get tired. Not pitch counts. But that's a talk for another day.

As for gathering statistics to prove you wrong, it's a little difficult because the rules of baseball have changed. It used to be that you could only put a certain number of guys on the DL at a time and once you reached your limit you were just out of luck. So, looking at days lost to DL/IL trips or number of guys put on the DL/IL is misleading. The minimum amount of time needed to be spent on the list has also changed over time. Shrinking from 60, to 30, to 21, and splitting into multiple lists with the 15, 10, and 60 day DL/ILs. 

Every study that's been run on MLB injury rates that I can find states that it's inconclusive because of these changes. The injury rates show they're going up, but the rates of increase go up with each increase in team's abilities to use the DL/IL. Crazy dichotomy, don't you think?

Yes, it is. You gave a well-educated response that is hard to disagree with. Mine was my gut response from watching the Twins since day one. My frustration is how we can't seem to keep players on the field over the last five years. Doesn't matter how good you are if you can't stay on the field.