Orginally presented on February 4 for the Cleveland chapter of SABR (Society of American Baseball Research), an in-depth player/positional analysis was performed to see how the 2012 Indians will fare.  This is part one of a 15 part series that will be released over the following two weeks.  The rest of the research/analysis can be found here. 

Outside of the “predictable” injures – the types of maladies that have plagued Travis Hafner and Grady Sizemore and have already been accounted for – there’s a certain of production the Indians, like every team, will lose this season.  How much?

Well, looking at data through the last four seasons, 2007 to 2011, the Indians lost an average of 598 games to unpredictable injuries.  Remember, this does not include either Hafner or Sizemore because of the constant injuries that have plagued them have become, more or less, rather predictable.

Of all those injuries, there have been 21 that have been significant, the type of wound that would require a player to miss 25 or more games.  Determining the amount of production missed by those hurt is a rather inexact science an requires a large portion of extrapolation, but it does provide a decent “guess” as to how many wins the team might lose this season because of injury.

Photo Courtesy of Keith Allison via Flickr.com

For example, in 2008, Jake Westbrook missed 142 games, appearing in only in only five, pitching in less than 35 innings.  In those five starts, Westbrook was 0.4 wins above replacement level; a difference of two wins the previous season and two wins the following season.  There was a difference of four wins two years prior to the injury, but looking back that appears as the career outlier, not the norm.  Examining all the facts, it’s a reasonable estimate to say that Westbrook’s injury cost the team between two and 2.5 wins in 2008, a reasonable total.

This approach was applied to all 21 significant injuries, and the below table illustrates a best guess on how many wins the team lost to injury.

Figure 12: Significant injuries and the amount of wins lost

Over the course of four years the team lost a total of 20 wins, or about five wins a year, seems reasonable enough.

But what about the players used in their place?  How much did they contribute?

Well, it most cases, it has to be assumed that the best available player is, in fact, with the big league.  There are cases where this doesn’t apply (for example, the team opting to keep Jason Kipnis in Triple-A last season for seasoning), but this usually isn’t the norm.

Taking it a step further, it’s a safe assumption that the replacement player won’t produce close to the regular starter’s level, at least in extended trials.  So how much would they produce by?

Well, somewhere about 30- to 40 percent seems reasonable.

Losing a player like Westbrook, and his 2.5 WAR totals, for almost an entire year would be rather difficult, but given the general state of the farm system over the past few years, the team should be able to plug in an available minor starter who would be worth about one win over the course of a full year, which happens to be forty percent of Westbrook’s production level.

So how many games did the team lose, on average, over the last four years because of significant injuries?

After adjusting the original total of five games by estimating a 40 percent return, the answer is about three wins.