Old Home Day in Philadelphia and Increase Use of the Disabled List

The Phillies may have recently sent Jack Taschner packing, but two other former Giants pitched in yesterday’s blow-out win over the Reds.  Once the Phillies were safely ahead 16-1, and starter Cole Hamels had gone seven innings on 92 pitches, the Phillies brought in Tyler Walker to pitch the 8th and Scott Eyre to pitch the 9th.

Tyler Walker pitched fairly well for the Giants last year, with a 4.56 ERA in 65 appearances, with 49 K’s and only 21 BB’s in 53.1 IP.  Not great, but certainly good enough that he should have been able to catch with another big league team at the beginning on 2009 after the Giants decided he wasn’t worth re-signing or offering arbitration.

Instead, he started the season for the Phillies’ AAA team, the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, where he posted a 1.40 ERA in 15 appearances with 20 K’s and only three walks in 19.1 IP, and he was promoted to the major league team in mid-June.  He’s pitching well so far with a 1.80 ERA after ten innings over eight appearances.

Scott Eyre, you probably know about.  His ERA is now 2.40.

Here’s an article from the NY Times about the increased amount of time players are spending on the disabled list.  (Up 26% from 2006 through 2008, according to the article).  The article lists a number of factors such as past use of steroids and discontinued use of amphetamines as possible causes.

I doubt that banning greenies has contributed significantly to time spent on the DL.  While use of greenies may have helped players play with pain, playing with minor injuries is one of the most effective ways of creating major injuries, and thus, at the end of the day, more time spent on the DL, so I don’t see greenies’ discontinued use as a reasonable explanation.

Something else which the Times article touches on, which I think is far more important, in the impact of current high salaries.  Both players and teams are much less willing to have players play with minor injuries (thus, risking major injuries) than they once were, because there is a lot more at stake if players are seriously injured.  Because talent is at such a premium now (and is so expensive), teams do not want veteran players signed to guaranteed long-term contract or younger players who are still under control at much lower salary costs for several years to be lost for longer periods of time due to more serious injuries.

The cost of putting a player on the DL in today’s game is relatively small.  The injured player will be replaced by a minor leaguer for at least 15 days, who earns a pro-rated $400,000, which is peanuts in today’s game.  As more and more pitchers are used by teams in each game, roster space becomes more and more valuable, meaning that players who have minor injuries will be DL’ed rather than have the team go shorted-handed for a week or ten days.

Other factors, I think, are the increased age of players and improvements in sports medicine.  Players seem to stick around forever nowadays, which is a result of increased salaries and expansion.  With thirty teams, there is always a need for talent, and players who don’t seem to have much left get chance after chance by one team after another to prove they really don’t have anything left.

Also, with high salaries, an awful lot of players go back to the minors after completing long major league careers, and many eventually make it back to the majors.  In the 1950’s and 1960’s, when there were fewer major league teams, more minor league teams and lower salaries, this happened much less often.  If a veteran major league player aged 32 or 33 couldn’t hook on with another major league team after getting cut, he’d pack it in and try to find another career to carry him on toward retirement.

Now, the incentive to keep playing even at minor league salaries is enormous.  Even limited major league time means approximately $2,200 per day in salary for each day on a major league roster, plus service time for pension purposes.

Here’s an article also from the NY Times by former player and Players’ Association rep Doug Glanville, in which he mentions that players now begin to earn future defined benefit pensions (”defined benefit” means the amount is guaranteed, and the employer, not the player, bears the risk if the pension monies are poorly invested; the vast majority of American workers with pension benefits now have “defined contribution” pension benefits, meaning that only the amount of the employer contribution contributed to the pension plan is guaranteed, and the worker bears the risk of poor plan performance or market crash) on their very first day of major league service.  This means that with every single additional day spent on a major league roster, the player gets a slightly higher guaranteed pension amount for the rest of his life when he decides to begin collecting his pension at age 50 or 55 or whenever.

The upshot is that players like Scott McLain, who has spent twenty years playing professional baseball, with only four brief major league cups of coffee and parts of five seasons playing in the Japanese major leagues, will probably earn more in salary and benefits playing baseball than most of the other things he reasonably could have devoted his youth to (including this year, he’s earned approximately $3.5M playing in Japan).  This is a big part of the reason why he and players like him are still playing into their middle and late 30’s.

Older players mean more injuries and longer DL stays.  Older players get hurt more often and take longer to heal than younger players.

Current advances in sports medicine add to this effect both by allowing players to play to older ages and also by creating long DL stays because teams don’t won’t to give up on a player who may one day come back.

The classic example is Tommy John surgery.  The modern reliance of the slider means that every year numerous pitchers tear their elbow tendons and have to have them replaced.  It generally takes more than a year for them to come back, but they do come back.  In the meantime, if they are still under contract or under control, they spend all that time on the DL.

For example, 36 year old Mike Hampton won his fifth game of the year last night.  He missed approximately three seasons between mid-2005 and mid-2008 with arm problems, but now thanks to modern medicine, he’s back and pitching until the next arm injury.  There are far more of these stories now than there were even 30 years ago.