Player Injuries            Back to Reference Index

Many baseball fans underestimate the frequency of injuries in baseball.  Players in Diamond Mind Online® will get injured, although somewhat less than they do in “real life” (and you may opt in creating Custom Leagues to set injuries to Random (with the same risk for all players) or to turn injuries off entirely).

In DMO’s “player profile” injury system, a player’s risk of injury depends on the relative frequency with which he actually was injured.  Players are not more liable to injury, for example, merely because they were part-timers, or had shorter careers, or lost seasons to military service.  

In researching players' injury propensity, we started with the information on the disabled lists, but that did not start until 1941 and did not come into regular use until the late 1940s. We also consulted our extensive library of baseball biographies and history, online sources like http://www.baseballlibrary.com/baseballlibrary/ballplayers/ and http://bioproj.sabr.org/, and the Proquest database of searchable full text newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and Boston Globe.

A few players in the DMO player pool will perform like “iron men”, suffering injuries infrequently and then only for the duration of the game or perhaps an additional game or two.  But, to qualify as an “iron man”, a player must have played in virtually all of his team’s games, year in, year out, over the prime seasons of his career, and such players are few and far between.  Other than the small number of “iron men”, the remainder of players in the player pool all bear some risk of a lengthy injury.

As in real baseball, certain positions, plays and events entail a particular risk of injury when they occur, such as being hit by a pitch (so this is a risk that a batter who is hit frequently will encounter more often than one who is not); a home plate collision (so this is a risk that catchers encounter that other fielders don’t, and that players who get themselves into position to score frequently potentially will encounter more often than those who don’t); or becoming involved in a brawl on the field.  Designated hitters have a reduced risk of injury.

A player only can be injured while he is in a game, with one exception: he can be injured if he comes off the bench to participate in a brawl. A player is not "credited" with past injuries when he returns to the lineup, so his injury risk is not reduced by virtue of having already been injured.