The Strain Game - SP Injury Risks
Examining IL data from 2024-2025 to spot heightened injury risks
I suppose that “strain” and “game” don’t rhyme. But I grew up (regrettably) listening to a lot of rap music, and those games take way more liberties than that.
We’ve already seen Reese Olson, Josh Hader, and Pablo Lopez report injuries to their throwing arm. In Olson’s case, he’s already gone for the year. Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to say that a guy was an injury risk after he gets injured. But in this case, I noticed something pretty intriguing.
Using the new Transaction Tracker on the web app, I downloaded the data and then filtered to pitchers who were put on the IL last year with some sort of strain to their throwing arm. And what do you know, all three of those names showed up!
Reese Olson had a shoulder strain in July and did not return. And now he’s added to the long list of pitchers who have had Tommy John surgery.
Pablo Lopez had a right shoulder strain in June. He returned, but then had a right forearm strain in September. And now, he has elbow discomfort in the opening days of camp.
What’s a Strain
Everybody’s a doctor now, right? From my #research (aka a prompt to Chat GPT), an elbow/shoulder strain in the context of pitching is detailed below.
strain = overstretching or micro-tearing of muscle or tendon fibers
Here’s a graphic of a pitcher’s elbow:
As far as I can tell, pitchers don’t have different elbows than the rest of us. So this applies to you as well.
I know I’m not giving the smartest explanation of all of this. Because you can’t intelligently explain something you don’t know.
But here’s what it looks like to me. The word “strain” can mean different things, and teams are about as cagey as they’re allowed to be with injury stuff in the early stages.
It can be as mild as an overstretching of a tendon or ligament. Give it rest, and it fixes itself in a couple of weeks. It can be as serious as a legitimate tear of a tendon/ligament. Those can heal themselves as well, but it takes a long time and I suppose it might never heal back fully.
I think when God designed the self-healing process of our bodies, He wasn’t really doing it for those of us who would immediately start hurling objects 95 miles per hour as soon as it felt better. But isn’t that amazing that our bodies heal themselves the way they do? Your brain is like eyyyy bro we’ve got a little tear action in that elbow let’s hop to it. Shout out to the Almighty.
Back to pitchers. These dudes will have surgeries that we’d never consider. I’m guessing like half of the people reading this have something wrong in their body that an elite athlete would have had surgery on a long time ago. I’m pretty sure I have some sort of torn labrum in my shoulder from my days as a tennis player in college.
But surgery is a bad outcome. No pitcher wants to have it, and the teams don’t really like putting their main players on the shelf for 6-18 months, either. So some guys try to pitch through it. And that can work.
Andrew Abbott had a shoulder strain in August 2024 and then another one in March 2025, and he ended up throwing 166 very good innings last year.
Cincinnati Reds placed LHP Andrew Abbott on the 15-day injured list retroactive to August 20, 2024. Left shoulder strain.
Cincinnati Reds placed LHP Andrew Abbott on the 15-day injured list retroactive to March 24, 2025. Left shoulder rotator cuff strain.
That’s the positive case. The negative case is a guy like Jared Jones:
July 4th, 2024 | Pittsburgh Pirates placed RHP Jared Jones on the 15-day injured list. Right lat strain.
He came back to finish the year (with sucky command) and then ended up needing Tommy John surgery in March of 2025.
Checking 2024
I looked for volume pitchers (starters or long relievers) that had some strain issues in one way or another in 2024. I’ll give you the full dataset at the end of this if you want to do further investigation on it. Here’s the list I narrowed down along with the date where the strain was reported:
I’m trying to narrow down to generally what percentage of these guys had big trouble following the strains. Here’s what I can find (without spending five hours on this post, hopefully):
Nestor Cortes: Strains began in September 2024; he hit the 60-day IL in April 2025
Joan Adon: Bicep strain in September 2024, threw 43 innings (all levels) in 2025
Trevor Williams: Right flexor strain in June 2024, placed on IL again in July 2025, threw just 80 innings in 2025
Braxton Garrett: Needed TJ in 2024-2025 offseason
Marco Gonzales: Shoulder surgery in late 2024, didn’t pitch in 2025
Reese Olson: Strain mid-2024, another 60-Day IL stint with a strain in July 2025, and now TJ in 2026
Drew Thorpe: Flexor strain in August 2024, Tommy John in March 2025
Clarke Schmidt: Lat strain in May 2024, hit 60 Day IL in June 2024, hit IL twice in 2025, threw just 86 innings in 2025
Robert Gasser: Flexor strain in June 2024, TJ in 2024-2025 offseason
Tylor Megill: Shoulder strain April 2024, missed ~two months, elbow sprain in July 2025, threw just 88 innings in 2025
Jose Urquidy: Forearm strain in March 2024, missed basically the whole season
Josiah Gray: Flexor strain in April 2024, TJ, didn’t pitch again until September 2025 (minor leagues)
Patrick Sandoval: Elbow strain in June 2024, TJ, did not pitch in 2025
That’s not even the whole list, just the guys that immediately stood out to me.
But I should give you the other side of the story as well. These guys did not miss significant time after some strain action:
Andrew Abbott: 176 innings in 2025
Chris Paddack: 158 innings in 2025
Eduardo Rodriguez: 154 innings in 2025
Joe Ryan: 171 innings in 2025
Kodai Senga: 126 innings in 2025
More bad news than good news, clearly.
Nobody knows the whole trust, nobody can predict the future, but it’s pretty clear that it’s rational to avoid betting on pitchers who recently have strains and didn’t have surgeries to fix the issue
Here are some names to start crapping your pants about. But first, the paywall, because I’m trying to profit off of other people’s misfortunes.