Major League DL Transactions

Recently in the World Chat of another world I play in (Kinsella), there was a discussion about whether or not injuries have become more frequent since the last updates were made to the game.  This prompted me to do some research which I thought I would share here as well.  Injuries are not saved anywhere, but DL history is.  So I pulled the historical numbers for world Kinsella and our world Major Leagues.  The two worlds actually make for a very good comparison because both Kinsella and Major Leagues are very close to the same age as they are both currently in season 33.

I captured the data using a Perl script which first used the Player Statistics page to get a list of all player ids from world history.  I then used a second Perl script to look at the Player Profile page for each player and capture their DL History.  I believe the data to be accurate, but don't shoot me if there are any errors in the data collection.

Now obviously, DL transactions do not include all injuries since an owner is not required to place an injured player on the DL and there is nothing stopping an owner from placing a player who would be out for 1 day with a hangnail on the 60 day DL.  But it is the best data we have.

We will first look at 15 day DL transactions.  In both worlds these were at their highest in the first 6 or 7 seasons and then settled into to a pretty consistent but also fairly wide range with transaction totals typically falling between 25 and 55.  There is a little uptick for the past 3 seasons in Kinsella, but it is not out of line with previous seasons a little farther back and Major Leagues hasn't seen the same spike.  I really don't see a trend of increasing injuries here.

When we look at 60 day DL transactions the numbers are even more consistent, but we do see a spike in Kinsella with transactions in seasons 29 through 32 being higher than the previous 10 seasons were.  Major Leagues saw a similar but not quite as drastic increase until season 32 when the number dropped to 20 which was the lowest since season 25.  I think it is possible there could be evidence of an increase in major injuries here, but I don't think we can say anything conclusively.  It could just be random bad luck.

Here are the actual numbers from each of the two worlds for those who would like to see them.

And just for fun, I ran the numbers to see ML DL transactions by team throughout the history of Major Leagues world.  The Twins have far and away the most 15 day and 60 day DL transactions, while the Padres appear to be hiding the secret to immortality from us.  Only one 60 day DL transaction in 32 seasons?!?  That can't be correct can it?