The Dodgers Have Been MLB’s Most Injured Team... And It’s Going to Get Even Worse.

Last weekend's injuries to Mookie Betts and Yoshinobu Yamamoto will add to an already ailing roster.

Mookie Betts — and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts — react after Betts was hit by a pitch during the seventh inning against the Kansas City Royals on June 16, 2024. (Katelyn Mulcahy/Getty Images)

According to my composite MLB forecast, the L.A. Dodgers are World Series favorites with a 19.5 percent chance of capturing the title. But what else is new? The Dodgers have spent most of the past decade as championship favorites, putting aside what tends to happen to them in October. This is a team with more star power than any other, and expectations as high as any franchise in MLB.

However, the Dodgers have built those World Series odds in the face of more injury headwinds than any other team in the league. (With more on the way, unfortunately.) At least, that’s according to a couple of calculations I made to quantify the effect of injuries on the 2024 baseball season.

There used to be a few go-to sources for which teams had suffered the most due to injuries leaguewide. One of my favorites was ManGamesLost, a Twitter account and site that used to tweet out visualizations of lost playing time and Wins Above Replacement due to injuries in a given season. When they stopped doing that at the end of the 2022 season,¹ I turned to Spotrac — an excellent site for all things contracts and transactions — and their injured-list tracker tool. But sadly, that also changed recently when they redesigned their site, seemingly eliminating a lot of the functionality for tracking the most injured teams and players.

(By the way, feel free to correct me if I am wrong, and just can’t find the familiar functions after the Spotrac redesign. Or if you have another favorite source for this kind of data, again, please let me know!)

So I decided to take it upon myself to track the cost of injuries to each MLB team, with the help of FanGraphs’ injury-report data.

Here’s how it works: For each team, I’m counting up the total number of days spent by players on the IL, plus an estimate of WAR value lost by players during their IL stints. These are the rankings for each category so far in 2024:

The first measure is fairly straightforward — it just involves adding up the cumulative total length of players’ IL time for a team. The WAR measure is a little more complicated, but it involves multiplying a player’s previous established level of WAR² by his share of the 2024 season spent on the IL.

By WAR, the costliest injury of 2024 so far belongs to Gerrit Cole and the Yankees, who’ve missed out on 2.3 projected wins of value with their ace sidelined due to elbow inflammation. (Cole just came off the IL to make his season debut on Wednesday.) Unsurprisingly, given the rash of similar arm injuries early this season, a large majority of the most impactful injuries below to starting pitchers:

The Dodgers have their own version of that, with future HOF lefty Clayton Kershaw still rehabbing his shoulder after undergoing surgery last November. That’s on top of additional stints by Tony Gonsolin, Brusdar Graterol, Bobby Miller, Dustin May, Max Muncy, Jason Heyward and Walker Buehler, each of whom added at least one-third of a win to L.A.’s league-leading lost WAR total.

And it’s about to get a lot worse.

Last Saturday, starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto — who was a top-25 pitcher by WAR at the time of the injury — left the Dodgers’ game after just two innings with what turned out to be a strained rotator cuff. He was placed on the IL and is expected to miss at least a few weeks, which will add to Los Angeles’ lost WAR tally above.

And then there was Sunday’s injury to Mookie Betts — a broken left hand suffered while being hit by a 98-mph pitch from Kansas City reliever Dan Altavilla:

That sound alone — along with Betts’ pained reaction — was horrible. Now, Betts is expected to miss 6-8 weeks, which means we probably won’t see a player who had been one of the leading candidates for NL MVP until at least August. Betts’ injury will possibly cost the Dodgers somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 WAR all by itself, on top of all the other absences detailed above.

If any team can survive the loss of a leading MVP candidate and a Cy Young contender on back-to-back days, it’s Los Angeles. They will have to fall back on guys like Shohei Ohtani, who ranks sixth in WAR and has been the best player in baseball over the past few years, and Freddie Freeman, who ranks 16th and has been an MVP in the past. This isn’t a case like the Rangers or Rays, where the injuries have been correlated with disappointing, sub-.500 records in the first half of the year.

But even the deepest teams can only survive so many star injuries before they begin to take their toll. World Series favorites or not, the Dodgers are going to test where that limit is as we head into the summer months.

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Filed under: Baseball

1. They seem to shifted their focus to providing injury-tracking services to teams and leagues. Good for them, but I miss what they used to make available to the public.

2. First coined/calculated by Bill James, Established Level works like this:
* The metric from the previous year (2023) is multiplied by 3.
* The metric from two years prior (2022) is multiplied by 2.
- The metric from three years earlier (2021) is added to the above total, and the entire thing is divided by 6.
- The final "Established Level" should not be below 75 percent of the most recent year's (2023) metric. Or, in my own twist for this injury calculation, it also cannot be below 75 percent of this year’s WAR per 162 team games.