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Arm injuries will define MLB playoffs, even for teams that overcame them
In a different universe, one in which elbow ligaments are indestructible and shoulders never swell, the Los Angeles Dodgers would be easy World Series favorites. Tyler Glasnow’s elbow would have held up until October. Yoshinobu Yamamoto would have had a whole season to adjust to major league hitters. Promising arms such as those belonging to Tony Gonsolin, Dustin May, Emmet Sheehan and Gavin Stone would be competing for October opportunities. Heck, in that reality, some guy named Shohei Ohtani might be starting Game 1.
But this is Major League Baseball in 2024, a universe in which the idea of a full complement of pitchers staying healthy for an entire season is so laughable as to be an irresponsible assumption around which to plan. For example: Of the aforementioned starters - not to mention future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw, who is out with a bone spur in his toe, and former ace Walker Buehler, who is still finding his way after returning from multiple ailments of his own - only Yamamoto is a lock to start one of the Dodgers’ National League Division Series games. And he will not do so uninhibited: The right-hander has yet to throw more than five innings or 79 pitches since he returned from a lengthy stay on the injured list late in the regular season.
While few teams can claim comparable loss in star power, the Dodgers are not alone: The pitching injury epidemic, which has escalated to the point that MLB is considering a wide range of changes to preserve starters, has hovered over a regular season that at times felt as if it would be determined more by which teams’ elbows could withstand the strain than by accumulated talent.
The postseason, which begins Tuesday, probably will be no different. Though executives around MLB concede postseason success these days largely revolves around getting hot at the right time, there does seem to be at least one shared, if blurry, blueprint for winning: Use the best arms on the roster to cover as many innings as possible and hope to survive the rest.
That effort often depletes pitching staffs for years to come - just ask the defending World Series champion Texas Rangers, who got just over 50 innings combined in 2024 from Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer, key figures in a larger pitching staff breakdown that will leave the Rangers home for October a year after they won it all.
Ace pitchers can have a massive influence in the postseason, but getting them there healthy is as challenging as getting there at all. Of the 10 active pitchers with a Cy Young Award to their names, only one, Baltimore Orioles ace Corbin Burnes, pitched through the 2024 regular season without an injured list stint.
Measuring exactly how much each team lost to injuries is difficult because there is no alternate universe in which those players who did get hurt did not get hurt, thereby offering a glimpse of what would have been. But in an attempt to determine which teams were affected most by arm injuries, The Washington Post analyzed all pitchers placed on major league injured lists with arm trouble in 2024, then compared the innings actually thrown by those players with the number of innings FanGraphs projected them to throw before the season.
The result was an illuminating, if imperfect, picture of the variety of ways in which some organizations weathered injuries and others collapsed beneath them. The Miami Marlins, whose ace, Sandy Alcantara, missed the entire season after Tommy John surgery and who lost other young starters to arm trouble this year, lost more innings than any other team in baseball. A year after making the postseason, they were sellers by May and finished with 100 losses.
The Cleveland Guardians, on the other hand, lost the second-most pitcher innings to arm injuries, having also lost a former Cy Young winner, Shane Bieber, to Tommy John. They finished with the second-best record in the American League and earned a first-round bye anyway thanks to a plucky lineup and a dominant bullpen.
Close behind them are the Dodgers and Houston Astros, who lost Luis Garcia, Cristian Javier and Lance McCullers for the season as well as Justin Verlander for long stretches. Both teams recovered well, in part because they are big-market franchises capable of acquiring big-name aces (Jack Flaherty and Yusei Kikuchi, respectively) at the trade deadline, but both are not as powerful entering October as they could have been.
Burnes’s Orioles, for whom injuries have served as an explanation for a less-than-charmed regular season, are also among the teams most affected. They also will feel the loss of multiple front-line starters acutely when they open postseason play Tuesday: Instead of a top three of Burnes, Kyle Bradish and Grayson Rodriguez, they probably will be relying on deadline acquisition Zach Eflin and Dean Kremer in the biggest games of their season - and on Seranthony Domínguez, instead of the dominant Félix Bautista (another Tommy John casualty), to close out games.
By contrast, two of the teams entering the postseason in positions of relative strength - the New York Yankees and San Diego Padres - are among the teams least affected by pitching injuries, though the Yankees did just lose Nestor Cortes to a ulnar collateral ligament issue that will prevent him from pitching in the early rounds. The Padres have one of the healthiest starting trios around in Dylan Cease, Joe Musgrove and Michael King as well as a dominant bullpen they bolstered at the deadline that is, to this point, still largely intact two months later.
Similarly, a couple of teams that exceeded regular season expectations en route to surprise playoff berths - the Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers - are among the teams that lost the fewest projected innings to arm injuries. Inexplicably, the low-payroll Milwaukee Brewers, who traded Burnes before the season, lost more innings to pitcher injuries than all but 10 other teams. They cruised to a division title and into the postseason and should therefore be studied by front-office scientists for decades to come.
But will the same pitching they patched together so brilliantly over 162 games be dominant enough to sustain them through the chaos of a short series or against more tested rotations later? The three-game first-round series leave no room for bullpen rest. Relievers who would never be used three days in a row during the regular season might have to be used that way now, all to earn a chance to pitch even higher-stress innings against even better teams. Attrition will happen. Survival will win out.
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