Advanced Baseball Injury Database (and PITCHf/x data)

In my other life, I am a programmer/developer – one who still loves baseball, of course! A few months ago, I sat down to develop a comprehensive injury database of MLB players over the past few years and wanted to tie in PITCHf/x data (read more about that system here) to see if we could correlate PITCHf/x values with injuries. The problem is that the PITCHf/x data needs to be corrected/calibrated depending on the park and date of game, and I simply don’t have the time to write the correction algorithms (nor am I sure I could do it with any reasonable level of confidence in the end product).

So, I downloaded millions of rows of raw PITCHf/x data and tied it into a comprehensive injury database to present as-is. It’s been up for awhile, but I haven’t promoted it all that much. Since I’m a bit light on content, I figured I’d post it here for your enjoyment.

You can check out the Advanced Injury Database and search for your favorite pitcher (or position player) and get back some results. Here’s what the basic search looks like:

You can also perform advanced searches, where you can get all the injuries back for a given bodypart with X number of days on the DL. Since I don’t want people to spider the data, you need to connect/authenticate using Facebook Connect to do so. (Don’t worry, it doesn’t give me access to your Facebook account or very much data.) A look at that system follows:

It really shines a light on how many players (pitchers in particular) have been injured over the past 10 years and how much it costs MLB teams. Injury prevention and rehabilitation are big pillars of Driveline Baseball’s training, and with good reason.

Hope you enjoy the application, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments about it. I am thinking about updating it in 2011 with injuries and PITCHf/x data, but it’s a fair amount of work, so I haven’t yet decided on whether or not I want to do it.