Jays were best at keeping pitchers healthy in 2015

Team believes improvement more good management than good luck

In June of 2012, after the Blue Jays lost their third starting pitcher to serious injury in four days, thenmanager John Farrell offered a little gallows humour: “We performed an exorcism on the mound last night,” Farrell said, unsmiling.

Unfortunately the demons the Jays were fighting proved earthbound, as their pitching staff continued to be plagued by arm injuries the following season. Granted, all of Major League Baseball was dealing with a crisis of pitcher injuries in 2012 and 2013, as Tommy John surgeries, in particular, reached historic levels. But the Jays seemed to be suffering more than almost every other team.

Since then, however, they have enjoyed a marked turnaround. Among the many things that went right for the Jays in 2015 was their overall health, but particularly the health of their pitchers. They had by far the fewest pitcher injuries of any team this past season, according to research by Jeff Zimmerman, the baseball-blogging analyst who published his annual report on disabled-list data in the Hardball Times on Tuesday.

The Jays had just two pitchers serve time on the disabled list in 2015 — rookie right-hander Aaron Sanchez missed seven weeks with a lat strain in his throwing shoulder, and Marcus Stroman missed most of the season with a torn ACL suffered in spring training — while no other team had fewer than six. The league average, meanwhile, was 9.5 pitcher injuries per team.

In 2012, Jays pitchers made 11 trips to the DL, while in 2013, they made 15.

The Jays are tight-lipped about the specific injuryprevention techniques they employed after the 2013 season.

They view whatever ability they may have discovered to protect baseball’s most fragile assets as a competitive advantage.

But we do know that starting in 2014, under former general manager Alex Anthopoulos, the team shifted away from one-size-fits-all pitch counts and innings limits in favour of a more individualized approach to managing pitchers’ workloads.

“We’ve made some adjustments in our entire organization in the last few years and they’ve certainly showed dividends,” said Jays pitching coach Pete Walker, who spoke to the Star over the phone on Tuesday from his Connecticut home. “The focus is on health and constant communication with our pitchers. I think it’s really paid off so far.”

Without going into specifics, Walker said the revamped approach has been implemented not only at the major-league level, but throughout the Jays’ farm system as well.

Walker said the coaching staff also amended how they tracked pitchers’ throwing sessions, paying particular attention to how relievers are used. Fans may have also noticed that in the last two years the team’s younger starting pitchers occasionally had their turn in the rotation skipped in favour of a spot starter, even if they did not have an apparent injury.

After the 2013 season the Jays adopted the weighted-ball throwing program — popularized by Steve Delabar — throughout the organization. And this past year, starting in spring training, players were outfitted with what looked like sports bras by a company called Catapult, which designs wearable sensors that collect a slew of biometric data.

Another key, Walker said, is much simpler. They encouraged pitchers to be honest about any lingering soreness or fatigue. “It’s talking to the pitchers, communicating with them, not creating heroes,” Walker said. “And certainly when there are minor issues you nip them in the bud. I think we’ve been really good at doing that.”

What remains to be seen is whether the Jays pitchers’ relative health the last two years is just a statistical variation — correcting the injury spikes of 2012 and 2013 — or if the turnaround is truly the result of the team’s altered approach. Walker is confident it’s the latter.

“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “It’s communicating, it’s being smart, being proactive and I think we’ve done a real good job with that over the last few years and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t continue.”