Rob Neyer doesn’t buy any of the explanations for the increase in injuries over the last two seasons. Could teams be bringing players back too soon? I read an unpublished paper a few years ago that indicated that the biggest factor in an injury is a previous injury. That is, when a player returns from an injury, he’s much more likely to go on the disabled list, and that probability falls off quickly over time. The even seems to apply to mental illness where Khalil Greene and Dontrelle Willis both returned to the DL after supposedly working through their problems. I wonder how much of this increase comes from players getting re-injured after a trip to the DL, or like Chien-Ming Wang and Mike Lowell, an incomplete recovery from an injury the previous year.

Update: I also wonder if the number of disablements that end after exactly 15 days has increased. That might indicated that more players are going on with minor or made up injuries. It’s quite possible teams no longer want to be short a player for five days, so they put someone on the DL rather than play short a player for a few games.