So, I got into this habit, you could call it a ‘practice’ of mine, where I’d try to really dig into veteran baseball players, especially pitchers. And J.A. Happ, well, he was one of the guys I decided to keep a close eye on. Figured he’d be a good case study, you know, a lefty who’d been around the block a few times. My plan was to track his performance, try to see if I could spot any trends or patterns as he got older in his career.
I started by logging his starts, looking at his velocity, his control, all that stuff. I was trying to build up this picture, almost like a personal project, to see if I could get a feel for when he was really on his game or when he might be heading for a rough patch. This was my little routine, my way of ‘practicing’ player analysis.
Then came the injuries. And it wasn’t just one big thing that took him out for a season. Oh no. It felt like every time I thought I had a decent understanding of where Happ was at performance-wise, something else would pop up.
- One time it was his calf acting up.
- Another time, it was some forearm tightness, if I remember right.
- Then there’d be a general soreness that would push a start back.
Honestly, it made my ‘practice’ a real headache. All my notes and spreadsheets, the little charts I was trying to make – they’d get all messed up. I’d spend time trying to adjust my thinking, trying to figure out how this new issue would impact him, and then bam, he’d be on the shelf again for a bit. It felt like I was constantly starting over with him.
It started to feel a bit personal, you know?
Now, I wasn’t putting money on this or anything serious, but it did become a running joke in my fantasy baseball league. I’d draft Happ, thinking, “Okay, I’ve done my homework, my ‘practice’ suggests he’s got a good stretch coming up.” And then, sure enough, an injury would pop up, and he’d be out. My buddies in the league, they never let me hear the end of it. “How’s your boy Happ doing?” they’d ask, knowing full well he was probably getting an MRI.
It really felt like his injury luck was specifically designed to mess with my little project! I’d be trying to explain my reasoning for picking him, “Look, my tracking shows he was due for some positive regression…” and they’d just laugh and tell me my tracking needed to account for random ailments better. It was all in good fun, mostly, but man, it was a pain trying to analyze a guy when his physical status was so unpredictable.
This whole experience with tracking Happ, and his unfortunate string of injuries, really hammered home for me how tricky it is with veteran athletes, especially pitchers. You see the name, you see the past success, but that wear and tear, it’s always lurking. And my ‘practice’ of trying to predict that? It was like trying to guess which day an old car will finally refuse to start. You just know it’s a possibility, but the exact timing and what will go wrong? A total guessing game.
So why did I even get into this ‘practice’ in the first place? Well, I’ve always liked looking at stats and trying to find patterns. After a particularly rough fantasy season where all my supposedly reliable guys got hurt, I thought, “There has to be a better way to anticipate these things.” So, I started this little hobby. And J.A. Happ, with his talent and his knack for picking up those nagging injuries, became a central, often frustrating, part of that learning curve for me. It definitely taught me that no matter how much data you have, the human body has its own plans.
