I don't like to use injuries as an excuse. Every team faces some injuries every season and the fact is this team is bad. They'd be bad even if everybody had been healthy. Maybe they wouldn't be as bad, but they are not winning anything with their current roster construction. I imagine if the majority of the roster had stayed healthy, they'd probably be pushing .500 at best.
That's not to say that the injuries haven't been brutal. I'm not sure exactly how this compares to past seasons numerically, but the Reds have been battered by injuries all year long. By my estimate, they have lost 538 days on the big league roster for players listed as day-to-day or on the disabled list. This isn't a completely accurate representation though since Wilkin Castillo and Danny Richar were brought up just a few days before getting injured. It's hard to count their missing days as doing much harm to the roster. Still, 17 players from the Opening Day roster have missed a combined 441 days to injury. It's hard for any team to recover from such a string of injuries, not to mention one that wasn't particularly good to begin with.
Probably the worst outcome of these injuries though is that it has prevented the brass from truly evaluating the team to identify the holes on the roster. I fully expect to hear excuses in the off-season that Willy Taveras or Alex Gonzalez was never truly healthy, but with no mention of the fact that neither player has been particularly healthy over the last 3 seasons.
If anything, that is what these injuries have done to the season - created a crap excuse. Well that, and taken Edinson Volquez out of the 2010 equation. Stupid injuries.
Special thanks to Fantasy Pitch Fx's Injury Tool for making the data available and reasonably easy to compile. After the jump I have a complete list of days lost to injury for the Reds in 2009.
Player | DTD | DL | Current |
Ryan Hanigan | 6 | 0 | |
Joey Votto | 10 | 24 | |
Brandon Phillips | 7 | 0 | |
Alex Gonzalez | 11 | 35 | |
Edwin Encarnacion | 0 | 66 | |
Laynce Nix | 3 | 0 | |
Willy Taveras | 12 | 0 | |
Jay Bruce | 0 | 30 | + |
Ramon Hernandez | 0 | 23 | + |
Chris Dickerson | 5 | 15 | + |
Scott Rolen | 6 | 0 | + |
Danny Richar | 0 | 39 | + |
Wilkin Castillo | 0 | 52 | + |
Micah Owings | 0 | 16 | + |
Bronson Arroyo | 3 | 0 | |
Johnny Cueto | 1 | 0 | + |
Edinson Volquez | 0 | 85 | + |
Mike Lincoln | 0 | 59 | |
Jared Burton | 0 | 15 | |
Nick Masset | 0 | 15 | |
TOTAL | 64 | 474 | 9 |