It hurts to look this good

I recently had a look at the Baseball Prospectus injury projections for this season, utilizing a system aptly named CHIPPER (Comprehensive Health Index [of] Pitchers [and] Players [with] Evaluative Results). A couple of interesting things for the White Sox but overall, no surprises. Even the fine creators of this tool acknowledge the wonderful job that Herm Schneider and Co. do every year, calling the White Sox the Major League’s healthiest team.

The chart is broken out into guys that are major, minor and little to no risk to missing 1 day, 15 or 30 days due to injury. Let’s have a look at the fellas that are the most likely to succumb to injury in 2011. Falling into the no surprise category are Jake Peavy and Carlos Quentin.

At some point while he wasn’t having groundbreaking surgery and being nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, Jake Peavy did manage to win the Cy Young Award. There’s not a whole lot I can say about Peavy that hasn’t been said a thousand times since he arrived on the South Side. He’s a gamer; he’s a tough SOB; he’s a question mark. If Jake ever returns to form, he’s our #1. Easily. He had a rough start for us last year, but he seemed to be improving before his seen ended abruptly. The question of course is if the injury has left him damaged long term. He’s not complained of any abnormal discomfort after making a few Spring Training starts. The real test is regular season throwing, though. It should be interesting to see what he can do in his first full season on the Sox.

Carlos Quentin…TCQ…The Haircut...We all got so excited in 2008, and then we all got so mad. Just like Carlos! Well, except for the excited part. Though a temper tantrum might have removed him from the pennant race late in 2008, I think it’s safe to say that the rest of his time missed, both before and after, was just being plain old injury prone. That doesn’t stop me from cringing every time he muffs a play in the outfield and slams a fist into the ground, punishing the well cared for surface for slowing his path to the ball. Stupid, dumb ground. Not to mention the fact that it seems like he gets hit by a pitch once a series. Anyway, as I’ve stated before, we’re waiting on that Carlos of old, but we’re far more likely to see him get hurt a number of times before that ever happens.

I doubt he’ll see enough action on a regular basis to miss too many games due to injury, but an honorable mention to Cookie Monster for also making the highly likely to get injured category. The next most likely to miss heavy time to injury after those three is Mark Teahen, but I’m not so sure we could get that lucky. As is pointed out in the piece, there is nothing to address his chronic case of being Mark Teahen.