Hoornstra: Dodgers’ Stan Conte, others study injury prevention

From J.P. Hoornstra at the Los Angeles Daily News on March 13, 2014:

How important is a baseball player’s injury history to the teams that employ them?

Dodgers head athletic trainer Stan Conte, speaking at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) Analytics Conference on Thursday, compared his work to a form of scouting.

“Typically when I look at a player that we’re looking to sign as a free agent, I’ll use public domain information to get as much information as I can to give myself some idea of whether that guy is a low risk, a medium risk or a high risk in regards to injuries,” Conte said. “Then if we did in fact do a physical and look at his medical records if we’re about to sign him, the whole thing may flip completely from one end of the spectrum to another on things we didn’t know about — things that added up to some of the public stuff that made it a higher risk or even a lower risk.”

Injury prevention, and predicting injuries before they occur, are two topics that Conte and his colleagues around baseball can’t know enough about. On that front, there have been positive developments.

Read the full article here: http://www.dailynews.com/sports/20140313/dodgersangels-notes-dodgers-trainer-stan-conte-others-study-injury-prevention

Related link: For more coverage of the 2014 SABR Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.



Originally published: March 14, 2014. Last Updated: March 14, 2014.