Nobody stayed healthy this year! OK, that’s a slight exaggeration. But if all the athletic training staffs had gotten paid by the injury this year, it’s possible they’d have made more money than Mike Trout.

Remember all those injury worries every team obsessed over back in spring training? They totally knew what was coming. There just wasn’t much they could do about it, apparently.

“We’ve done everything we could possibly do to protect guys,” said one AL exec. “We’ve given pitchers extra days. We’ve dialed back innings. And I don’t feel like any of it has paid dividends. I look around at every team’s injured list, and it boggles the mind.”

The boggle threshold is different for everyone, of course. But no more truthful words were uttered about anything we’ve seen in 2021. Here’s the incredible data, courtesy of Derek Rhoads, who monitors injuries for Baseball Prospectus.

Remember all those injury worries every team obsessed over back in spring training? They totally knew what was coming. There just wasn’t much they could do about it, apparently.

Not even counting players who landed on the COVID-19 IL, the number of player placements on injured lists around baseball was up (ready?) by about 37 percent compared with each of the previous two full seasons, 2019 and 2018. The average team used the IL 32 times this season — up from about 23 in 2019!

Recurring injuries were a huge issue. Heading into the final weekend of the season, 216 different players had made multiple visits to the non-COVID-19 IL this season (more than seven per team). In the last full season (2019), it was just 131 (about four per team).

For your average GM/President of Baseball Ops, managing a roster this year felt like an endless game of Whac-A-Mole. At one point, at the July 22 peak, there were 295 different players on the IL at the same time— almost 10 per team. That’s way above the peaks from either 2018 (207) or 2019 (233).

And one of the upsets of the year is that teams found somebody healthy enough to pitch every darned day all season. Teams had to use the non-COVID-19 IL for pitchers an incredible 534 times this season. That’s up an astonishing 44 percent from both 2019 (370) and 2018 (367). The math works out to about 18 pitchers heading for the IL per team!

“Every way you sort it,” said the same exec, “injuries took a huge jump this year. I just hope it levels out because it hurts our game when the best players don’t play. So here’s hoping this was just a one-year speed bump.”

Only the Strong Survive!!!