Will Matt Shaw Flick a Quicker Stick When the Regular Season Resumes?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Do batters who suffer oblique strains have diminished swing speeds when they first get back onto the field?

Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images

There are few injuries a ballplayer hates to deal with as much as oblique strains. The danger of recurrence, once you have one, is maddeningly high. The prescribed course of treatment (usually, rest is the main thing, and the player is barred from advancing through each stage of rehab until they can do so without pain or tightness) is the kind of thing that drives an impatient competitor berserk. Whether you're a hitter or a pitcher, the injury also affects the most fundamental and explosive element of your game: rapid rotation.

Matt Shaw suffered an early oblique injury after reporting to camp in February, which put his availability for the season-opening Tokyo Series in doubt immediately. That was a frustrating development for Shaw, as much as for anyone else. He has worked hard since the middle of last season to make himself a capable third baseman and to position himself for the opportunity that opened up when the team traded Isaac Paredes in December. To his credit, he didn't allow that frustration to interfere with his work. On the contrary, he pushed hard to make himself ready for a few exhibition games in early March, before the team left for Japan on Mar. 11. He made the flight, because he set his mind to it.

It's easier to set one's mind to something than to set one's muscles to it, though. Shaw looked bad in his first two major-league games, coming up only with an all-time cheapie of a first hit on a chopper to the pitcher in the second contest. His contact was weak; his bat looked slow.

That might be because the Dodgers had some of the best pitchers in the world on the mound, and Shaw was genuinely overmatched. Alternatively, though, it might be because he simply wasn't physically ready for the challenge he embraced. His bat speed was poor, but it might be more an indicator of where he really was in his recovery than of where he will be once he gets going again.

Since Aug. 1, 2023—in other words, going back as far as we have public bat-tracking data—there have been 23 oblique strains suffered by players who had both a baseline against which to measure and some playing time after returning, before the end of their season. (Really, there were 24, but we'll circle back to the one not included in these data at the end.) Fourteen of the 23 saw their swing speed get slower in the 10 days immediately after their return to play than in the 10 days immediately before they got hurt—although half of those reductions in bat speed were by 0.5 miles per hour or less.

As you can see, there's something other than a normal distribution here. Our sample is still quite small, so we can't draw unduly confident conclusions from the data, but this is about what we'd expect to see, really:

• The difference is there, but small, for the most part;
• A few outliers on the low end indicate players who either came back too soon and were still starkly diminished; and
• A few on the other end indicate players who probably played through the injury a bit before landing on the shelf, or were so tired before going down that the benefited a great deal from some downtime.

It might not surprise you to hear that Seiya Suzuki was one of the latter cases, when he went down with an oblique strain last Apr. 15. He seemed to suffer the injury while running to first base on a ground ball in Seattle, which is not the typical way that hitters hurt those muscles; it's the process of a swing that tends to create that strain.

In all likelihood, Suzuki (who, remember, missed the 2023 World Baseball Classic with a more severe oblique strain) had nursed a not-quite-healthy oblique to that point in the spring. He seems to need a few weeks each year to get loosened up. Chalk that up to the weather, or to his body type or his training regimen, but whatever the reason, it seems to be true. Indeed, after missing just 25 days with the injury, Suzuki returned, four days faster than the median hitter over this two-season span:

But he was still swinging the bat 1.7 mph faster when he returned than when he went down. There's a notable pattern here, beyond Suzuki. Brandon Lowe of the Rays suffered an oblique strain at almost the same time as Suzuki and missed two more weeks, but when he came back, he, too swung the bat notably faster.

Meanwhile, two of our biggest bat-speed losers in the wake of oblique strains belonged to players who suffered their injuries during spring training, or right away in the first series of the 2024 season. Using their 2023 swing speeds as baselines, Nathaniel Lowe (-2.0) and Sean Murphy (-1.8) lost as much acceleration as just about anyone when they first got back onto the field in the first half of 2024. That gives us a hint that, as they ramp back up, hitters whose spring trainings were compromised need some time to get their bodies moving the way they'd normally be ready to move at that stage. Both the Rangers' Lowe and Murphy recovered their bat speed after a couple of weeks of sluggish swings upon being activated, which is awfully suggestive.

How long a player is out with an injury like this is a tough indicator to read, because it can tell a noisy story. Did a player return quickly because he'd only been sidelined out of an abundance of caution, or did he rush back, refusing to be kept out of the lineup longer than absolutely necessary? It's probably one of the two in several cases, and the other in several cases. The data doesn't give us a clear signal in terms of the optimal time for a player with an oblique issue to return, which shouldn't surprise us.

It does seem, at least, like the surest way to avoid a bad outcome is to have a hitter come back five or six weeks after getting hurt. In Shaw's case, though, that would have meant waiting until right about now to put him back into competitive action. In order to be considered for a spot on the roster in Japan, he needed to be back in the Cactus League lineup in under three weeks—so he was.

If he's continued to get treatment and rest, Shaw should be back up to full strength—and speed—by the time the Cubs take on the Diamondbacks Thursday at Chase Field. It's possible he's genuinely not ready for the majors, but we probably couldn't say that for certain inside of a few weeks. It's also possible he was just not himself after sitting through a very long cross-Pacific flight with a still-nagging muscular issue, and that we'll see a much more confident, healthy, and explosive Shaw next weekend. The good news is, we'd be able to see that quite quickly.

Let's talk briefly about the outlier of outliers, though. Back in the second half of 2023, Seby Zavala suffered an oblique strain. In the 10 days before that happened, he was swinging the bat at a positively turtle-like 67.2 mph. He missed a month, but when he returned to the lineup, that number was 73.5 mph. He'd jumped two grades in bat speed, by being hurt and missing time. In all likelihood, that's an indicator of some bad data; it was still early in the era of bat tracking by Statcast. Let's roll with it a minute, though, because Zavala is only somewhat alone.

Jorge Soler (+1.1 mph) also saw his bat speed increase after missing a chunk of September in 2023. Near the end of last season, Christian Walker (-0.2 mph) and Wenceel Pérez (-0.2 mph) saw barely any degradation after their month-long absences due to oblique strains, and Michael Siani (+2.0) saw a marked increase. It might well be that, late in the summer, an injury that shelves you for four or five weeks is a highly beneficial chance to rest—one that outweighs whatever rust still hangs on you or whatever lingering worry about the muscles remain when you get back into the lineup. If the injury happens before the season, though, it's a different story. Shaw probably needed more time than he got to recuperate from this injury, but now, there's a good chance it's fully behind him. The Cubs certainly hope so.

View full article

[We Got The Whole 9]

It's possible that Zavala was playing through the injury for a spell, right? Or was he 67 all season? That is an insane increase.