Which teams were most injured?

Major League Baseball’s injury list is the sport’s 31st unofficial team, never made the playoffs, but always spoiled. Last week, Illinois had 22 players placed on the IL. The biggest name is Will Smith, who landed at Illinois State University in the second half of last week with a bone bruise on his hand, due to a rather rude foul tip in Nick Gonzales’ bat.

The Dodgers aren’t known for a lot of damage, but with injuries losing, Smith’s results seem far less than they did before. Smith’s test showed no fractures, minimizing the time he expected to miss. The 30-year-old receiver is the best offensive season of his career, with .296/.404/.497 slash line and 153 WRC+, besides representing the best slip percentage in his career. He has fewer games than usual, but this is mainly due to the team’s roster building. He started 39 games with the designated hitter in 2022-2023, but the appearance of Shohei Ohtani now makes it even harder to sneak him into the roster while on a day off. An injury would be a big deal…if that matters, but Smith could have returned as early as the upcoming weekend. It may be earlier, but Smith started last Tuesday after missing five games, meaning the IL’s retrospective il date was later than September 3, when Gonzalez’s foul tip occurred.

Smith and the Dodgers seem to be lucky, but the Astronauts and Jordan Alvarez may not see the same wealth. Less than a month after returning from a broken hand, Alvarez spent his ankle again, and his ankle awkwardly hitting the plate, which was awkward, which could only touch the plate on your stretched Armstrong Doll. He has not been placed on the IL yet, and the exact consequences are still to be determined, but he will almost be missing out on a while. He will know more after his MRI on Tuesday. Alvarez suffered a serious injury that could be in their playoff game and beyond October.

Alvarez has spent 115 days on the IL this season and the Astronauts certainly feel his absence, but how does the losses this season compare to those of other teams this season? More broadly, which team lost to the injured roster? If you ask a fan of a team that is not performing well, the almost consistent answer would be “we”, but I think we can do better!

To do this, I took every IL in 2025 to estimate how much potential war loss caused by each injured player. It’s hard to give an exact answer in terms of “Injury Cost Team X wins” because it requires a lot of alternative history, but we can at least generally understand how much baseball value disappears into the ether. So please don’t quote these as actual wins or I’ll [A LEGALLY ALLOWED ACTIVITY UNDER STATE AND FEDERAL LAW]. To get all this as close as possible – and to work as much as possible – I cast every player as they landed in the last game before IL. For the rest of the season, I counted players who have confirmed the season, or had no timetable to return on our injury list, because the rest of the year was missing. According to the CBS Sports Injury Table, for players currently on the rehabilitation mission, I assigned them the earliest dates to them. Plus, it’s interesting, but nearly impossible to perform, and by definition, these are lower-impact diseases. Also, for reasons that I hope it is obvious, I can’t include harm that has not yet occurred.

If you force me to be threatened with serious physical injury, guess without looking up, I guess which team is the most valuable, I’ll guess the Dodgers, and I’ll probably comment on their horror story types, as frightening as any premise saw sequel. But it was Alvarez’s Astros instead of the Dodgers, which was the team with the biggest injuries. ZiPS estimates Alvarez’s loss — which doesn’t include any possible missed time for his current injury, as he is not yet on the IL — as the biggest potential WAR loss in terms of impact (3.3 WAR), ahead of Reynaldo López for the Braves, Corbin Burnes for the Diamondbacks, Shane McClanahan for the Rays, Justin Steele for the Cubs, and Gerrit Cole for the Yankees. The other six Astros injuries this season are also planned to put the team at least one loss of value: Isaac Paredes, Ronel Blanco, Spencer Arrighetti, Cristian Javier, Javier, Lance McCullers Jr. and JP France.

Orioles are ranked second when using this method. This is good evidence that in a disappointing season, bad health should be considered as at least a mitigating factor. That said, this isn’t a card without Jill either; the Orioles apparently know that entering last offseason, Kyle Bradish and Félix Bautista will miss out on a huge part of 2025, while Grayson Rodriguez was shut down in 2024 due to injuries. Unless there is a miracle, Baltimore will finish the season under 0.500, and the injury is far from the only explanation for the team’s underperformance.

Of course, we know that the Dodgers will be on this list, not bronze rather than number one. Blake Snell was the biggest loss, but overall the team had a fewer injuries than last year, and the roster was actually generally healthy compared to the pitchers.

If the Red Sox ended up missing the playoffs, it could be said that injury may be the biggest deciding factor. If they don’t play the playoffs, it’s unlikely to be more than a game or two, and they certainly missed a few wins of Illinois’ worth. Some of the influential players who hit the IL include Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford, Triston Casas, Alex Bregman, Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer. The Mets and the Rattlers are fighting for the final NL wildcard seat, and both teams have also suffered more than average injuries in 2025. So, the Braves are, but they are so far away that they can’t reasonably quote the injury as a reason they don’t play the playoffs.

Zack Wheeler’s injury, on the other hand, is a devastating loss for the Phillies, but its greater impact will be their playoffs and 2026 performances rather than the 2025 season itself. (On Monday night, Philadelphia won the NL Eastern Conference championship.) Baseball’s worst teams landed here (White Sox, Nationals, Rockies), in large part because they didn’t expect to win many wins in the first place. The Cardinals need to perform hot shows to avoid the second time in three years with something not done since the 1990s, so the fact that they have been struggling despite their health exceeding average is not an auspicious sign for their lineup. In 2025, St. Louis suffered even one loss, with Iván Herrera’s injuries closest to 0.94 (although Zips may still underestimate him).

Injuries may always be the most, unpleasant part of baseball until…er…the 2020 robots and semi-robots have gradually broken up.