At SIS we’re fans of (and a data provider for) FanGraphs, and we’re also fans of the Effectively Wild Podcast. We particularly get a kick out of hearing the hosts muse about some baseball topic thinking “I wonder if we could know the answer to this question.”

A few times a year, we get to swoop in and help!

On Episode 2467 (linked here but only available to Patreon supporters) Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley talked about a recent play in which Mets pitcher Tobias Myers was hit by a line drive and seemed to downplay it, certainly reacting less strongly than a normal human would if they took 94 to the leg. They speculated whether pitchers often act stoic in that situation to either a) present a tough facade to the hitter, or b) discourage anyone from pulling them from the game.

We obviously don’t have access to players’ psyche or the ability to administer a pain scale assessment, but we do track something that can get us closer to an answer to this question.

SIS tracks all kinds of injury events, including things that the players don’t show a reaction to. So while we can’t tell how the player is actually feeling, we can at least try to judge if getting hit by a batted ball elicits a less dramatic response than expected.

To roughly compare analogous plays, I looked at injury events since 2018 where a pitcher was hit by a medium-or-hard-hit ball and compared them to a hit by pitch or a foul off a body part. It’s reasonable to argue that these aren’t apples-to-apples comps, but I think they get us close.

If we remove injuries that are initially severe enough to merit medical attention, balls hit off pitchers have about a 50/50 chance of the player showing some kind of ill effect right afterward. For the comparison group, it’s more like a 40% chance. (And that 40% rate is more consistent with the overall average across all injuries). 

That could suggest that pitchers are actually showing more pain, but also could just be that these injuries are a little worse. So let’s try to disentangle that.

The expected days missed on these low-initial-severity injuries (per our prognosis logged shortly after the injury) is slightly higher on average for the pitchers. That’s particularly true when they show some kind of impact, where the average for pitchers is 2 expected days missed compared to 0.5 for the batters. 

This seems to debunk the above, namely that pitchers and batters show a similar response but the pitchers’ injuries are actually a little worse.

But these are all pretty small effects, and they’re more speculative in nature. The big thing we find here is how often someone checks on the player after being hit. 

Pitchers receive medical attention almost 60% of the time they are hit by a decently-hit batted ball, compared to under 10% for batters hit by a pitch or a foul off their foot. But when we compare the expected days missed on these injuries, the pitchers have a lower average (2.6) than the batters (4.3). 

This shows that there is a lot more sensitivity to any kind of threat to the pitcher, even if the health outcomes aren’t likely to be any worse. These are also much less common plays, occurring at just 1 percent of the frequency of a hit-by-pitch or a foul off the body. So it could just be more jarring.

So, there might be some marginal evidence that pitchers are obscuring an injury, but they would be entirely rational in doing so considering how protective clubs are of them.