Merry RCL and Razzslam season, Razzballers!
Hopefully, your drafts are moving along smoothly or, at least, not going completely off the rails. If you’ve already drafted or you are still preparing, tell me how it went/how it’s going in the comments.
I jumped into my first RCL draft of the year with the March 1 group (shout out to them). I’m pretty pleased to have made it to and through the draft. Last time I “participated” in RCL back in 2024, I spaced and got distracted by the Oscars, resurfacing hours later with a roster very rich in only starting pitchers and catchers through the first several rounds. Not ideal.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Speaking of RCLs, go find yourself a league before they are all filled up! CLICK HERE, scroll down, join a league, draft, win, repeat. Compete against Keelin!
My time back for RCL got me thinking about making quick decisions around line-ups. Drafts that feel chaotic and/or have fast turnaround are a great reminder of something managers deal with all season long: decisions under pressure. Sometimes those are rational decisions. Sometimes the decision is yelling “YOLO” and clicking a button (it was Giancarlo for me).
Which, conveniently, brings us to, you guessed it, injuries.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked through injury risk, context around injury risks, and the panic that appears alongside pitching injuries. Today will be the capstone of the pre-season Ambulance Chasers series before I turn to regular injury coverage for the season.
The overarching theme of this series is that the goal isn’t to predict injuries. The goal is to prepare ourselves to react to injuries.
I’ve Become So Numb
Baseball injuries are, for the most part, not shocking to us.
Things like Matt Waldron’s hemorrhoids are baked into the system. A slew of locally-sourced hamate bone fractures? Throw those into whatever gross and potentially illegal thing we are baking in this metaphor.
Orioles infielder Jackson Holliday said he’s scheduled to begin swinging with both hands tomorrow. He had been swinging one-handed (with his left) and he began throwing last week. Recovery from his broken hamate bone in right hand is going well
— Andy Kostka (@afkostka.bsky.social) 2026-03-04T14:06:37.844Z
Forgetting about any data or metrics like velocity that we discussed last week, consider the times you’ve seen a pitcher pause and rub their forearm or elbow. The times someone tweaks their hammy running out a grounder. The awkward slide where a player is slow to get up. As we talked about in Ambulance Chasers: Injury Risk Reality Check For Draft Season, we will most definitely hear “tightness” or “day-to-day.” It happens constantly. So constant, that the weeks where there is less for me to write about feel strange. Is baseball even real if no one is injured?
It’s not the injury itself that wrecks us. It’s the decisions we make around the injury.
Consider how two managers might handle injury news for the same player. Or maybe you have two shares of the same player in different leagues and feel experimental. On one team, a manager may see the injury news and react immediately. On another team, a manager may react by taking a beat, waiting a day, and finding a better replacement when waivers settle.
As it turns out, being chronically online doesn’t matter as much when it comes to hearing about injury news before anyone else. It’s about how you handle injury news.
To Freak Or Not To Freak
Returning to where we started at the beginning of this article, where I was talking about decisions and how hard it can be to avoid hurriedly and sweatily fat-fingering our picks in the Fantrax app or decide what to eat for dinner for the 8,035th day in a row, there is an important decision that is inevitable: as a fantasy baseball manager, when and what kind of decisions should you make around an injury?
Sometimes the decision is obvious. No overthinking required:
- Player goes on the IL? A move can be made without ceremony.
- Closer loses the ninth inning job? Goodbye saves!
- As we talked about in Ambulance Chasers: What We Think We Know About Pitcher Help (And What We Don’t), if a starting pitcher suddenly skips a scheduled start, we may have a problem.
Clear role changes, confirmed absences, and those kind of events are direct signs of stats in immediate danger. You can move forward confidently. A great recent example of this is Hunter Greene’s elbow issues. Even without UCL involvement, the mention of bone spurs, second opinions, and Dr. El Attrache are a few lines too many for me.
If your Hunter’s Brown, it’s 200 innings you can mark him down. if your Hunter’s Greene, don’t like how this sounds nah’mean
However, sometimes the best move is to be patient. Which, frankly, sucks.
It’s like when you have a really weird mole and your doctor tells you the best approach is “wait-and-see”, which is fine (but, what if it’s cancer?). Sometimes waiting is the best approach (but seriously, what if it’s cancer?).
Take the dreaded, ambiguous “day-to-day.” That phrase can mean a blip on the radar. Or it can turn into a pre-2024 Byron Buxton situation (we’ll talk more about sunk cost in the next section).
Unfortunately for us, teams can be pretty artful with vague optimism:
- “He’s day-to-day.”: He may play. He may be dead. Who can say?
- “There is no timeline.”: You’ll see him in two months.
- “He’s progressing well!”: As it turns out, he is alive and moving on some level.
- “It’s up to him.”: Something legal (hamate bone in the hog head cheese)? Something more personal like mental health or family issues?
In terms of other wait-and-see situations, early season soreness falls into this bucket. Pitchers especially always seem to be “a little tight” in April.
An important thing to remember is that not every headline deserves a transaction.
And to help us honor that idea, I have a very general, easy-to-remember framework to follow when the panic sets in:
Act Appropriately Immediately
- Player goes to the IL
- Starting pitcher misses a start
- Role changes (closer or lineup)
- Injury changes usage
Wait A Bit Before Acting
- “Day-to-day”
- Vague optimism (“expect him back soon”)
- Early-season soreness (monitor forearm and elbow soreness closely)
- Situations where the replacement role is still murky
If the news changes a lineup decision this week, act. If it doesn’t, monitor it.
Is The Grass Greener?
There’s a delicious, sexy trap that shows up every single season.
A good player gets hurt, and it becomes so easy to convince yourself a replacement will be just as valuable.
Consider Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest answer is most often the correct answer, when thinking of bench players.
Bench players are on the bench for a reason. Breakouts happen, but most bench guys will leave you hanging in some ways that will show up in your stats.
And of course, we can’t sleep on the everyday player that may not have the biggest name, but provides a steady stream of PAs. Hindsight is a beast when thinking about Brice Turang before he was a Top 100 player with less power, but the proof was in the voluminous pudding of PAs. I was originally going to mention Jurickson Profar here too, but the news comes at us fast.
What about our shiny prospects, though?
Expect Mistakes
All of us have fallen into the same handful of traps with injuries.
Consider the last time you panic added a player. Whether it’s a debuting prospect or another hot-right-now player, what a rush it is to pick a player before anyone even knows if the role will stick. Who here dabbled with early Jackson Holliday and Vaughn Grissom? The tumble was hard.
Then there’s the opposite mistake that I mentioned above around pre-2024 Byron Buxton being forever day-to-day: the sunk cost fallacy. Not to purposefully sound like some David Byrne lyrics, but you may find yourself holding an injured player forever because you spent a pick on him three months ago (2024 Gerrit Cole and Corbin Carroll)? Draft cost is a squatter at heart, and it badly wants to live rent free in our heads the whole season and lightly traumatize you for years to come.
Finally, the timelines will get you. A projected return date looks precise on paper, but most of the time it’s just an educated guess.
How Ambulance Chasers Will Work When This Season Most Certainly Gets Weird
As we are approaching Opening Day, injury coverage will begin in earnest. Starting in the next edition of Ambulance Chasers, I’ll be looking at injuries in buckets in a framework similar based on the “Act Immediately” and “Wait A Bit” decision framework I mentioned above.
The first bucket is Musts. These are the situations that change fantasy leagues right away like role shifts. playing time changes, or important players leaving the line-up.
The second bucket will be Secondary situations. These secondary situations are worth tracking and mentioning, but not necessarily situations that requires a run to waivers.
I’ll provide the implications of those injuries as well as replacements where it makes sense. As always, if I haven’t mentioned someone in the article, feel free to follow up in the comments.
Being Reasonable (Or Faking It!)
Things are changing all of the time. Players heal slower (and occasionally faster) than expected. Sometimes a guy with “forearm discomfort” returns in five days and other times it’s a season-ender.
The Ambulance Chasers motto is “There’s no such thing as perfection.” Just kidding. There is no Ambulance Chasers motto, but I’ll consider that one in the future.
While there is no such thing as perfection, especially when dealing with injuries, we can do our best to stay level-headed: adjusting when new info is available, avoiding those roster moves that feel smart for about 20 minutes and then haunt you for three weeks or more, etc.
It is hard to predict injuries and can be aggravating to manage through injuries. You just have to avoid the really bad decisions. That’s easy enough, right?
I’m Keelin, your weekly reminder that injuries don’t follow timelines. You can find me on Bluesky at keelin12ft.bsky.social.
Note: This column focuses on injury situations that meaningfully affect fantasy baseball decisions. It is not a complete injury ledger or a prediction of exact timelines. Teams are often vague, information changes quickly, and this is best viewed as a snapshot of where things stand, with the goal of helping fantasy managers draft with context rather than panic.
