Originally Posted by struggles_mightily
I basically agree.
The Juan Encarnacion example has been brought up as a counter to this way of thinking, but it doesn't work. In late 2007, after he sustained the injury, there was a consensus that it was extremely serious.
In January 2008, reports confirmed that he would miss the entire 2008 season, and there was speculation that the injury would end his career. In May, Mozeliak said, "I'm sorry to say that he will not [return to the team]. His injury will likely result in his career ending." It's instructive to look at the language in that quotation, because it hints at the strong reluctance (both for practical and emotional reasons) to simply declare an injury 'career ending'. Even if attempts at rehabilitation and recovery are tokenistic in some very extreme cases, they do occur.
I do think there are some cases where an injury simply 'ends' a career, though. But those happen in certain circumstances. It's easy to see why a veteran on an NRI deal or similar who picks up a reasonably serious injury in the spring would choose to just say, "so long and thanks for all the memories". There's no incentive for him to continue. Still, that's not a 'career ending injury' in the present OOTP sense of the term -- it's a guy picking up a serious injury, weighing up his options, an deciding to call it a day. This is a process, not just an event.
The way I've always had in mind that things should work is that, when a player develops a reasonably serious injury, there should be the possibility (particularly for older or injury-prone players) that the prognosis worsens over time, or that the recovery process goes poorly. Thus, as the injury process lengthens and worsens, the player's skills take a bigger and bigger hit and more and more of his 'useful' career span is used up. Older guys might decide that they've made enough money, don't need to put the strain on their body and at some point decide to just call it quits. Younger guys might experience such a retardation in skills that they can't be useful to a big-league club, and decide to retire because there's no money there for them.
Either way, I think the 'process, not event' way of thinking would be much more realistic and much cooler as well -- it would be kind of neat to follow an injured player's progress, wondering if he'll ever pick up a ball or bat again, knowing that there's a realistic chance he might not.
I'm kind of suspicious of this way of thinking, mostly because there's no way of proving that it's correct. One could make an equal(ly poor) conjecture that accumulating poor stats drives a player on to improve, or that having good stats makes a player 'over-confident' or whatever. We just don't know what the tangible effects of these things are. Talent might not govern 'all' (I'd guess that it's at least 90-95% of performance, though), but judging what percentage of results comes from 'psychological makeup' is extremely spurious, and I'd rather OOTP stayed out of such shady avenues.
|