Which Teams Have Suffered the Most Due to Injuries?

Want to build a projection system? There are a lot of things you want to prepare for ahead of time, like fans thinking that you have a secret vendetta against their favorite team. The most practically important thing to know is that you are going to be wrong. Not just occasionally, but all the time. And assuring people afterwards that yes, 10% of players are supposed to fail to even meet their 10th-percentile projection isn’t going to get you off the hook, no matter how technically correct you are. Being wrong, however, is your opportunity to improve your model. Indeed, models learn a lot more from being wrong than being right.

When it comes to projecting the number of wins for a team, it mostly comes down to two big factors: how good the players are and who actually plays. Predicting the future is an incredibly difficult activity, and that is reflected in the variance in the probability “buckets.” ZiPS entered the season highly confident that Paul Skenes was a darn good pitcher, but even with that belief, ZiPS was only 50% sure that his 2026 ERA would fall between 2.37 and 3.20, and only 80% sure that it would land between 1.80 and 3.65. But as hard as it is to project how effective a player will be, that’s still easy compared to predicting who will play. Models can get a general idea of the likelihood of injuries from some specifics, like whether a player has missed a lot of time recently or just had Tommy John surgery. But what they don’t know, and certainly never will, is who will tweak their hamstring next Thursday and be out for the rest of the season, who will suddenly lose their velocity in their Labor Day start and need a UCL repaired, or who will be abducted by giant mutant ants and forced to toil in underground sugar caves.

So, which teams have suffered the most due to injury in 2026? If you ask fans, especially those of underperforming clubs, they’ll tell you that their favorite team has been uniquely put upon by injuries this season. But we’re numbers people here. We can do a bit better than that and see which team’s fans can justify their sad laments about the trials and tribulations of the hometown 26.

As I write this, there have been 690 independent IL stints so far in 2026, with 11 players hitting the IL on three separate occasions. To estimate the lost potential value, I had ZiPS re-run the projections for each player as of the date of their injury and estimate how much possible WAR fell off the table. I then made an aggregate table of sadness. (Day-to-day injuries, some poorly reported, are really hard to gauge, but those tend to be small potatoes or else they would result in an IL stint.)

Note that these are potential WAR losses; you can’t simply add the wins to the team’s bottom line because a lot of injuries overlap. If your 4.5-WAR starter, your 1.2-WAR plan B, and your 0.5-WAR emergency option all get injured, you don’t suddenly get six wins back in the alternate timeline where none of those three guys get hurt. But you do lose a lot of options and a lot of potential value if they all go down:

Considering how terrible the Red Sox were at the start of the season — and how much I heard about it after projecting them for the most wins in the AL East — I’m going to take a mildly hubristic victory lap here. ZiPS liked the Red Sox in large part because it felt they had the best depth in their division:

Boston’s biggest strength in ZiPS, and why this team projects for more wins than any other in the AL, is the depth of its rotation, which has just about the highest projected floor of anybody. While it’s out of the ZiPS wheelhouse, and therefore not taken into consideration here, it’s also worth noting that if the Red Sox are as deep in starters as ZiPS thinks, they may be well-equipped to make a pretty big deadline trade, since everyone else needs pitching.

Despite only having gotten six starts from Garrett Crochet, and with Tanner Houck and Kutter Crawford still on the IL, the Red Sox still found themselves in a position where they could actually trade a starting pitcher who was succeeding in the majors at the deadline. The Connelly Early/Curtis Mead swap has yet to bear fruit for Boston thanks to Mead getting injured in his second plate appearance for his new team, but that the trade could even happen was a show of how confident the Sox were in their pitching depth. That confidence also allowed them to make another deadline addition, trading for Adley Rutschman rather than using those prospects to bring in another pitcher.

Elsewhere, it seems like the Braves and Dodgers rank toward the top of this list every year. In Los Angeles’ case, I’d argue that some of this is intentional, though that’s actually less sinister than it sounds. The contemporary Dodgers are a team that is quite open to acquiring talent with injury risk and then rolling the dice that they can get most of them on the field come October. That the Braves are still in first place in the NL East despite ranking third on this list is pretty impressive; injuries were a difference-maker in a bad way for Atlanta in 2024, and 2025’s injuries played a large role in what ended up being a depressing season.

While it doesn’t come close to explaining the Rays’ unexpectedly good year, health has certainly helped, especially on the pitching side, where they finally got a (mostly) healthy Shane McClanahan back after two lost seasons. The Nats have similarly gotten an assist from their best players generally being in good health.

Sadly, there are still more injury losses to come this season. So what does the rest-of-season forecast look like? These projections are even more of an estimate since we’re predicting future health, not just tallying the results that have already been observed. Players who we list on the RosterResource Injury Report as being out for the season, I project as being out for the season, while those who are questionable for 2026 get an 80% injury projection and those with no timetable to return get a 90% injury projection. I project players on a rehab assignment to return three weeks after the start of their assignment. For those expected to play again this season, but whose exact timetable for return is unclear, I combed the news and made a rough estimate of when they might play again; where specifics were unavailable, I used RosterResource’s original return date, provided it hadn’t already passed. Here are the projections:

The Red Sox again rank first, while the division rival Yankees check in near the top thanks to the uncertainty surrounding Aaron Judge’s return (there are other players contributing here, but Judge is the big one). This is a list you want to drop down, and on that score, the Astros go from being one of the most injured teams in 2026 to one of the ones with the best current injury outlook. Hunter Brown, Cristian Javier, and Hayden Wesneski all missed significant time, but they’re back in the rotation. Houston only has four players on the IL, and Carlos Correa is the only one who could have a significant impact on the team’s win total.

The point of all this isn’t to magically turn back the calendar and retroactively hand out extra wins or losses; the wins are already banked, and a lot of life is simply about how the cookie crumbles. But data like this is a useful reminder of how much of a team’s fate rests on things far less controllable than how good the players are at the whole playing baseball thing. Projections can tell you a lot about the range of potential futures facing a team, but they can’t tell you which teams the baseball gods, or those aforementioned giant mutant ants, will choose to favor or punish.

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