Under our “player profile” injury system, a player’s risk of injury depends on the relative frequency with which he actually was injured in his real career. Players are not more liable to injury, for example, merely because they were part-timers, or had shorter careers, or lost seasons to military service.

A few players in the Diamond Mind Online player pool will perform like “iron men”, suffering injuries infrequently and then only for the duration of the game or perhaps an additional game or two. But, to qualify as an “iron man”, a player must have played in virtually all of his team’s games, year in, year out, over the prime seasons of his career, and such players are few and far between. Other than the small number of “iron men”, the remainder of players in the player pool all bear some risk of a lengthy injury.

A player only can be injured while he is in a game, with one exception: he can be injured if he comes off the bench to participate in a brawl. A player is not "credited" with past injuries when he returns to the lineup. A player's injury risk is not reduced by virtue of having already been injured.

For the injury research, we started with the information on the disabled lists, but that did not start until 1941 and did not come into regular use until the late 1940s. We also consulted our extensive library of baseball biographies and history, online sources like http://www.baseballlibrary.com/baseballlibrary/ballplayers/ and http://bioproj.sabr.org/, and the Proquest database of searchable full text newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and Boston Globe.

We appreciate that it may be difficult from the information available for owners to gauge how injury-prone different players may be. However, it would not be realistic or appropriate to disclose specific injury ratings, as no real-life General Manager knows in advance how frequently or for how long his players are likely to be injured.