BRADENTON (93.7 The FAN) - The 2019 Pirates were among the leaders in time lost due to injuries. Pirates Director of Sports Medicine Todd Tomczyk takes that personally and made extra measures this offseason to try and prevent that from happening again.
"If you look at the league as a whole, the injuries aren't going down, unfortunately. We were one of the highest teams that had IL days, or man games lost or whatever metric that you like to believe in. I take that personally," Tomczyk said. "That's something that we really peeled back the layers as a team, as an organization and tried to identify reasons why. There isn't on specific variable and one specific reason and I don't believe it was because of bad luck, there are things that we identified, there are reasons that we feel that we can emphasize this year and like I said, we made a more concerted effort to connect with their offseason strengths and conditions coaches, their physical therapists."
Tomczyk emphasized the importance of offseason work and the level of involvement he and his staff had in what the players were doing.
"The biggest thing is continuing to collaborate with the player and continuing to transition from their offseason to spring training and their in-season.
So what did they do to try and change that?
"The time we, as a body team, can impact them the most, is the time when we're not around them the most and that's the offseason. So understanding their programs, connecting more in detail with their offseason strength and conditioning coaches, their offseason therapists. We made a much more concerted effort of having more site visits this offseason of our staff going to see players and understanding, this is what they would do and this is what we think the goals are."
Tomczyk also provided some updates on key injured players from last year and how ready they will be for spring training.
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Click the audio link below to hear all of Tomczyk's updates on the players health to start spring training.