I've often referred to the Boston Red Sox training and medical staff as a Dream Team of sorts put together by the Sox front office, with many of the individual staff members on the cutting edge of rehab programs, surgical procedures and preventative training methods. The excellent Baseball Prospectus Author Will Carroll issued his Team Health Report for the Sox last week, and included this highly deserved summation of the Sox staff.

You can log on to www.baseballprospectus.com for the entire report, but here's an intro snippet that is highly complimentary of Boston's medical staff:

The Facts
Head Trainer: Paul Lessard
Player Days Lost: 500
Dollars Lost, 2007: $15.3 million
Three-Year Rank: 9

Force plate biomechanical analysis. Closed-chain isokinetic baselines. There are a lot of big words and big concepts you'll hear out of the Red Sox training room, but in the end, the system relies on the hands and minds of Paul Lessard and Mike Reinold. Yes, the medical staff is as data-driven and information-based as every other element of operations in the Red Sox organization, but there's as much art as science in modern sports medicine.

Machines don't feel the slight differences in strength between innings that the team measures in its starters. Machines aren't spending off-season hours monitoring the progress of their pitchers, re-designing workouts designed to change October outcomes with work in January.

While the Sox have often done some things well--they've been on the cutting edge of surgeries for years, and for much of the decade they've had a decided advantage in returning players from injury, something that's continued through this new staff--they now do almost everything well.

Some might call the task of trying to keep a veteran team with this type of makeup Sisyphean, but even if that's so, the Sox medical staff is taking a more existential view. The injury to Curt Schilling is the type of risk-reward scenario with upside that the Sox's medical skills allow for, rather than an indictment of their decision-making process.

It's one thing for a team to take on a Mark Prior-type rehab or to bring in a series of cheap but fragile starters, as the Marlins and Nats have done. The Sox are taking a very different tack, which they can afford because of their financial and medical advantages.

I'm not insulting anyone by calling athletic trainers artisans, but with the integration of advanced concepts, the Red Sox's trainers might be the closest to scientists in all of baseball. They'll continue to push the leading edge when it comes to techniques and tools. Whether they can continue to see improvement in their results will determine whether or not they end up a dynasty.