The word of the day was injuries as there are a lot of pitchers hitting the injured list through various ailments, and we talk a bit about that on this Dreamcast, along with our praises and thoughts about the Cubs starting this season off strongly against some tough competition (not the Rockies).
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Kyuji Fujikawa left Sunday's game with an apparent re-aggravation of his forearm injury. After taking an MRI yesterday, he was diagnosed with a torn ligament and is due for TJS. This is a real bummer – Fujikawa looked pretty good after coming back from his first injury. The Cubs have him signed through next season, at $4m, and have a $5.5m club option for 2015. Fujikawa will be 35 and probably still getting his groove back from the surgery at that point, so I don't know if the Cubs would take it. We may have seen him throw his last pitch as a Cub.
At least the Cubs have Kevin Gregg. I can't believe I just said that (laughing)
One of the running jokes around here is that I hate Carl Crawford. Really, I don’t. And I don’t take greater than usual glee in his disappointing season (at least, above seeing the Red Sox lose). It all stems from this article I wrote back in February complaining about the near-universal acclaim for the 7/$132m deal that he signed with the Red Sox. The gist of it was that I thought that while Crawford is a great player, there’s a big risk in signing a guy to a seven-year deal whose eggs are largely in one basket (speed) that can disappear quickly. We all saw how quickly it happened to Alfonso Soriano, also an exceptional athlete entering 30s.
However, I did not expect Crawford to have such a terrible first year of his contract. At first glance it doesn’t look like it can be chalked up to injury – he was awful for the first two months of the season before hitting the DL with a minor hamstring injury in June.Since then he’s had a few other minor ailments (elbow, neck) but as of now he is the not so proud owner of a .259/.293/.410 slash line, for a .310 wOBA.
However, when I look at his more directly speed-related skills, I’m not so sure that there isn’t more reason for concern going forward.
After purloining an average of fifty bases per season in his first 8 years as a regular, Crawford has only stolen eighteen this season. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern in when those stolen bases happened – he rate had declined even before his hamstring injury. Plus, it’s not like the Red Sox don’t like to set their fast players loose. Ellsbury has stolen 50, 70 and 37 bases in his last three full seasons respectively.
Crawford’s defensive numbers have also taken a nosedive. Single season defensive numbers don’t mean much, but when the metrics agree that a player has had a 20 run drop from a skill level that they widely agreed on, well, that’s something. It could be the effect of the Monster, though IIRC MGL’s latest update to UZR, at least, worked on fixing park effects.
Maybe he’s finally paying for playing all those years on the turf at TB, as Brad suggested in the comments of February’s piece, Andre Dawson style. Maybe he’s just really on the wrong side of thirty. Meathead fans/radio hosts out here have been complaining about how Crawford’s contract (and Lackey’s) is now an albatross, untradeable, etc. etc, all the stuff we’ve heard for years in Chicago. I don’t see the Red Sox trading him anytime soon – there’s more than enough reason to believe that even if he fell off a cliff on the age curve that he’ll see some regression next year.
We’re definitely going to need more data than one season to determine if Crawford is heading down the Soriano path, but even if he does that doesn’t necessarily mean that I was right. Free agent contracts are in a broad sense a quantification of the probablity distribution of outcomes that a team expects from a player. All I was trying to say was that I thought the chances of this happening were much higher than the contract suggested, based on his skillset. Any contract is a gamble, and the Red Sox lost. I just thought that it was a worse bet than they did.
With the news that Darwin Barney is now headed to the DL, I thought it would be “fun” to see if the Cubs could field an entire squad of players who have been on the DL this season.
SS Darwin Barney
2B Jeff Baker
C Geovany Soto
1B Alfonso Soriano
LF Marlon Byrd
RF Reed Johnson
CF Brett Jackson
SP Matt Garza
SP Randy Wells
SP Andrew Cashner
SP Trey McNutt
SP Jay Jackson
SP/RP Bob Whitenack
CL Kerry Wood
All we’re missing is a third baseman. You’re next, Aramis Ramirez!
Fellow Cubs blogger Doc Blume opined in the comments to today’s article at LOHO that part of the Cubs injury issues stem from the roster being filled with players with questionable medical histories, as the Cubs had no money to spend on better players. The lack of payroll room the past few offseasons pushed the Cubs towards signing/acquiring marginal, injury prone players. My gut reaction to this is that it should be demonstrably false. Let’s run down the list of Cubs players that have hit the DL this year. (NB: another part of the Cubs injury woes have occured in the minor leagues, e.g. McNutt’s blisters, Whitenack’s arm issue, whatever is going on with Jay Jackson, Brett Jackson‘s hand injury, etc., etc. But since these guys weren’t signed or otherwise acquired on the market I won’t include them).
Players DLed or otherwise affected by injuries, in order of age
P Andrew Cashner – He’s had no injury history leading up to this. Young pitchers get injured. He wasn’t signed/traded for though so it doesn’t quite fit the mold of the hypothesis.
P Matt Garza – Garza has pitched five seasons in the majors and had only one short DL stint in the beginning of 2008 with an elbow injury. He’s in the prime of his career so it is reasonable to expect him to pile up innings (as much as you can expect it of any pitcher)
P Randy Wells – Wells had a stress fracture in his arm at the end of 2008, but no other red flags are popping up for me. Again, he came up through the system so he also doesn’t fit the mold
C Geovany Soto – Geo has had several DL stints, but its not especially surprising given how catchers get banged up. He was a late bloomer so his age could be a part of it. He’s another one coming up through the org (though the last such player on this list)
2b Jeff Baker – Baker had a major DL stint a few years back due to a hand injury. He hasn’t been on the DL since but has had several minor complaints that have kept him out of the lineup the last few years. He’s on the wrong side of 28 so seeing more injuries isn’t too unusual. They picked him up from the Rockies for basically nothing (relief pitcher Al Albuquerque).
CF Marlon Byrd – I’m not going to bother looking up his injury history, since being hit in the face with a baseball doesn’t have much to do with age or injury-proneness. Just shitty luck
1B Carlos Pena – Pena had issues with his thumb early in the season and it may have been an accomplice in his April power outage. He’s had several DL stints, including a hand injury in 2009, the recovery from which may have led to his poor 2010 numbers. Given his past injuries and his age it’s not unreasonable to see him continue to accrue injuries.
CF Reed Johnson – This injury isn’t surprising at all. Given Reed’s age and the fact that he’s been on the DL four separate times in the past four seasons for back problems. However, Reed’s role going into the season was that of a 5th outfielder so given his diminished role I don’t think his injury history isn’t that big of a deal.
LF Alfonso Soriano – Well, he’s been injured for a while now. There’s an inherent risk to signing *any* player to a long term deal in their thirties and you can feel free to blame Hendry for that, but at the time of the signing Soriano was quite healthy and an incredible athlete, rather than the shell of his former self that he is now (cue Carl Crawford axe grinding). We’ve argued for the Soriano signing enough times here though so I won’t beat that dead horse. Anyway, the Soriano signing happened when the Cubs were on a spending spree so the payroll hypothesis doesn’t really apply here either.
Overall, I don’t the theory does not hold up. The only starter it applies to is Pena, whose injury was relatively minor but could easily be injured again later this year.
Some other theories that were posited were whether some blame should go to the strength/conditioning coach or the shape of Wrigley’s crappy facilities. These things aren’t exactly new, so I don’t think there could be a particularly strong correlation there either. Just some shitty luck.
UPDATE
jstunami pointed out that I should have included Milton Bradley and Carlos Silva, so let’s move this back through 2009-2010 as well since the Cubs had payroll contraints those years.
RF Milton Bradley – Aside from his various pyschological issues, saying that MB had a tough time staying healthy is an understatement (just check out this laundry list of documented injuries). It’s a fair point. Given the other guys that were also on the market at the time (Ibanez, Abreu) I still think the Cubs made the right move going after a guy like Bradley (how they handled him afterwords, that’s another story). If they had more money I don’t know who they would have spent it on anyway – those three were the three biggest OF free agents that year.
P Carlos Silva – the booby prize in dumping Bradley, the Cubs didn’t really care who they got just so long as they got salary relief. The $8m or so they got along with the deal was what they were trading for, anything they got from Silva was gravy.
2B Aaron Miles – utility player
P John Grabow – Not really a budget-related signing, so much as a dumb one.
2B Ryan Freel – utility player
1B Chad Tracy – utlility
If you guys can think of anyone else who was injured, expected to get significant playing time, and signed on the cheap, let me know. This was all I could come up with
Today has been a rough day to be a Cubs fan. Everything got off to a bad start this morning as we awaited word on Andrew Cashner’s MRI results. But we can look to Cubs.com to point us to the light and make the best of a bad situation. Surely, Carrie Muskat will give us the hope for a happy ending that we all crave as Cubs fans.
The Cubs rotation took a double hit on Wednesday, when both Randy Wells and Andrew Cashner were sidelined with strains in their forearm and shoulder, respectively, and both are headed for the disabled list.
Wait… what? Cashner, sure, we were almost PREPARED to hear that about Cashner, but what the hell is this about Wells? Did he strain his arm lifting a bottle or something?
Wells has a strained right forearm, which he felt Tuesday, the day after his start, while Cashner has a mild strain in the back of his right rotator cuff. Both had MRIs, and the good news is that neither has structural damage in their arms.
Well that sounds bad, but not catastrophic. They’ll probabaly just be out for a couple of weeks. Better safe than sorry. Whew… I was starting to get concerned.
“We’re not going to put a time frame on any one of them because we’re going to be careful in April,” Cubs general manager Jim Hendry said Wednesday.
That doesn’t sound very reassuring.
They will not pick up a ball for at least two weeks, Hendry said, and they will be re-evaluated at that point.
Holy shit, they won’t even be touching a baseball until almost Easter? Somebody better tell me something uplifting soon or I may start Googling how to make a noose.
“It could’ve been a lot worse — I could’ve been out the rest of the year,” Cashner said. “It is what it is, and I’ll get strong and get back out there when I can.”
That is not uplifting! I need something along the lines of “if this were the playoffs, I’d probably stay in the rotation, but we’re just being cautious” and you give me “it is what it is”? Where is the roof access in my apartment building?
The Cubs don’t need another starter until Sunday in Milwaukee and are expected to call up right-hander Casey Coleman from Triple-A Iowa. They also will look at lefty James Russell as another option, and he could start on Tuesday in Houston.
Casey Coleman and James Russell…
“We’ll find a way to get through it,” Hendry said.
Three man rotation! Old school! Maybe we can get a XXXL uniform for Greg Maddux and get him back out there? On a completely unrelated note, how many Tylenols do you think is fatal?
Neither Wells nor Cashner felt any discomfort in Spring Training. Wells started on Monday and threw 99 pitches over six innings against the D-backs. He said he had some soreness in his forearm on Tuesday. There is nothing wrong with his elbow, Hendry said.
This may just be me, but jumping right to dismissing problems with the elbow seems a bit defensive to me. Of course, I’m used to seing pitchers go down early in the year with “strains” that are “nothing to worry about” and we don’t see them on the mound again until at least after the All-Star break. What if the Tylenols were washed down with a bottle of Jack?
“The MRI showed nothing structural, the ligament is fine, and I just have a strain in the forearm and the flexor there,” Wells said. “I’m just going to take some rest and time and come back stronger.”
Nothing structural. Just a strain. The thing is, a strain is a tear. A tear in the muscle. It is a mild tear, but it is a tear nonetheless. So it has to be somewhat structural, right? I’d be happy to be wrong about this, so someone please make me feel better about this in the comments. Maybe mix the Jack with some bleach?
Wells, who threw 194 1/3 innings last season, has been one of the most durable pitchers on the Cubs last season.
Well, get ready to pass that torch to someone else, son. Speaking of torches, I wonder if I have any kerosene laying around.
“It’s one of those freak things,” Wells said. “I’m not going to rush anything and make sure I’m completely healthy. When I come back and make my next start, I’m going to be 120 percent.”
120%? They’re going to make him bionic? Or is he going to be like the kid in the horrible movie, “Rookie of the Year” where his ligaments heal “too tight” and he can suddenly throw a bazillion miles per hour? I wonder if I watch that movie on a continuous loop if my brain would actually explode?
Cashner made his first Major League start on Tuesday and gave up one run on two hits, including a solo homer by Arizona’s Ryan Roberts, over 5 1/3 innings. He had gone to a three-ball count on two batters, including Willie Bloomquist, who drew a walk with one out in the sixth. Cashner said he felt the discomfort on the last two pitches to Bloomquist.
Why the hell is Willie Bloomquist involved in everything that went wrong for the Cubs in this series? Maybe murder suicide is the answer.
“We were counting on those guys, absolutely,” Cubs manager Mike Quade said. “Now we’re counting on them to get back as quick as they can and come back healthy.”
At a 120% right, Q? At least he’s trying to throw out some straws that I can grasp.
Quade remained optimistic.
I often wonder what color the sky is in Mike Quade’s world.
“In this day and age when you hear about people who get shut down for a year, this could be a lot worse,” Quade said. “I’m expecting three, four weeks and we’re back in action, and that’s a lot better than three or four months.
Um, Mike? I don’t know why you aren’t familiar with how the Cubs do things when discussing injuries to their key players, but they NEVER let on how bad it is right off the bat. Go ask Kerry. He’ll tell you how it works.
“It’s a long season, and those two guys will be back to help us.”
That poor bastard. I think he really believes that. Mike, do you want me to forward you the noose-tying how-to link when I find it?
One of the running jokes around here is that I hate Carl Crawford. Really, I don’t. And I don’t take greater than usual glee in his disappointing season (at least, above seeing the Red Sox lose). It all stems from 
120%? They’re going to make him bionic? Or is he going to be like the kid in the horrible movie, “Rookie of the Year” where his ligaments heal “too tight” and he can suddenly throw a bazillion miles per hour? I wonder if I watch that movie on a continuous loop if my brain would actually explode?