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August 31, 2007
Under The Knife
September
by Will Carroll
August flew by. It seems like we should know more about how the season is going to end by now, but I know that I don't. To me, that's a good thing. I want classic chases, the kind that will fill It Ain't Over 2: Electric Boogaloo some time down the road. I want to be on the edge of my seat, yelling at my computer screen. I want to love baseball so much over the next month that I'll forgive Dane Cook coming on my screen every ten minutes. I want to scoreboard watch. I want to hit refresh. I want to call my friends so we can scream like we did back in 1984. And for once, I think I'll get what I want, and so will you.
Powered by September, which is where we decide who gets to play in October, on to the injuries:
With Andrew Miller all the way back in Lakeland, the return of Kenny Rogers takes on new significance, at least on paper. Rogers will throw a simulated game today, and if all goes well, he'll slot back into the rotation mid-week after Labor Day, likely on Wednesday. The Tigers are losing contact with the surging Indians and could use the boost of getting some stability back in their rotation. Like Pedro Martinez, Rogers isn't someone that wins on pure stuff, so he doesn't have to be all the way back with that. The bigger concern is that he can throw and recover, keeping Jim Leyland from having to juggle an already jumbled rotation. As a result, no matter what the results of the sim game are, it's Rogers' status recovering over the next couple days that will determine when he returns.
I realize that the Mets were fighting against a sweep by their division rivals. What I don't understand is how the Mets allowed Billy Wagner to go out there for 45 pitches just days after he was unavailable with a dead arm. Did Willie Randolph think that the rest had magically made him fresh? Things went rapidly downhill, leaving Wagner with the blown save and the loss, the Mets with a tighter division race, and the confidence of Mets fans at low ebb. Wagner's late-season arm troubles mirror last season's, where he seemed spent in September. The Mets pen is thin, so they have to hope that Wagner has enough left to finish or that someone else steps up after roster expansion.
Chris Young's season appears to turning on his oblique strain from July. Before that, he was a solid number two behind ace Jake Peavy. Since then, he's struggled in almost every way. There are really only two explanations. The first is that he never quite healed and has been gritting his way through it up to this point, making his back problem more of a cascading setback than a standalone injury. The other is that he's relatively healthy with minor flareups, but that those problems have gotten his mechanics out of whack. Watching him try to find his release point last night doesn't clear anything up. It could be either/or, it could even be both, but for the Padres, the course of action is the same. They need Young to figure things out mechanically in order to protect against any current or past injury. If the injury is preventing that, he needs to sit until he can, but again, that's the delicate balance that trainers and managers have to find right now.
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Prospectus Hit List: T... (08/31)
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Under The Knife: One S... (08/30)
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Under The Knife: Skip ... (09/02)
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Future Shock: Mailbag (09/02)
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Team Health Reports: Washington Nationals