Week 7 ass hDLes - Never trust anyone with 2 first names

 Not these Regulators...though really...Keifer, Sheen, EMILIO
and Lou Diamond?  It's a tough group to beat.

Hey Tot Heads.  So...I am back and I am whatever the opposite of well rested is.  Turns out, having a baby leads to less sleep.  Who knew?  Uncle Jimmy, heads up.  If you were planning on getting more sleep after Warren Glonke is born (I think I inadvertantly created the greatest nickname ever for your kid Jimmy.  I am picturing a miniature Warren G from Regulators, only white..and to be clear, that is not the Regulators from Young Guns pictured here.  I may end up calling your kid Warren, regardless of the gender.  Also, its a better nickname than Baby Globber or Baby Globke, both of which are still in the running), it probably isnt going to happen.  I would also like to take a second or 6 to thank Kyler for stepping in and handling the recaps and waiver transfers this week.  I'd like to get him (and any of the rest of you) up and contributing regularly.  While this blog may be my third child (Toddorburt) and I may or may not have difficulty letting go and handing the reigns over at times, I do enjoy checking in and not knowing what I'm going to find there.

What I do not enjoy is checking in on my team and not knowing who I am going to find there with both elbows still intact.  Obviously you cannot go anywhere on a baseball website without comign across a "Holy Shit the sky is falling and even the ball boys down the right and left field line are getting Tommy John surgery" type article, but really...some of this shit is getting a bit ridiculous.  The Tommy John thing is getting a lot of play right now, mostly because I think doctors (and pitchers) are deciding to go under the knife right away rather than wait it out and try rest and rehab and TJ has become a sort of buzzword.  With the advances in the procedure, pitchers are not only coming back stronger (they always have...strangely, the leg tendons are stronger than the original arm tendons and people can throw harder after TJ than before), they are coming back at a much higher success rate.  Ten years ago, a pitcher might delay TJ because there was only a 40% chance he would make it back to the Bigs.  Now, if a pitcher is a MLB caliber player, they are coming back from TJ at nearly 90% or above.  It is almost as if having a piece of tendon removed from somewhere in your body (or from a cadaver, cuz...why not?) and inserted into your elbow has become as routine as a sprained ankle.  Heck, I bet severely sprained ankles have a shorter recovery, but lower return rate (maybe not, but if a speedster hurts his ankle, it surely effects him much more long term than a pitcher needing TJ on his frickin arm).
Anyways, the trend that makes me take notice is how many marquee players are going down with injuries of all kinds.  Baseball has always been a grueling marathon of a season, meant to test which teams are truely the best, not merely which ones get hot at the right time (playoffs not included in that statement), but I have often wondered if shortening the season would be in the best interests of the game.  My reason was always that people lose interest when 75% of your games happen in something other than the first or the last month of your season (compared to football where 53% happen in a month other than the first or last).  The excitement of the beginning of the season and the anticpation of the pennant race at the end are the big draws of baseball, not the Wednesday afternoon game in early June.  But the rash of injuries makes me wonder if baseball needs to reduce the games in the season to keep these guys upright.  Right now there are 30 players currently rostered on our teams that are DL eligible, with a couple more likely to go on the DL in the coming days (looking at you Joey Votto and your old man knee!).  No team has been more injury prone than John's Money, Weed and Injury Masters -- He has so many he gets his team gets its own section in the ass hDLes segment.  He has so many ahDLes that its like the bad fraternity where everyone gets roofied but people keep going to their parties anyways.

Here is the list of players on MWP currently on the DL.
2b,ss,OF Ben Zobrist
SP CC Sabathia (dropped this week)
SP Hyun Jin Ryu
RP Nate Jones
3b Ryan Zimmerman
1b/OF Mark Trombo
2b Jason Kipnis
SP Jose Fernandez

Obviously Jose Fernandez is the back breaker on this list, but if you total up the salaries of these guys, you find that of John's original $400 auction budget, $181 of it was spent on this pile of useless. Fernandez has overcome things much worse than this, but now John will have an interesting decision to make on him.  Keep him and stash him on the DL for the rest of the season and hold him at $46 without knowing when he will be back or if he will make a full recovery, or let him go back into the auction and risk losing a superstar starter before his 23rd birthday.

The other ahDLes this week, Martin Perez (MBHB) and Ryan Cook (MTMTAS) are fungible pitchers. 

Lastly, there is the Farns.  Farnsworth (Zach Attack) is in the lineup this week for Zach and saved a game on Monday for the Mets.  His reward...outrighted to AAA!  Apparently there was some claue in his contract that gave him a bonus for being on the roster for a certain number of days and he was quickly reaching that milestone.  So, rather than pay him, they tried to send him to AAA and he refused the assigment, making him a free agent.  Thanks for being scumbags Mets...and Zach lost a RP for nearly an entire week.  We will check back on Monday to see if it would have altered that matchup.