{"id":340,"date":"2012-05-29T21:17:55","date_gmt":"2012-05-30T04:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=340"},"modified":"2012-05-29T21:38:50","modified_gmt":"2012-05-30T04:38:50","slug":"a-crowded-infirmary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=340","title":{"rendered":"A Crowded Infirmary"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Choppers relief pitcher Mariano Rivera<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Memorial Day is usually a good point in the season to take stock in how the baseball season is going and examine where it may be headed.\u00a0 As usual, there are hitters and pitchers who are vastly exceeding expectations, and have done so for long enough to make you think it may not be a fluke.\u00a0 Some of those players are helping to put their DTBL teams at or near the top of the standings.\u00a0 However, there seems to be a much bigger factor in determining a team’s success (or lack there of) this season:\u00a0 injuries.<\/p>\n

Almost daily, there is another key player going down to an injury, whether it be a minor day-to-day issue, or one that has the player headed to season ending surgery.\u00a0 We’ve had torn ACLs, torn UCLs, sprained knees, torn hamstrings, broken hands, blurred vision, chronic illness, you name it.\u00a0 It started in spring training when two closers were lost for the season after undergoing Tommy John surgery (Naturals’ Joakim Soria, Jackalope Ryan Madson).\u00a0 Two DTBL first round draft picks are yet to play a game this season (Kings’ Michael Morse, Choppers’ Michael Pineda).\u00a0 It is never a good sign when two of the most mentioned names in baseball are Tommy John and Dr. James Andrews.<\/p>\n

Even the previously indestructible players are falling victim to this plague.\u00a0 The surest thing in baseball, Choppers’ Mariano Rivera, tore his ACL while shagging fly balls.\u00a0 And just yesterday, the always reliable Roy Halladay (Jackalope) was lost for 6-8 weeks due to a lat strain.\u00a0 Halladay wasn’t the only ace to go down yesterday either.\u00a0 Jered Weaver (Moonshiners) was pulled from his start in the first inning with a back problem.\u00a0 Fellow Moonshiner starting pitcher Ted Lilly hit the DL as well, as did red hot Kings catcher Jonathan LuCroy who suffered the freakiest injury of the season, breaking his hand due to a falling suitcase in a hotel room.<\/p>\n

In those last two paragraphs, I named nine different players, and that didn’t even begin to scratch the surface.\u00a0 Every DTBL team has been affected, some more than others.\u00a0 I probably need to take a closer look at each roster to see if this is still the case, but prior to this most recent string of injuries, there were three teams in particular who had been absolutely decimated:\u00a0 the Darkhorses, Choppers and Demigods.\u00a0 All three are around the double digit mark in total number of players who have spent time on the DL, including some very critical losses.\u00a0 I suspect the Moonshiners are moving close to this list as well after losing 40% of their rotation yesterday.\u00a0 The Darkhorses injury problems were so bad, for a while they were fielding a major league roster with at least three disabled players.\u00a0 The Choppers and Demigods minors are\/were filled with virtually nothing but injured players.<\/p>\n

The Mavericks have been in first place virtually the entire season.\u00a0 In large part, that is because they had been the healthiest team in the league.\u00a0 Until about a week ago, their only injured player was 12th round draft pick, and projected bench player, Lorenzo Cain.\u00a0 But now the Mavericks have joined the rest of the league after having lost Neftali Feliz and Austin Jackson.\u00a0 Still, they are in better shape than most.\u00a0 With the exception of two pre-season injuries (Madson and Ryan Howard), the Jackalope had been relatively healthy as well, which helped guide them past the Mavericks for a couple days last week.\u00a0 But now this Halladay injury could be a major problem for the defending champions.<\/p>\n

On a positive note, these injuries have certainly restrained any one team from running out to a huge lead, keeping most of the league very much in the mix.\u00a0 Half of the league is within 10 points of first place and two others are within 20.\u00a0 So if any of these teams can get relatively healthy, there are plenty of points to be gained.\u00a0 But that “healthy” term seems inconceivable for some teams at this point.<\/p>\n

It was suggested to me by one league member that we look into adding additional DL slot(s) to our rosters in the future.\u00a0 I am not necessarily opposed to this idea, but keep in mind that such a change would require a number of other adjustments as well, like the total number of players on the league roster and maybe a change to the free agent signing limit too.\u00a0 This is a conversation I’m willing to have though if the consensus is that change is needed.\u00a0 Obviously, no change will be made for this season though.\u00a0 In the mean time, hopefully some of this madness will come to an end and we’ll be able to determine a champion based on player performance rather than healthy body tallies.<\/p>\n

Hopefully my next article will be about player(s) who are actually contributing to their DTBL squads!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Memorial Day is usually a good point in the season to take stock in how the baseball season is going and examine where it may be headed.\u00a0 As usual, there are hitters and pitchers who are vastly exceeding expectations, and have done so for long enough to make you think it may not be a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11,12,6,9,3,10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-choppers","category-darkhorses","category-demigods","category-jackalope","category-kings","category-mavericks","category-moonshiners","category-naturals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":345,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions\/345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}