Oh the hits, they just keep on fucking coming. From the busy Twitter fingers of several reporters at Rogers Centre who just spoke with John Gibbons, we have this:
Sergio Santos set for surgery on elbow to clean out some bone spurs ad chips. Won’t end season. #BlueJays
— Shi Davidi (@ShiDavidi) May 14, 2013
And this:
Morrow scratched from Wed start, Ortiz to take his place. #bluejays
— Brendan Kennedy (@BKennedyStar) May 14, 2013
Ugh. Are you for fucking serious?
Oh, and there’s more…
Surely you’ve caught wind of this by now, but just for the sake of being complete– because there are certainly not minor moves of the sort I don’t mind letting slip away into the ether– Brett Lawrie and his Red Bull (and blinged-to-fuck watch) have rejoined the Jays, with the reciprocal move from the club being to put Sergio Santos on the DL with a triceps strain.
The triceps is what had sidelined Santos for a good chunk of the spring, and is perhaps the reason why, while he’s been effective, he hasn’t looked quite as sharp as we’d hoped to see him thus far.
“It hit a point where I felt I wouldn’t be doing the team any service or helping them out if I wasn’t coming in and pitching effectively,” said Santos, according to a piece from Shi Davidi of Sportsnet. “So I’d rather nip it in the bud now and that’s what I think their thinking is as well, get back and hopefully it’s only two or three weeks and then I can be back.”
With the bullpen going well, the loss of Santos for a couple weeks doesn’t seem to suggest some kind of forthcoming doom– though I grant that it’s entirely possible I’ll end up eating those words.
Alex Anthopoulos may not quite be ready to publicly say he’s counting on him, but Sergio Santos was on Jim Bowden’s radio show this afternoon, and according to the host, Santos was confident about the upcoming season.
Sergio Santos told us there is a 100% chance that he will be ready by opening day for the Blue Jays. Santos has been throwing for 4 months
— JIM BOWDEN (@JimBowdenESPNxm) December 20, 2012
That doesn’t mean throwing off a mound, of course, but this is some seriously fantastic news… if you want to bother believing it. Though, normally this is the point where I’d be all, well, what the hell else is Santos going to say? but really he could have hedged a little. Ninety-nine per cent, perhaps?
I don’t know if that makes me feel any more confident, but it’s better to hear than the converse. And if he does come to camp ready to go straight back to being the guy the White Sox traded us, look out. Santos, Jose Reyes and R.A. Dickey are going to be such fan favourites, I don’t think a lot of people even know. Holy awesome, what a year is coming.
In a somewhat delayed piece of business, the Jays announced today that the injury to the right shoulder of closer Sergio Santos isn’t getting any better so he’s going under the knife. The procedure will be on the labrum, not the rotator cuff with is a small consolation.
Sounds like Santos shoulder just wasn’t getting better/remained painful so the decision to opt for surgery came down from on high. Santos initially tried working through the injury to avoid missing the season and yet here we are.
The latest from Richard Griffin of the Toronto Star has him talking about injured Jays closer Sergio Santos, who joined his teammates last night in Anaheim, since he’s been staying at home in California while shut down because of shoulder pain.
“When he showed up at Angel Stadium on Thursday and stuck his head in the clubhouse,” Griffin writes, “he was greeted like a long lost brother by his teammates. That esprit de corps makes Santos’s enforced absence with shoulder inflammation a little easier to take.”
Well, I guess that’s good. But the piece’s money quote from John Farrell kinda doesn’t.
“The one thing that he’s learning is the difference between soreness and pain,” Farrell explained. “That can be said for a lot of young pitchers that they don’t really have that full understanding of what they’re able to pitch through vs. any kind of pain. In this case because the onset was in one game, we were over-cautious in handling him and in getting him evaluated.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not by any means at fucking all saying that the Jays shouldn’t be overly cautious when it comes to their key bullpen asset– or… anyone, really– it’s just, now that Santos is cleared to start throwing again on Tuesday and hopes he can be back in a couple weeks, let’s hope that the learning bit Farrell speaks of goes both ways. As in, they’ve learned to maybe assess this kind of thing better, and they’ve learned that maybe just sticking the Established Closer they happen to employ back into his old familiar role and riding him through thick and thin isn’t such a great idea either.
Not that, y’know, the bullpen’s problems haven’t been largely a result of small sample sizes and shit happening, but still… there were red flags on Cordero when he was acquired, and he hasn’t done a whole lot to lower them. It sounds like maybe the next time Santos feels some soreness in his shoulder it doesn’t necessarily have to lead so quickly to us getting a damn month or more of Cordero ninths. I think a lot of our blood pressures would be greatly relieved if that were the case.
I don’t know… it’s Friday…
Good-ish news tonight by way of the power of Barry Davis’s special privilege…
Santos MRI showed no structural damage. Is on a “no throw” program for 10 days to 2 weeks and will be evaluated at that time. #bluejays
— Barry Davis (@SNBarryDavis) April 24, 2012
So, the club possibly won’t be losing a lights out reliever for a prolonged period, the Sergio Sirotka Moron Brigade can put away their banners and wait for the next dipshit parade to go marching off into, and in the meantime, Francisco Cordero will continue to do a competent job of trying not to suck too much at protecting the lead as the team’s temporary ninth inning man.
Overly-sensational title? You bet your right nut it is. Because apparently that’s the game we’re playing today, as whoever provided the title for whatever shit dribbled out of Richard Griffin’s mouth and into the pages of this morning’s Toronto Star.
“Blue Jays home opener loss an ominous sign,” we’re told, as Griffin queues up to make a play for the title of this city’s Media King of Stoking the Flames of Fucking Stupidity. “Troubling,” he calls last night’s performance. “A disturbing development.” The Jays now “must be concerned about their closer and his psyche.”
Right, because it isn’t blindingly goddamn obvious that anybody ready to make wild pronouncements a month into a 162 game season– let alone after four fucking games– is either genuinely stupid, or genuine keen to employ the classic trolling techniques of Damien Cox, baiting readers and bloggers into angrily driving traffic towards whatever preposterous thing they’re pretending to believe.
