These bug bites are going to leave a mark

Every game there are 292 pitches thrown on average.  With any pitch, a play could develop that could change everything—a player’s career, a team’s playoff chance; a play could even break a fan’s heart. 

With just one pitch, an injury could plague a player, and then everything changes.  This year, more than any year in recent memory, the injury bug has bitten almost every team in baseball.  Some teams have been impacted more than others, but even the smallest injury early in the year can change the course of an entire season. Before the season starts, every organization assembles their team with specific roles for each player, and when someone goes down, it can force everything to change.

In the last couple of weeks, we have seen numerous all-stars hit the DL and each poses a serious threat to the success of their teams’ season.  From Rivera to Ellsbury to Longoria, these injuries are changing the landscape of baseball in 2012.  Obviously Rivera and Ellsbury are huge injuries, but I do not think they’ll be as much of a shock to the system as Longoria going down.  He is not only a MVP threat every year, he is the heart of that lineup and locker-room.  He makes everyone around him better.  Tampa will always have the pitching to keep games close, but losing your best bat and most talented offensive player is going to be a serious blow to any division title and World Series aspirations. That would be the case for any team losing a player like Longoria, and I am sure is the biggest fear for many GMs. As for Rivera, that is a sad story, but the Yankees will find someone young and groom him into their closer for now (as they already have), and if they don’t fix their starting pitching, it won’t matter if Rivera was there and healthy all season, because he can’t pitch four innings a day anyway!

Not only are these major injuries making waves, but there are a good number of the lesser names with major injuries and a few others with the “nagging” kind that will hamper many teams.  Some players being gone for the season or just a short time are not going to have the same influence as the guys discussed earlier, but those with the lingering injury bug may not perform at their peak level for awhile or even the entire year. The likes of Chris Young, Tim Hudson, Carl Crawford, Mike Pineda, Drew Storen, Homer Bailey and Brian Wilson to name a few are all big injuries that will serve as a harmful force to their teams’ season.

In some cases, like Young, the effects of these disruptions will only be determined once the player has returned to the lineup. Chris Young is the best hitter in the Arizona lineup (with all respect to Upton of course).  He was putting up monster numbers before he got hurt, and even with him due to come back within two  weeks, their offense has been invisible since he went out, and in a division where a playoff spot comes down to the last week of the season, giving away these games now could come back to bite them in September.

In a situation like Pineda, the Yankees traded away a lot to get a guy with the hope to have him atop the rotation. Now with both him and Chamberlain hurt, they are forced to have a veteran like Petite come out of retirement to pitch. They invested a lot into an unproven commodity and now will pay the price for a situation they had no control over. As for Bailey and Wilson— yes they are both all-star closers good for 40+ saves a season, but every year closers come and go, and even with these injuries, both teams (Boston and SF) seem to have the closer situation handled for now and should be able to manage without rushing to the phones looking for a trade.

As I talk about all of these impact players who are already hurt, there are a lot more who have stayed healthy even with a history of hitting the shelf. Guys like J. Heyward, A. Rodriguez, J. Beckett, T. Tulowitski, and Josh Hamilton, to name a few. Fans of their respective teams hope every time they play they will come out of the game healthy, because they too are so important to the success of this season.  If any of these players happen to find themselves on the DL for an extended period of time, their team could be in deep trouble as well. 

Finally, I will say as a longtime fan of the sport, you always want your team to do well, and the rival team to do poorly, but you never root for an injury and you never want to see another player get hurt.  That being said, every year there are injuries that are so random and funny, you have to laugh at them (Sosa pulling a muscle while sneezing is one of my favorites!).  Look at a guy like Chamberlin, I mean what professional athlete gets hurt playing on a trampoline?! I will let that slide because he was just being a good dad and playing with his kid, but come on!  Of course I can’t go without mentioning the now infamous Josh Outman injury. It needs to be talked about and everyone should be able to get a laugh over this since nothing serious happened.  Earlier this year, he was placed on the DL with a strained oblique, an injury which was credited to vomiting while gorging himself at an all you can eat buffet. Yummy!

For now, we can just hope that no one else catches the injury bug. But as we all know from years of watching sports, that ain’t never gonna happen.  All a team can do is pray to the baseball gods, and hope that they have a solid back-up waiting in the wings or buried somewhere in the minors.