The Chicago Cubs now have three catcher on the disabled list. Take that, Nationals.
Today, in order to make room for Travis Wood, the Cubs placed Welington Castillo on the 15-day disabled list with a sprained right MCL (that’s in the knee). As I noted this morning in the Bullets, the Cubs had a tough decision when it came to adding Wood to the roster. On the one hand, there were just 11 pitchers on the roster before the move, so sending out a position player made sense. Further, the Cubs had three catchers on the roster – Koyie Hill, Blake Lalli, and Welington Castillo – so moving one of them out would have made even more sense.
But the problem there was Castillo’s knee. The Cubs hoped his knee injury was a four/five-day kind of thing, and it may well be. But to keep Castillo around in the hopes that he’s able to play in a few days would have meant sending someone like Adrian Cardenas back to AAA for at least 10 days (unless there’s another injury). That’s not something the Cubs wanted to do, apparently, so they instead decided to DL Castillo.
The move means that Castillo won’t be eligible to return now until June 2. That, in turn, means that this is Koyie Hill’s team (with Blake Lalli occasionally drawing starts) until Steve Clevenger returns from the DL (oblique strain/rib cartilage crack), as early as next week (he played in a rehab game at Iowa today). Geovany Soto, you’ll recall, had minor knee surgery, and will be out for another few weeks yet.
Are you appropriately caught up on the ridiculous situation that is the Cubs’ catching position?