NEWSLETTER
Chicago Cubs manager Dale Sveum gave a number of injury updates yesterday, and they were all positive. That’s new.
The biggest turnaround came with respect to Ian Stewart and his ailing quad. Literally one day after saying that Stewart was unlikely to return until the weekend at the earliest, and that it seemed like his recovery was getting pushed back every day, Sveum said Stewart would make his Cactus League return on Thursday (off the bench). And Sveum no longer sounds like a guy who doubts that Stewart will be with the club on April 1. This comes after more than a week of I-don’t-know-if-he’ll-have-enough-time-to-make-this-team type rhetoric.
“I think there’s plenty of time now,” Sveum told the media. “We were a little bit worried that it would be next week but everything’s gotten a little bit quicker.”
Well, all right, then. Given the abrupt about-face with respect to not only Stewart’s return date, but also the “plenty of time” thing, it’s fair to wonder if Sveum got a note from the front office. For his part, Stewart said on Sunday that he thought he could return earlier than Sveum was saying, so maybe the Cubs just decided to defer to Stewart’s sense of his own body. Either way, he’ll now have two weeks of game action to go before camp ends.
(If you’re inclined toward cynicism, you’d note that Friday is the deadline for the Cubs to cut Stewart if they want to save 5/6th of his contract – but, teams are not permitted to cut non-guaranteed players of Stewart’s ilk for injury reasons (it has to be for poor performance). So, unless he returned to game action before Friday, they couldn’t even argue that they were releasing him for baseball reasons. No, I don’t think this actually has anything to do with his return this week. There’s a second deadline by which the Cubs could cut Stewart and save 3/4 of his contract, which comes at the end of Spring Training. That’s the far more relevant deadline … and even that one, I don’t think the Cubs will seriously consider it.)
Also on the injury update front:
