NEWSLETTER
A trio of pitcher injury/rehab updates …
At AAA Iowa last night, Eddie Butler made his long-awaited return. Well, I mean, long-awaited in terms of “where in the sweet heck was that guy?” Rehabbing an apparently very serious groin injury in Arizona for months, Butler finally returned to the upper minors mound with an inning of work last night at Iowa. Sounds like it was a bit of a grind:
That's it for Butler who departs after 1 inning. Plan wasn't for him to go deep into this game anyway. https://t.co/s9MbZpcO6R
— Tommy Birch (@TommyBirch) July 1, 2018
Given how long Butler’s been out, and given that there isn’t a desperate need for him at the big league level at this time, you can bet the Cubs are planning on taking it very slow with Butler’s return. He can get up to 30 days on his rehab assignment, at which point he would have to be activated to the big league roster, or subjected to waivers. It’s possible he would clear waivers at that point, and then the Cubs would be able to keep him in the organization through the end of the year before they’d have to make a decision about adding him back to the 40-man roster (unless they brought him back up sooner).
Meanwhile, Carl Edwards Jr. made his first rehab appearance the night before, and he says he felt good (Des Moines Register). Normal, it seems. He’ll make at least one more appearance there at Iowa, presumably today or tomorrow, before potentially returning to the big league club.
And lastly, some thoughts from Joe Maddon on Yu Darvish’s situation, having now been diagnosed with a right elbow impingement and given a cortisone shot to help with the inflammation (Cubs.com): “Hopefully, this relaxes his mind a bit moving forward. Whenever you define a situation, it always helps the human being.”
That’s especially true and fair for a guy who somewhat recently experienced pain in his triceps, and then, boom, had to have Tommy John surgery. It makes you wonder if Darvish pitched through that pain a little bit – all players, to varying degrees, have to play through some level of discomfort at times – and now he’s more gun shy about doing it again, especially with the pain in roughly the same spot.
Maybe Maddon’s right that Darvish knowing, “Yeah, there’s a medical reason for your pain, but it isn’t necessarily going to destroy your elbow again if you pitch,” will help him. To get from there to here, we are necessarily doing some speculating, but it’s all pretty easy to imagine it playing out that way.
That would also kinda square with how this entire injury/rehab scenario has played out in such a confusing way, in terms of the messages we’ve received and the behavior of the parties. You throw in the additional layers of multiple languages and Darvish’s uncommon candor, and you get the perfect storm for us to really not understand how the severity of the injury (or not) is squaring with what’s being said (or not) and what’s being done in the rehab process (or not).
