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August 6, 2007

Under The Knife

Rantastic

by Will Carroll

Joe Morgan has a whole web site devoted to his particular brand of genius, so I tend to just ignore him. (It's the button that says "mute.") However, when he decided to become a doctor tonight, he couldn't have been more wrong. You can't determine when a quad is healed because strength testing doesn't work? You'd rather have a quad than a hamstring? Quick quiz: which structure is more redundant? That the quad "lifts the leg?" (This was something that was repeated by Buck Martinez on XM.) The quad is an extensor muscle, Joe. The hip flexor and hamstring work to "lift" the leg in the gait. That Alfonso Soriano's lucky there wasn't a tear after Jon Miller read that Soriano had been initially diagnosed with a strain? That "it looks like his quad," when he was visibly grabbing the quad there in hi-def?

I literally screamed. After hearing Orel Hershiser's reasoned, even approach for a couple nights of the Barry Bonds coverage, it seemed even more intolerable. It's about time that the FJM boys, as well as Phil Mushnick, get some traction. Billy Beane didn't write Moneyball, and it's not Joe Morgan's birthright to call Sunday Night Baseball.

Powered by Twitter, on to the injuries:

• Ranting aside, the injury to Alfonso Soriano is precisely the kind of thing that could tip a very close NL Central race, just as the Ben Sheets injury threatens to do for the Brewers. Soriano has a Grade II strain of his right quad, apparent from the second he stopped hopping and grabbed it. He grabbed it hard, right in the belly of the muscle, which tells you it was sore immediately, but wasn't so sore that he couldn't touch it, and that the damage wasn't at the ends or the muscle, where there's not as much fiber. A lot will depend on how significant the tear was—the Grade II designation was very broad, and is more of a guess than a firm diagnosis—and how he responds to treatment. At this stage the best guess is that he'll miss between two and four weeks, given what we know and his response to his strained left hamstring. It's important to note that the quad came on the opposite side as the hammy—what that means is that this isn't a strength deficit showing up as a strain, but is instead a discreet, traumatic event.
• It didn't look like much at the time when Edgar Renteria simply rolled over his ankle, but we were looking too low. It appears that the stress went higher, and he's ended up on the DL with the dreaded high ankle sprain. Renteria figures to miss just more than the minimum with the injury, just another in a long series of problems that the Braves have had to overcome. With Chipper Jones banged up seemingly all season, losing Renteria in the middle of the race is going to hurt, but happily the Braves have Yunel Escobar available to take over. The team will also get Andruw Jones back this week after he had a cortisone shot and sat out the weekend to let it take effect.

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