Pablo Sandoval Is Headed To The Disabled List, And John Farrell Doesn't 'Know How Long This One's Going To Take' (And Other Injury Updates)
More often than not, when you have a player that you’ve given a $95 million contract to and they end up on the disabled list, that’s bad news. I’m not saying that losing Pablo Sandoval is good news, but I don’t think anyone is feeling like the Red Sox are now in danger because of this.
Yes, he leads the team in home runs (3) and has one fewer RBI (10) than the team RBI leaders Andrew Benintendi and Mookie Betts (11), but his overall numbers of .213 with a .646 OPS are pretty underwhelming to say the least. He had been better lately, though, hitting .368 with a .797 OPS over his last 6 games. That being said, one of the biggest issues for Sandoval in 2015 was his defense, or lack thereof. That’s more or less been the same story with him to start 2017, as he’s already made 4 errors in 16 games. That puts him on a pace to make 34 errors over a full season.
The corresponding move to Sandoval being placed on the disabled list is the Red Sox activating Josh Rutledge, so that gives them another right-handed bat off the bench to go along with Chris Young. They already have Marco Hernandez on the active roster, so John Farrell is likely going to go with a platoon situation with these two players — Rutledge getting the start at third base against lefties, and Hernandez will be in there against righties.
I mean, does anyone actually have a problem with that in the meantime? I kind of look at the third base position this year as a situation where anything that you can get from that position is a bonus. The fate of the Red Sox season is not dependent on how Sandoval, Hernandez or Rutledge perform.
Some other injury updates here — David Price tweeted his own injury update today.
I thought it was pretty funny to watch the beat writers freak out about this. Who gives a fuck how he gets the information out there? If he met with you guys, he would’ve just said the same shit that he tweeted, only you would’ve gotten to tweet it instead of him. He addressed everything that the media would’ve asked, anyway — how many pitches, what kind of pitches, how many simulated innings he threw, how long the rest periods were, how many pitches per session he threw, and how he felt afterwards. Throw him a retweet and shut up.
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The most important thing here is that we’ve graduated from just throwing fastballs in these bullpen sessions to now he’s throwing all four pitches. Not only that, but he “felt great after”, which is a different tone than last week when we were told that he felt soreness in Toronto.
Tyler Thornburg is on the comeback trail. All positive signs here:
And Dustin Pedroia:
Pedroia did not need an MRI on Monday, so I would imagine that we’re going to see his return some time in this Yankee series, although John Farrell wasn’t really specific about when his return might be. We’re now four days removed from when Pedroia initially suffered the injury, so that coupled with the fact that he didn’t need an MRI, I’d take that as a sign that if he were going to need a DL stint, we’d have heard about that by now.