• Troy Tulowitzki is expected to miss two to three weeks with a cracked shoulder.

Toronto won’t definitively know whether Tulowitzki can make it back for at least another week. His progress will be closely monitored, and not only does the bone have to heal, but some internal bleeding has to subside and the muscles need to recover.

“I think there is a chance,” Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos said Sunday morning. “Just talking to the doctors, they do think it is a little early to try to set a timetable on it.

“We’ll know more in the next few days, but if they had to guess, and it really is only a guess at this point, could be two to three weeks and then he could be back for October. Hopefully we’re playing at that time. That’s really all we have, but we’ll know more as the next few days come along.”

To me, it sounds like they have no clue when he will be back. I went and looked through my injury databases and only found one player who had a fracture in his shoulder. Carlos Gomez missed 37 games in 2011 because of a fractured shoulder.

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Flags fly forever, or so they say. And yet…not really. I mean, they kind of do, but how many Giants fans out there are like, “Eh, we had our run, good on the Dodgers!” Right.

So in fantasy, particularly keeper or dynasty leagues, you have to make a tough call when that title is in reach – how do you maximize your chances at that eternal flag without ensuring a collapse the next year? I am struggling with a situation right now that puts that balance to the test.

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• Ryan Zimmerman will miss significant time with an oblique injury.

Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman remains out of the lineup because of a left oblique injury. Although he is listed as day to day, two sources expected Zimmerman to miss a significant amount of time because of the injury.

• Manuel Banuelos will be shut down for the rest of the season with elbow discomfort.

Banuelos exited Sunday’s disappointing outing against the Nationals with some elbow discomfort. The Braves held out hope that the pain would subside as this week progressed. But before Wednesday’s series finale against the Phillies, Atlanta manager Fredi Gonzalez revealed the rookie left-hander would be re-evaluated by Dr. James Andrews next week.

“We don’t think there is anything significant there, he’s just in pain right now,” Braves assistant general manager John Coppolella said. “He wasn’t feeling great. We had hoped he might come in and feel really good today. That didn’t happen.”

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• I better give my two cents on the Matt Harvey situation. In my opinion, there should not have been any big blow up on his innings limit this past weekend. Both sides should have gotten together before the season and discussed how Harvey should be handled in case the Mets make the post season. The general outline of this agreement should have then been made public so everyone has an idea of what is going on. This discussion should not be happening now in early September, but when the season started. The Mets, Harvey, and Boras created this mess and now they need to figure it out. Anyone who wants to point fingers needs to do so at all parties.

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• September 1st is such a mess with all the transactions. A bunch of semi-hurt players came off the DL. Also, several minor league DL players moved to the MLB 60-day DL to increase roster spots. With no real reason to put players on the DL with the expanded rosters, I will try to keep track of those players in another table after the official DL players. I hope I got everything, but let me know if I missed anything.

• Mark Teixeira’s bone bruise is going to keep him out at least two weeks. Historically, hitters take a little longer to return, but the time frame is close.

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We’ve reached the Naked Lunch point of the Fantasy Baseball season—that moment when everyone sees what’s on the end of every fork. That of course doesn’t mean that we all know where we’re going to finish in our leagues. But it does mean that we know pretty much whom we’re going to finish with or be finished by. Sure, there will be unforeseen September call-ups galore, and also some waiver deals that send role players to contenders. But except for the prime prospects—Hector Olivera isn’t in the majors to sit on the bench, and Javier Baez probably isn’t either—no one knows which of the newly-summoned hitters might play regularly, or which pitchers might get plugged into a starting rotation and have some chance of success there.

Anyway, we certainly don’t. And this created a quandary for us, in our capacity of would-be timely bloggers. Thirty blog installments in, we’ve already told you about the guys we like and don’t like who’ve been around during the season. We don’t know any more than you do about who among the newbies is going to (a) play and (b) be good. And if you’re reading this, need stolen bases and nothing else, and thus can afford to have an otherwise-uninhabited spot in your starting lineup, you’ve probably already acquired the amazing Quintin Berry and his spotless SB record; you don’t need our input.

So we had nothing to blog about, until we heard that one of our heroes had died. That would be the writer/neurologist Oliver Sacks, the Mickey Mantle of his hybrid profession. Casey Stengel, marveling at Mantle, said that he “has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster.” Similarly, Sacks wrote better than any doctor—we mean English prose, so don’t tell us about Chekhov or William Carlos Williams—and doctored better than any writer. His specialty was describing the strange things a brain can do when its owner isn’t looking or hasn’t been nice to it. And this, needless to say, made us think of Justin Morneau. Read the rest of this entry »

• Tomorrow roster’s can expand to allow anyone on the 40-man roster to join the MLB team. This is when the official DL becomes about useless. Teams won’t move players to the DL because teams no longer need to free up roster spots. Also, hitters who can hit, but not play in the field will return. It will keep a list of players who should be on the DL, but aren’t starting on Thursday.

• Stephen Strasburg owners may not want to start him this week as he is again dealing with back issues.

Still, Strasburg left after throwing 60 pitches in four innings, allowing seven hits and four runs, all four on home runs. Nationals Manager Matt Williams described the problem as a “recurrence” of the upper back trouble he had earlier this season, which contributed to his first of two 2015 disabled list stints. Asked if this discomfort may lead to a third, Strasburg said, “I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion.”

We will know more after he pitches his mid-week bullpen session.

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This is what Chris Davis does. He’s always going to swing hard, resulting in what Brooks Baseball lovingly refers to as a “disastrously high likelihood to swing and miss.” But sometimes he’s going to connect on those swings with pleasant results.

This approach lends itself to results like the past three seasons when his wRC+ bounced from 168 to 95 to 138. Plenty have tried to figure out exactly what went wrong with Davis in 2014, and now with the benefit of a rebound season’s worth of data, I think it’s worth seeing if we can learn anything.

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• Carlos Carrasco is on the DL with a sore shoulder. It is never good to have pain, but this injury sounds pretty minor.

The Indians said they expect Carrasco to require just the minimum stay on the DL.

“Watching him throw his bullpen yesterday, he’s OK, he’s just a little bit stiff after,” Indians manager Terry Francona said before Tuesday’s game. “I was glad they did the MRI. Sometimes when you give MRIs to pitchers, you have to be careful because anybody that’s thrown a baseball can have something wrong in there. But his was very clean. We were thrilled.”

The news could have been much worse.

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• I having traveling and enjoying Massachusetts for the Saberseminar. I just have not been able to keep up on MASH and need to get out an update before more injuries mount up. Well, this morning I think I may have caught up …. maybe. Today’s MASH is pretty much just a status report with little to no analysis. On Thursday, I will run an in depth on several of these injuries.

• Hunter Pence will probably miss close to the minimum 15 days with a strained oblique

• Billy Hamilton is out with a sore shoulder.

• While the team won’t admit it, Jake McGee will not throw for the major league team this season. The team is putting a 6-8 week return time for him which will be after the regular season.

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