• The Rays starting rotation is a mess right because of a trio of injuries. Alex Cobb has forearm tendinitis which will cause him to miss time to start the season. Drew Smyly will at least miss his first start with shoulder tendinitis. Alex Colome won’t be in the starting rotation to start the season after showing up to spring training late and then being in the hospital with pneumonia. The Rays rotation now looks to be Chris Archer, Jake Odorizzi, Nate Karns, Burch Smith and one of the following: Enny Romero, Matt Andriese, Everett Teaford, or Grayson Garvin.

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• Zack Wheeler has a torn UCL and will likely need Tommy John surgery.

Zack Wheeler has a torn UCL in his right elbow. Tommy John surgery is almost certainly inevitable. #Mets

— Anthony DiComo (@AnthonyDiComo) March 16, 2015

I went back and looked at his injury indicators and nothing sticks out from last year. The only possible issues I spotted were that he was not an established regular starter and threw hard (95 mph fastball).

Also, let me clear up one item while the main stream media goes crazy with the huge “increase” in pitcher injuries. The current trend is only with elbow injuries. As I found this past fall, days lost to pitcher injuries are transferring from the shoulder to elbow.

Days lost to shoulder injuries reached almost 7,000 in 2008. In 2014, the total days lost was under 3,000. Much of this improvement can be attributed to better exercises for the muscles in the shoulder.

So with the number of shoulder injuries down, something had to give. The number of days lost to elbow injuries went from about 5,000 days in 2008 to over 8,000 in 2014. The days lost just seem to be transferring from the shoulder to the elbow.

People are not talking at all about the time lost to shoulder injuries being down over 50%.

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• Marcus Stroman will miss all of the 2015 season with a torn ACL. Sadly, there is just nothing to discuss about him until he returns next year. The Blue Jays talked about some of the options for his rotation spot.

Right-hander Aaron Sanchez immediately jumps to the forefront of that discussion as he’ll likely compete with right-hander Marco Estrada and left-hander Daniel Norris for the final two spots on the staff.

“Our plan for Sanchez was always the same,” general manager Alex Anthopoulos insisted Tuesday afternoon. “I think it certainly gives him a better opportunity to start but we still have Estrada being stretched out, still have Norris being stretched out, still have the remainder of camp.

• The earliest Chris Sale could be ready for the season is April 12th. It could take longer.

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The following is what happens when I go a full week without a report. The injuries are rolling in and I have quite a few updates on spring training velocities.

• I guessing most people have heard that Yu Darvish has a tear in his ulnar collateral ligament. Here is Jon Daniels going through Darvish’s options:

“We got the MRI results yesterday evening. Dr. Meister met with Yu at that time and we just all got together this morning and talked through the options, effectively, that there are three options for Yu at this point,” Rangers general manager Jon Daniels said. “One is to attempt to pitch through it, which is not a great option. Two, would be an effort for rest and rehab. I think the sentiment is that is effectively what we did in the fall and in the winter and up until two days ago, we had very good results with it. He looked very good but obviously that did not pan out as desired. The third option would be Tommy John surgery.”

I don’t think he will immediately pitch though the pain. Instead, he will rest for few months with rehab which is what Tananka did. He may be able to pitch the last couple months of the season. If he decides to get Tommy John surgery, he will likely not be competing in the majors until May 2016. He may be a late round DL stash for this season, but nothing more.

• Hunter Pence will be out six to eight weeks with a fractured forearm. Arm related injuries for hitters seem to have the most lingering effects. His power could be down quite a bit once he returns.

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• Chris Sale will miss at a minimum of three weeks with a fractured foot. Then he will need to get up to speed before being able to start.

Chris Sale sustained an avulsion fracture on the lateral side of his right foot as the result of an accident at his Arizona home Friday. The left-hander is expected to be sidelined three weeks before resuming baseball activities.

Looking back at previous pitchers with foot injuries, they saw a 0.4 BB/9 and 0.25 ERA bump. Some loss of production, but not too much. The White Sox won’t need another starter until mid-April, so they may be able to go with four starters until then.

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• OK, MASH will be twice a week for the seven or so months with all the baseball news coming in. There is just a ton of Fluff right now and useful new information is a little tough to find.

• Michael Saunders will be out until around the All-Star game with a torn meniscus in his knee. This is a mess for the Blue Jays. Right now they look to replace him with internal options.

… Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos said he expects to fill Saunders’ vacancy in left field with internal options. Kevin Pillar, Ezequiel Carrera and Andy Dirks are the early favourites to win the job out of Spring Training.

Here is the projected wRC+ for the trio.

Name: wRC+
Pillar: 92
Carrera: 83
Dirks: 99

Dirks looks to have the inside track statically, but he is current still dealing with a back injury which cost him his 2014 season. If the 28-year-old Carrera gets the job, he could be a sneaky SB play with 50 SB in 2014 between the majors and minors.

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• I will steal the words of the great philosopher Ned Yost to intro this list of broken down ball players:

“… everything being written at this time of year is just ‘fluff’.

So much ‘Fluff’ right now. I am getting a ton of small updates with how everyone is feeling great and/or making outstanding progress. I am not going to write about each of these “Best Shape in Whenever” reports, but will put them into the injury spreadsheet. I will just try to concentrate on bad news until some games start.

• The Braves Shae Simmons will miss all of the 2015 season because of Tommy John surgery. He was the first player to officially go on the DL in 2015. Chris Withrow and Brandon Beachy has since joined him.

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• Victor Martinez will miss 4-8 weeks with a torn medial meniscus in his left knee. This puts him getting healthy in the middle of spring training or a couple of weeks into the season.

The Tigers announced Thursday that Martinez has torn the medial meniscus in his left knee. Martinez tore the cartilage last week during workouts in Florida and underwent an MRI and exam on Wednesday in Lakeland, Fla., where the tear became clear.

Looking at V-Mart, he may see a loss of average and power because of the knee injury. Using the spreadsheet linked in this article on how injuries affect production, here is the average loss in production from players with knee injuries.

Rate Stat: < = 30 DL Days, > 30 DL Days
AVG: -.007, -.014
OBP: -.013, -.014
SLG: -.024, -.045
ISO: -.017, -.031

If the injury brings down his projections, he will be closer to his 2013 version (.301/.355/.430) than the 2014 version (.335/.409/.565).

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• Troy Tulowitzki has been dealing with a labrum tear since 2008 in which he finally had surgery for at the end of 2014.

But for years, Tulowitzki and the Rockies knew that his hip labrum was damaged. The area has been a problem since he suffered a torn left quadriceps tendon early in 2008. He had surgery to remove scar tissue from the left groin area in 2012, but he hoped to continue to play through the underlying labrum damage.

Did the surgery finally put an end to the problems?

Not even Tulowitzki knows.

“It’s been a battle for me, no doubt,” Tulowitzki said. “I do everything I possibly can to prepare for the season and make myself healthy. Hopefully, all these things are past me. I can move on and go out there and play 140, 160, however many games it is, I love to do that. I have every intention to. We’ll see how it goes.”

I guess we can finally see if he can stay healthy for an entire season.

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• Two items to start with. First, quite a few update are in the spreadsheet at the article’s end. Information is becoming more available, but it restates a lot of old information.  I will continue to give the updated sources. Second, thanks for your support and suggestions as I got this series up and running. It got some recognition at the latest Fantasy Sports Writers Awards.

Hey! FanGraphs won an award! Or, really, the excellent @jeffwzimmerman won an @fswa award for his MASH series on health issues. Congrats!!

— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) January 17, 2015

Thanks.

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