A few of the dopes at Sons of Sam Horn are taking to task the media tales of woe being spread about the balky back of Josh Beckett. Gcapalbo writes:
So, here we are just 48 hours since Beckett pulled a muscle in his back during a meaningless spring training start, the MRI is negative on any trouble with the structure of his spine, and he's a little sore.
If you'd like to leave your radio and television switched off and not read the newspaper for a few days, I'll save you some time and aggravation and summarize:
a) The Red Sox can't field a rotation. To add to Schilling's shoulder woes, Beckett is clearly a 'question mark' for the first half of the season. Wakefield is too old, Lester and Buchholz are too young. (Perhaps Matsuzaka will be too tired from those middle of the night feedings as well and the Gyroball won't drop either). We've got nothing, except Julian Tavarez. (Did I mention that Bartolo Colon never misses a meal?)
b) Theo and his minions sit grimly around the office at the minor league facility slapping themselves on the forehead in anguish exclaiming "I KNEW we should have GOT SANTANA!" Never mind the $137.5 million dollars+ to sign him, the two or three or more years of dead money on the end of that contract after his arm has fallen off, or the emptied Red Sox farm system-- boy, did we screw up!
c) There's a conspiracy to not send Beckett to Japan (Can't find a place to put the shot in!) Probably Theo's decided he's one of the 'bad apples' who would do nothing other than complain and ruin the team for the first month of the season-- so best to not let him get on the plane.
d) Clearly, the season is lost, and it's not even April!
This bit of perspective, knock on fiberboard, is well-placed.
Yet the human body is a mysterious thing. Rhode Island's own Rocco Baldelli, whose promising career has been cast in uncertainty because of a nagging and mysterious series of injuries knows this better than most, as the ProJo's Joe McDonald recently reported.
“I’ve been tested for everything under the sun, the whole gamut, trying to find the stem of what all these problems are that I’m having. I can tell you I don’t have MS, there’s no chance. … I know it sounds bad when I’m denying specific things.”
But while he knows what it’s not, he’s still not sure exactly what it is.
“I can’t say that I have X, Y and Z,” he said. “I had mixed results in my tests and for me to try to explain what I have, I just can’t do it with a quote in the newspaper. There’s no way for me to say what I have, because as far as exactly the problem I’m having, I don’t know."