With baseball still on the proverbial shelf, most offseason concerns we had for injuries are gone. We’ll cover a few small updates here today as we hopefully move towards some number of games this season.
The biggest news over the last few weeks was with Chris Archer. The Pirates righty was shut down for surgery to correct “Thoracic Outlet Syndrome” this is the same issue that sidelined Matt Harvey earlier in his career. Archer was already a shell of his former self, and really only someone you’d be taking a late round flyer on or picking up in a 2 start week hoping for some K’s, but this puts him on the shelf until the beginning of the ’21 season at best.
Marcell Ozuna suffered a facial laceration in a domestic incident, but will be fine according to Braves medical staff
Rich Hill has stated he expects to be fully ready for training camp, whenever that happens to be, and is a name that should be shooting up everyone’s draft boards/FAAB priority lists if we do get a season. You’re normally only banking 10-15 starts from Rich as a sure thing anyway, this year that could very well be the entire season.
Other members of the “will be ready for camp” group this time around include: Eugenio Suarez, Nick Senzel, AJ Puk, and Byron Buxton.
Another guy that may be ready is Aaron Hicks. Hicks is returning from Tommy John surgery performed towards the end of the season last year. Boone came out earlier this month and mentioned that Hicks was on track for a June or July return and pointed to the similar injury to SS Didi Gregorius who returned in mid June last season. Hicks’s return would hurt the value of guys like Brett Gardner and Mike Tauchman, it would also return Clint Frazier to pretty much untouchable territory.
Griffin Canning continues to progress in his rehab. Canning has thrown multiple bullpen sessions without a setback thus far according to the Angels and may be ready to pitch towards the end of June/early July. Shohei Ohtani is in the same boat.
With some teams’ facilities opening back up earlier this month, we should start to hear more and more of where people are at as well as any aggravations or other tweaks as people ramp up activities.
What about Cespedes?
Addressed him in the comments of my last post. Nothing new since. Here’s what I wrote:
“The Mets haven’t put out a lot of info on Cespedis’s ankle. All we really know is that he’s still rehabbing it.
My biggest concern with Cespedis, even when he gets healthy, is playing time. He’s going to be battling it out for LF and DH ABs.
In Left, the Mets can play Nimmo, JD Davis, McNeil….aka younger and better bats.
I’d expect Dom Smith to get the bulk of the DH ABs as well.
If you’re in a super deep league with daily transactions, maybe Cespedis is worth a bench spot to give you some pop, but if you have to set a lineup weekly, he might only get run one or two times a week max.”
Thanks Hammer