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Now the baseball Gods have gone too far. Carlos Correa was my AL MVP pick for this year, my biggest keeper in my main league and one of my few reasons for joy so far this fantasy season. 6-8 weeks is his time table and since it is a torn ligament and not a broken bone he probably won’t have that super-human Freddie Freeman healing time frame. August 29th is the earliest we might see Correa take the field again in real life, but he’ll be playing SS and hitting HRs every night in my dreams. Stash or Trash: Stash. Unless you’re in a 2-team league. In which case, what the hell is wrong with you? Fill In: I grabbed Jose Reyes (18.3%) because I’ve lost control of my life. Since the beginning of July, Reyes has a .405 AVG with 3 HR but only 1 SB. If he’s figured something out he might find eventually himself hitting higher than 7th in the Mets lineup. More likely though, I’ll be cycling short stops in an out until August 29th. 

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Seems like even the injury bug is down in Miami enjoying the All-Star game so we’ve got a light load of injuries this week. However, I fully expect him to come back twice as strong once everyone starts exerting themselves again after enjoying Mama’s home cooking and catching up on Orange is the New Black on the couch for the week.

As always, if you’ve got league specific injury questions please leave them below in the comments and I’ll get back to you! 

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Shades of Freddie Freeman… Pedro Strop might want to hire security for his home in San Cristobal, Dominican Republic because bitter Nationals fans are going to be hurling lots of huevos from Trea Turner‘s broken wrist. Nationals fans are an interesting lot to begin with. Many of the people who attend Nationals home games are transplanted fans of other teams who are only in DC temporarily for business or pleasure. I went to a Nationals game once where a woman was reading and knitting the entire time. I don’t think she witnessed a single out. Back on track! Trea! Of course his amazing stats are only told to you AFTER he is set to miss about two months. In June he had 22 stolen bases. 22. By himself. And yes, I did list Trea as a bust in the 2017 Razzball Writers Predictions. But here’s what I wrote to Jay as justification: “Turner has skills—no doubt. But he has less than 1,000 at bats since he entered professional baseball in 2014. He is going to be this year’s Carlos Correa—drafted in Round 1 or 2 and not earning back that cost.” Steals will be there. Runs too. Everything else? Ehhhhhh. Stash or Trash: Stash. Please. Fill In: So there is no replacing 22 stolen bases in a month. But you know that, right? Hell, over the last 30 days there are only 4 players with over 10 stolen bases. So I’m going to recommend one of them: Cameron Maybin (61.9%.) This is more of a shallow league add, but he’s one of the few players that can even give you part of Trea’s stats. Maybin is always a risk to find himself in an issue of Ambulance Chasers, but right now his 24 SB and 49 runs aren’t bad.

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Julio Urias is this week’s gut-punch injury of the week. The 20-year-old uber-prospect is about to miss a year and a half (at least) after undergoing anterior capsule surgery in his throwing shoulder. Urias has had some bad luck throughout his life. As a kid in Mexico, Urias underwent three surgeries on his eye to remove a non-cancerous mass. In 2015 he had cosmetic surgery to repair the drooping eyelid caused by this mass. Hopefully Urias will come back strong from this current surgery, but there is cause for concern any time there is a major surgery on a pitcher’s throwing shoulder. I’d recommend dropping him even in dynasty leagues as his successful return is not a given. As for his replacement you can trade one J-U for another: Jose Urena (17.7%.) Over his last 4 starts Urena has 3 quality starts and 16 K’s in 23 IP. He’s allowed 23 base runners which isn’t phenomenal, but Urena’s throwing shoulder is in one piece so he’s got that going for him. Which is nice.

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It is the time of year where we see daily grind injuries. Sore backs, back stiffness, back discomfort etc. A lot of injuries that just accumulate from playing six games a week in the summer heat. If you thought we’ve had a lot of injuries so far — I have a sneaking suspicion there are going to be more of these type of injuries. Not season ending — just break down injuries. If you have an opportunity to acquire a multi-position player like Brandon Drury, Danny Valencia, Chris Taylor or Taylor Motter you might make it through these injuries better than your opponents. 

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This week, “Beef” Welington Castillo took a foul ball right to his “beef.” Which made me question — do major league baseball players ever wear cups? Especially catchers? I know they’re awkward, bulky and uncomfortable, but the alternative is genital mutilation. (This has to be the first genital mutilation reference on Razzball, right? Wait…Grey must have written it at least once.) When I was a kid playing baseball it felt like I was always taught that a cup was the most important piece of equipment I had to wear. The older kids would tell horror stories about coaches who would do cup checks by letting a bat pendulum swing into your crotch. While wearing a cup and jock strap as a kid was an uncomfortable experience, the fear of a sadistic sociopath of a coach crushing my manhood was much worse.

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If you had to write a fill-in-the-blank to summarize fantasy baseball in 2016, it would look something like this: “________ hit 30 HRs in 2016, a career high. He will hit half that amount in 2017.”

2017’s fill-in-the-blank is going to look  like this: “_________ was placed on the 10-day disabled list.”

Last week I was astonished to only have nine players hit the disabled list. This week, the injury bug came back with a vengeance — there are a whopping 20 players who have been added to this dubious club. Some of them are really earning those DL frequent flier miles.

This week there are six outfielders and nine starting pitchers mentioned in this article. Rather than try to find six healthy outfielders and nine healthy starting pitchers to add I am going to list a few shallow, standard and deep league targets you can add as fill ins. I’ll add this list at the bottom of the article.

As always, if you’ve got a league specific question, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you ASA-quick.

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I almost don’t know what to do with myself this week. There are only nine fantasy baseball relevant players who made it into this week’s Ambulance Chasers (I said relevant Jered Weaver — relevant.) That is the lowest total since Week 1 of this series. Maybe players are just playing safer to avoid injury. Or maybe there are just less players left  to get injured…

  • Week 1: 9
  • Week 2: 15
  • Week 3: 14
  • Week 4: 11
  • Week 5: 14
  • Week 6: 16
  • Week 7: 13
  • Week 8: 9

As always, leave a comment below if you’ve got any injury questions that are specific to your league!

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The fantasy baseball roster you could make out of the current disabled list would easily be in first place in many rotisserie leagues. If you left your draft with all of these players healthy you would probably be pretty confident of your trophy chances. Granted, if you left your draft with these players I’d question the skills of your league mates.

Fun story, I once joined a friend’s new fantasy baseball league and one of the members had never done fantasy sports before. He drafted every offensive position in order starting with catcher in round 1. This was my actual reaction when I realized what was going on in about the 3rd or 4th round… Needless to say his pitching was a disaster.

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This is getting out of hand! If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve seen my share my process of how I keep track of which players are getting mentioned in injury reports. By the end of Thursday night there were 25 players listed in my Google Doc. Luckily for them (and me) some have returned to play since they were first mentioned as possibly being injured.

Normally I am not someone who would recommend changing your league’s rules mid-season, but due to this new 10-day disabled list we are seeing a lot more players being placed on the DL. You might want to talk to your league commissioner and other owners about having an emergency vote about adding 1 more DL-spot to your rosters if at all possible.

As always, if you’ve got any questions regarding injuries that are specific to your league — please drop a comment below and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours!

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This 10-day DL situation has really created some nice job security for me. Jeff Zimmerman of Fangraphs has done the work to prove this for me — as of May 1st, players have spent 4,198 days on the disabled list, an 8% increase from 2016. There has also been a 30% increase in disabled list trips from 2016.

If you have any specific questions about injured players or fill in options that are specific for your league please leave a comment below and I will get back to you with my thoughts, otherwise, let’s get to it!

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