I typically come in here flinging jokes and happiness around like a monkey with his poo, but this week I’m distraught. This list is decimated. As most of you know by now, I don’t rank injured players, and with that angle there are plenty of shlubs at the back end of the list that are barely rosterable even in deep mixers. At this point, I can’t even just say that about the back end. The grossness keeps rising. This week alone we’ve lost (take a biiiiig breath): Chris Sale, Trevor Bauer, James Paxton, Ross Stripling, Kenta Maeda (to the pen), Tyler Skaggs, Jeremy Hellickson, Dereck Rodriguez, Marcus Stroman, Mike Montgomery, and Carlos Martinez (to the pen like Maeda). To make matters worse, we are approaching September when virtually no one is placed on the DL – they just get skipped. That reminds me of what Big Pun’s catchphrase would be if he were a pitcher; instead of “I ain’t a player I just crush a lot” he would tell folks “I ain’t on the DL I just get skipped a lot”. Catchy tune. So anyway, it’s pretty hard to trust anyone on this list beyond the top 15, and I just can’t remember a year when pitching was this bad. But we will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We’re going to live on. We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!!