Finally, the Jim has come back to Phoenix!
Q
The home-page picture is doubly appropriate today. It’ll be the first game wholly since my return to Phoenix. While it’s nice to go away and visit places and people, it’s nice to come back home. No bed is as good as your own. We missed our cats. [Less certain, is whether or not they missed us…] However, courtesy of jet-lag, I was up at 5 am this morning. Fortunately, I do have one final day off work, so if I feel the need to crash out later on, I am at liberty to do so. Normal service can now be resumed on the Gameday Threads too, with bullpen charts and everything. Which is where the bandage part of the image comes in. Literally half the bullpen when I left last week, are no longer present for various reasons.
Heck, that doesn’t even include pitchers who both arrived AND left the active roster while I was away, like Tommy Henry and Christian Montes De Oca. Given the latter’s previous roster stint turned him into a ghost D-back, I am increasingly suspicious he does not exist at all. But we also lost Justin Martinez, Cristian Mena, Jeff Brigham and Kendall Graveman. We now have the likes of Tayler Scott on the active roster, whom I was not particularly aware was in the organization. Another task for the day is to update the 40-man roster page, though part of me wants to wait and see what happens with Martinez’s second opinion. It’ll probably be “Get TJ on the left elbow too, just to be safe.”
Right now, we have eight pitchers on the 40-man roster page on 15/60-day IL, and zero position players. That’s getting off easy compared to some: the Dodgers have fourteen pitchers there. Even my fantasy team is using all five IL spots for pitchers. Yesterday, Jack wrote about the epidemic, including the fact there have been forty-seven TJs this year already. He reckons it’s due to an increase in both velo and breaking pitches, and it seems a sound conclusion. It’s not likely to change soon, so pitching depth has never been more important. Through 67 games, the D-backs have used 28 different pitchers. Last year – when our pitching staff was shredded by injury? – the equivalent figure was only 25.