Richard Durrett is truly missed today.
This is what happens when you devote a website to, in all reality, covering the Dallas Cowboys but have extra capacity and force your football dudes to write about baseball. From ESPN Dallas.com:This is a critical week for the Rangers in terms of where they stand with ace Yu Darvish. At some point he should throw a bullpen session.
It doesn’t have to occur today or tomorrow, but he needs to throw sometime . . . Darvish needs to show the club he can pitch through some discomfort, especially if games are meaningful . . . Darvish should let the club have more control over what’s needed for him. He needs to have better communication with the front office and the manager to make things smoother. He just decided it was best to head to the DL, and it raised questions regarding his commitment to the club.
That’s from Calvin Watkins, whose bio says he has “covered the Cowboys since 2006 and also has covered colleges, boxing and high school sports.” Baseball is not mentioned. Not really surprising given the content.
To be fair to him, he does offer a Ron Washington quote that, at least on the surface, supports the idea that Darvish should pitch sooner rather than later. But it also spends a lot of time with the false equivalence of a position player dealing with aches and pains and a franchise pitcher dealing with elbow inflammation. It also is based on the false premise that Darvish, and not the the Rangers front office, training staff and coaching staff, determines when he goes on the disabled list and when he does not. Oh, another false premise: that the Rangers games mean anything at this point in the season.
How one can cover baseball for a living and not note the epidemic of pitcher injuries and the importance of keeping a guy like Darvish healthy in the long term is a mystery to me. Oh wait: this guy does not typically cover baseball for a living. That’s right.
(h/t Adam from Lonestar Ball)
