Written by Jay Yencich | 03 April 2010

One of the reasons the MLB has often given for not participating in international tournaments, or not sending more interesting prospect to the winter leagues, is that you risk injury in a meaningless exercise. Within baseball, there are not so many contests for regional bragging rights. Sure, there’s the Caribbean Series every winter, the IBAF World Cup [of Baseball], the regional tourney in the eastern part of Asia, and the WBC coming around every four years, but even though I could go on, the average fan on the street would be exceptional if they could name two of those. The MLB, being somewhat America-centric, would rather think that the World Series, if the name wasn’t enough of an indicator, is really all there is to it and that anything that doesn’t directly serve that is a waste of time.

The funny thing about that is that we still have Spring Training which is also a month and a half of time in which bad things can happen without them being meaningful. Some players need to work on this or that under observation and then bust it out in a real game, but when you have guys like Cliff Lee getting injured for a perceived threat, in a match-up that doesn’t matter, facing a team the Mariners won’t play during the regular season, things get a little wonky. I don’t know of a better solution off-hand, because it would be highly impractical to go around playing nothing but intrasquad games, or ruin the industry that is Spring Training, but the flaws and double standards makes it feel as though there’s some consistent way we could develop of addressing these issues, even it’s the best of several flawed options.

This has been a long time getting around to a point, which is that James McOwen, famous for last year’s hit streak, separated his right shoulder yesterday in an exhibition game after he ran into a wall. Funny thing about that, he’s already done it twice before. So, in essence, a player rewarded by the organization for his hard work by being brought along with the big club has gone and injured himself in a way that will likely put him out for the entire season. Ouch.

Given the alternative, which is something approximate to Triunfel breaking his fibula in the second game of the season, or Yung-chi Chen separating his should in the fifth game of the season, I don’t know which I prefer. The certain claim that I can make is that it sucks for McOwen, who was coming into what was to be his first tour of the high minors needing to continue building on what he did last year. This is not a loss on the same level as Triunfel, or even Chen at the time, but it still is unpleasant and bumped up the grade on what was already a fairly steep climb to the majors.

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