thurdl sports

NIH: The lost Nationals

Researching Astacio last night got me thinking about the Lost Nationals pitchers. There were two guys we picked up in the off season who didn't pitch a single regular season game as a National before hitting the DL. Astacio is rehabbing and we might still get a half season out of him, but there's another one, who was injured earlier and is gone for the season.

Yeah, everyone knows Brian Lawrence, I don't know why I'm giving a history lesson about him.

His injury was a rotator cuff tear that was diagnosed during surgery to repair his labrum. What that translates to is the fact that his shoulder was seriously fecked up. Let's look at how a shoulder is assembled. The two major parts of the shoulder that are part of the torso are the clavicle (feel your shoulder, it's the thin bone at the top) and the scapula, or what is termed the shoulder blade in layman terms. The shoulder is a ball and socket joint, which means that the socket that is the labrum accepts the ball joint head of the humerus.

So where's the rotator cuff? It's a series of tendons that covers the front of the joint. Yup, back to those pesky tendons again, seems like everytime I go researching a serious injury, it always comes back to tendons. Tendons are stretchy little bastards, to the point that they were used as a rudimentary form of elastic in some older cultures. Ew, right? But, when they tear or snap, they take a hell of a lot longer to get fixed than a muscle or even broken bone will. That's where all the problems are coming from. These are lingering and crappy things to get injured, but we just keep going down with them.

So. Tendons. They suck. Hopefully we stop hurting them, and I mean now.

posted by thurdl @ 9:04 PM