Diamondbacks Roster: Some Assembly Required

Chris Young went on the disabled list today.

Justin Upton is day-to-day with a thumb injury that he had to have drained of fluid the other day.*

Geoff Blum was placed on the DL last night though the only thing wrong with him is a terrible case of being mostly useless when the team needs a roster spot. Or, if you’re the Diamondbacks, “an oblique strain.” Yeah. That’s convenient.

Called up from Triple A in this fiasco is one guy who’s been raking** and one guy currently passing kidney stones. Because I guess there wasn’t anyone else available. Maybe someone with both an inflamed appendix and a nasty case of gout. But they had to find somebody. I mean, do we really want to see Willie Bloomquist in left field everyday?

I didn’t think so.

Young was on a tear to open the season. I mean a hitting-.410-with-5-home runs-13-RBI kind of tear. When Matt Kemp looks in the mirror, he sees Chris Young behind him getting closer and ever more threatening. If Kemp had Mad Eye Moody’s Foe Glass, he’d be seeing the whites of Chris Young’s eyes.

Everybody else: not so much. Miggy’s doing that thing where he tries to hit lots of home runs and forgets that he has a very pretty and decidedly effective swing when he’s not trying so hard he nearly spins in a circle and falls over like the least graceful kid trying to hit a pinata.*** Ryan Roberts has no idea what’s going. Paul Goldschmidt can’t seem to get a regular start and I’m pretty sure it’s making him sad. Besides Joe Saunders , the starting pitching has just been kind of okay.

Losing the one guy currently striking fear into the hearts of our enemies hurts. Especially since he made a beauty of a catch. Really. It was the kind of thing you can use to feel superior when your friends say that baseball players are fat and aren’t capable of doing anything more than standing still in the outfield as the ball falls into their gravitational well. I’m at least partially convinced he’s some sort of a superhero now, with the the way he flew through the air like that.

It just ended badly. As soon as he collided with the wall, I stopped making meatballs+ and began wailing like an old Italian lady. “No, Chris. Oh no. This is bad. This is so bad.”

And it was bad. The trouble is that while we can afford to lose Upton for a few days while he works that thumb thing out, losing Young at the same time puts the team in a much worse position. It’s like chopping someone’s legs off and then telling them to go run the Boston Marathon: yeah, they could do it but it takes a long time to get used to prosthetics and you trip and fall down a lot.

If we’re going to make it through, the other boys will have to step up. The are the Never Say Die-mondbacks and this is the first time this season where their backs against the wall. We’ll see how it goes. Until then. we’ll hope CY doesn’t go the way of Jacoby Ellsbury.

*Ew
*In Reno, where the air is so thin any hard hit ball is at-risk of entering a low Earth orbit
***Boy, it took me a long time to get to that analogy, didn’t it?
+Delicious snacks! And so portable!