Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
You know, we’ve been talking a lot about Zack Greinke‘s elbow lately, but there was still the possibility of burying your head in the sand and pretending it wasn’t a real thing.
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Padres
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Dodgers
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7:10 p.m. PT
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Los Angeles, Ca.
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3B
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Solarte
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2B
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Barney
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CF
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Almonte
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CF
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Puig
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Smith
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Gonzalez
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2B
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Gyorko
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Kemp
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C
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Grandal
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Van Slyke
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1B
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Goebbert
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Turner
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Liriano
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Arruebarrena
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SS
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Amarista
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C
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Ellis
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P
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Stults (L)
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P
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Hernandez (R)
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But now, it’s all too real. Greinke won’t start tomorrow, as was originally planned, and will instead be pushed back to Saturday to buy him extra rest. Clayton Kershaw will start tomorrow on regular rest, and Dan Haren will start on Friday. An MRI thankfully didn’t show anything out of the ordinary, and Greinke didn’t even want to miss his start, but ultimately agreed to a few extra days.
By itself, that’s maybe not the end of the world. Of course, this is hardly the only issue afflicting the rotation right now. Josh Beckett is probably out for the year. Haren has been more awful than not. Hyun-jin Ryu is on the disabled list. Roberto Hernandez, tonight’s starter, and Kevin Correia are both in the rotation, and neither are really any good. There’s no reason to think Zach Lee is ready. Stephen Fife is out until 2016. Red Patterson exists, I guess. There’s no such thing as rotation depth; if Greinke were to be out for any length of time, Carlos Frias would have to make his first major league start. It could be worse, I guess, because the Angels maybe just lost Garrett Richards to a serious knee injury, but this is also not good.
To make things worse, the Giants somehow actually won their protest of last night’s rain delay, turning their loss into a suspended game, to be continued tomorrow. Maybe it’s still a loss, of course, but it’s not certainly a loss, as it was, and while a four game lead is nice to have, the Dodgers are still going to need to win some games over the next six weeks.
That start tonight with Hernandez against old friend Eric Stults, who I hated to see leave five years ago and would really like to have around right now. Dee Gordon gets a day with Darwin Barney playing second base; Scott Van Slyke takes over for Carl Crawford in left field against the lefty. Andre Ethier still doesn’t exist.
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