Maddon on Darvish: ‘There Was Some Pain in There…You Don’t Mess with Pain’

Yu Darvish was scheduled to undergo an MRI on his sore right triceps at some point on Tuesday, though the results of said scan were not available as of press time. All we have until then are third-party descriptions of the discomfort the pitcher is feeling, which I for one believe provide a perfectly adequate basis upon which to render our own professional diagnoses.

670 The Score’s Bruce Levine tweeted Monday that Darvish “told a person of trust the Triceps [sic] soreness before his Tommy John surgery was in a different spot then [sic] now.”

Whew, good. Having the soreness in a different spot is definitive proof that this isn’t the same thing and that it’s totally a matter of icing and resting the arm for a few days. Maybe he’ll miss one or two more starts at the most, but then it’s back to normal. And like, normal normal, not normal for this season.

Ah, but there could be more to it than that. While Joe Maddon spent most of his appearance with The Score’s Bernstein and McKnight Show discussing The Slide Heard Round the World, he managed to address the Darvish stuff as well.

“A couple days before [placing Darvish on the DL], we were talking about it a little bit and we thought we could work through it with the trainers making him feel better,” Maddon explained. “But it just did not want to go away. He kept throwing and testing it and possibly that made it even worse.

“And a guy who’s arm’s bothering him a little bit, there’s always a tendency that they want to test it by throwing more. So I think that’s what happened and because of that, he could not get to that comfortable point.

“I asked him, I said, ‘Is this soreness or stiffness or is this pain?’ Soreness or stiffness I would have asked him to play through it, but it was absolutely…there was some pain in there. So you don’t mess with pain.”

No, you most certainly do not mess with pain. And I don’t like the idea that Darvish was/is experiencing actual pain rather than just soreness or mild discomfort or whatever. My expert medical opinion would be to pop an Aleve and apply a fresh Salon Pas patch every few hours until the pain subsides. Maybe crack open a cold one or three to kick-start the numbing process.

Then again, my degree was only in English and came from the same tiny liberal-arts college that bestowed an honorary doctorate in humane letters on Woody Harrelson. We should know more this afternoon or evening, so keep your paper bags handy until then.

For those of you who are into conspiracy theories, Adbert Alzolay was perfect through four innings in his start for the Iowa Cubs Tuesday afternoon, but was pulled after just 60 pitches. Run with that as you like.

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