Open up and Seiya
The Cubs' doctors are checking on their best player. That's never good.


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Given the difficulty of their early schedule, with series against the defending World Series champion Rangers, the mighty Dodgers and a three city west coast road trip, the Cubs’ 10-6 start is very good.
The news that Seiya Suzuki is back on the injured list with a dreaded oblique strain is very bad.
And, of course it’s following the traditional Cubs injury timeline.
Step One - Player suffers injury.
Step Two - Training staff says he really dodged a bullet and it’s just a minor injury.
Step Three - Player goes on injured list but doesn’t need an MRI because of step two.
Step three and a half - Cubs forget the player is still on a road trip with them, and leave him in Phoenix.
Step Four - Initial time frame of the recovery is exceeded. Player gets MRI.
Step Five - MRI shows injury is in fact much more serious than originally thought.
Step Six - Trainers and doctors stand around waiting to roll a die to determine how far off they were. Die comes up six, and player goes on 60-day injured list, and barely escaped euthanasia.
The Cubs are on step three with Seiya, which, to be fair is ahead of their typical schedule. Normally, they’d have waited to put him on the IL and then after playing shorthanded for eight days they would finally give into the inevitable. This time they did it right away.
And that’s partly why their optimism seemed more disingenuous than normal.
Dr. Jed Hoyer said that the Cubs believe Seiya’s injury is far less serious than the one that wiped out his entire spring training last year and more than 40 days total. Jed’s evidence for is that last time it was on Seiya’s right side and it was from a swing, this time it’s on his left side and it’s from…well, they’re not really sure. Probably running, or maybe reading a book. There’s just no way to tell. Those darn obliques just strain themselves.
At first blush, the Cubs’ choice of injury replacement seemed to indicate that they believed their own horseshit. They recalled Alexander Canario, who will play some right field in Seiya’s absence, but mostly it will be Mike Tauchman plodding around out there. You would think that if they thought this would be a six or eight week injury that they’d pull the rip cord and recall Petecrow Armstrong, put him in center and move Cody Bellinger to right field. But they didn’t do that, which seems to indicate that they don’t want to make the long term move just yet.
So that’s encouraging.
Or is it?