______________________________________________________Raise of hands: who didn't realize that Vernon Wells had been playing injured for basically the entire season? Okay, now all of you with your hands raised, take that hand and slap yourself across the face as hard as you can. If you're lucky, the impact will be jarring enough to knock your IQ all the way up into triple digits!
Yeah, so it came out yesterday that Vernon is going to need surgery to repair some torn cartilage in his wrist. This should come as a surprise to exactly none of you.
Vernon's season was a lot like the fairly recent movie, Die Hard 4. Both started out with high hopes but, much like the Christmas that I wanted the Ninja Turtles with the Stretch Armstrong arms, those hopes were quickly dashed. Something was clearly wrong. Both struggled out of the gate. They were both clearly being held down by something (a complete loss of bat speed and a PG-13 rating, respectively) and, despite getting good near the end, it wasn't enough to make up for the crappiness leading up to that point. And then Bruce Willis drives a car into a helicopter.
Pictured above: the same thing twice.Watching Vernon swing the bat in slow motion this year compared to last year, it was apparent that he just wasn't capable of swinging with any kind of effort. Not that he was mailing it in, but that "flail softly at pitch" was absolutely as hard as he could swing. Hopefully the announcement of this surgery will momentarily keep all the people bitching and moaning about how Vernon is "finished" from being turned into a fine paste from the sky falling on their heads.
On the other hand, it could just fuel a bunch of lame jokes about how he's just as likely to hit the DL as he is to hit into a double play.
