Larry Brown Sports

There is only a month left in baseball’s regular season and the Texas Rangers lead the Angels by 2.5 games in the AL West. Texas took three of four from the Angels in Anaheim last week and the teams meet again for a three-game weekend series. Angels manager Mike Scioscia knows time is running out on the season so he’s decided to gamble for the monstrous series; he’s pitching Ervin Santana and Jered Weaver on short rest against Texas.

Dan Haren will start Friday against Derek Holland. Haren beat the Orioles the previous week so he has a full six days off. Santana, however, pitched eight innings on Tuesday against the White Sox. He’ll pitch Saturday against C.J. Wilson. Jered Weaver pitched seven scoreless innings on Wednesday to beat Chicago the day after signing a five-year extension with the club. Weaver will pitch Sunday against Colby Lewis.

Neither pitcher has ever started on three days’ rest. Now it’s time to see what they’re made of. Something tells me Weaver will be up for the task. Let’s hope Santana will be too.

Weird title, but allow me to explain. Word came out Sunday afternoon that an MRI on Angels pitcher Ervin Santana’s elbow revealed a strained MCL. As a response, the Angels are shutting Santana down for the time being and they’re going to start him on the DL to begin the year. Now even though the Angels are my team, I’m not a big fan of Ervin. Trust me, if you had to witness 26 of his starts in ’07 you would understand. Putting that aside, Santana went 16-7 with a 3.49 ERA last year. He had 214 strikeouts which was second in the league, and 219 innings pitched, which was 4th in the AL. Ervin was an All-Star pitcher on the best regular season team in MLB last year. By the transitive property of common sense, Santana is an important player in baseball. Allow me to now move on to my gripe.

None of the major sports sites had a headline on their homepage regarding Santana’s injury. Some sites even (I’m looking at you, Yahoo!) had a news headline about Chipper Jones injuring his oblique in the WBC as if Chipper getting hurt again, much less for an exhibition event, actually qualifies as news. On a larger note, what bothers me most is that we have been subjected to non-stop updates on Johan Santana’s elbow the past two weeks even though it looks like he’ll be OK for opening day. Oh I see, now that he’s a Met, he’s all of a sudden important to ESPN? The guy was a Cy Young winner five seasons ago and you didn’t care, but now that he’s in New York, the thought of him not being ready on Opening Day is a big deal. Moreover, in what I’m guessing was an effort to promote ESPN’s “spring training blog,” the story that Derek Jeter had a sore hamstring in the first week of camp made it onto ESPN’s front web page, and into ESPNEWS’ 30-minute block. A sore hamstring. The kind every player gets the first week of camp. Front page headline. Seriously.

I think it’s become pretty clear (as if we didn’t already know), that ESPN’s just going to promote what’s important to them rather than what’s actually relevant. Derek Jeter having a sore, not injured or torn hamstring, is a main headline. All-Star pitcher for 100-win club having sprained MCL in pitching elbow and starting the season on the DL means nothing. Only you as the fan know what’s really important. Don’t let those Networks and sites tell you what is and what isn’t because clearly their judgment is skewed.