Dom Brown to Return from Month Long Vacation to Knee Rehabilitation Island

Dom Brown’s latest excuse for not being Bryce Harper has been a knee injury that he “tweaked” about a month ago.  But the time has come for him to return to the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, thus solidifying his role as a guy on the team who does things.

The plan was initially for Dom to spend an entire year in Triple-A, so that he may improve in a more stable situation than on the bus between Philly and Lehigh.  Yet, his inability to rema

in impervious to pain has taken him out for chunks of time, which sort of nullifies the whole idea.

So what are we left with?  A former top prospect playing on a bum knee at the minor league level?  Sorry, there shouldn’t have been a question mark at the end of that sentence.  Yes.  That is what we have.

The question now is whether or not Dom will see the light of Major League Baseball this season.  Instinctively, you want to say, “Yeah, why not?  What could possibly go wrong?”

And the answer is, “… to his body?  Probably a lot.”  But if you’re talking about what could possibly go wrong for the Phillies, as a team, and not Dom Brown personally, then yeah, I can’t imagine how one of our outfielders performing less than adequately would really change anything.

The bonus would be if he for some reason took off on a tear and really proved he was ready for the future.  But I can’t imagine that spending a checkered year in Lehigh really did a lot for his confidence, despite that game where I wondered aloud if he had become a supervillain.

We know there’s raw power in there, somewhere.  And if he can get his head on straight after injury leave, maybe he could show up in 2012 and make some kind of statement about the future, alongside guys like Freddy Galvis, who seem ready to play major roles in the coming years but are being offset by unforeseen maladies in the present.

Or maybe he’ll burst into hysterical tears in the batter’s box, who knows, really.