Cole Hamels to Miss Next Start Due to Totally Fine Shoulder

Evil has a new name; a flowing, Shakesperean poem that sounds at ease with it’s own dark, debilitating nature.

"“inflammation in the posterior rotator cuff behind his left shoulder”"

Not visible in it’s written form is the pronunciation of the term requiring a hiss and flicker of the tongue at the end.

This poisonous verbiage is the reason Cole Hamels will miss his next start, and possibly the one after that.  This, after Rich Dubee told us it was probably nothing.  This, after Cole Hamels said he wasn’t in any pain.  This, after the Phillies told us the MRI they scheduled for him was “precautionary.”

After drawing it out until we could do naught but assume he was already dead, we finally know the truth:  Cole has inflamed his posterior rotator cuff, an injury so grotesque and dehumanizing that his family will have no choice but to close the casket.  Sure, we’ll see him again in a week or two, but in all likelihood he’ll be a shadow of his former self.  His face a grizzled mess of; his eyes bloodshot and lost, like a child whose been up all night crying; his mind on a pilgrimage to insanity.

They may even put him back out on the mound, and we’ll be forced to watch in agony as he stumbles about, lost, and looks at the baseball as if it is some kind of foreign object from another world.  After so long away, the game will feel decidedly foreign; the cultural gap between him and it so wide, he will be able to do little but quietly sit down and gawk at the abyss.

“We’ve got five pitchers who I think have inflammation in their shoulders right now,” Cole said, offering zero comfort in this time of hysterical grieving.  Seeing the trauma of his own injury, his panic had set in and led him to utter cowardly, simple phrases into the microphone, in an attempt to bring his peers down to his level of discomfort and shock.

Unsettling still was Ruben Amaro’s denial:  “We’re pretty pleased.  He’s got some inflammation in his posterior rotator cuff, but no major changes,” he said, cocking a shotgun and weeping.