San Francisco Giants' Mark DeRosa May Require Second Surgery

Veterans get hurt.  Or, at least, they get hurt more often than young players.

The Giants’ Mark DeRosa announced that the surgery to repair a tendon sheath in his left wrist last off-season was a failure and the tendon sheath is torn again.  He’s going to try to tough it out for a while to see if he can play with it the way he did last season after the Cardinals acquired him from the Indians.

DeRosa hasn’t hit a lick so far this season, and he didn’t hit much with the injury after the Cardinals acquired him last year (.696 OPS as a Redbird).

The Giants really can’t afford to be giving at-bats to DeRosa if he can’t hit.  DeRosa has been playing almost exclusively left field, which is a position from which you have to get offense, particularly in the NL, where you already have the pitcher hitting.

My guess is that DeRosa struggles for another three or four weeks and then gives in and has the second surgery.  In the meantime, the Giants will have lost some games they might have won if they had a leftfielder in the line-up who could hit.

I was very amused by reports of an American kestrel that has become a celebrity at the Twins’ new Target Field.  The kestrel was apparently drawn by the large flying insects attracted by the stadium’s lights.  An enterprising camera man caught the bird snagging a large moth out of the air and consuming it on top of one of the foul poles.  The video was played for Twins’ fans, who, of course, loved it.  Here’s the video .

Needless to say, the bird has already been named Kirby the Kestrel in honor of you-know-who.

In a much less pleasant note, a Houston-area policeman was acquitted of charges of aggravated assault for shooting the son of former major league Bobby Tolan, Robert, and thus ruining Robert’s professional career.  The cop mistakenly thought that Tolan the younger was (1) armed and (2) in a stolen vehicle.  Neither turned out to be the case.

The car was mistakenly identified as stolen because another officer typed in the wrong license plate number.  According to the prosecution, Tolan was shot in the chest after he began to get up when the officer in question slammed his mother into a garage door.  Got to love that Texas justice…

It’s not over, however.  The Tolan family is suing in federal court alleging that the community and the relevant police department has a history of racial profiling, false arrests, and racial harassment.

For what it’s worth, based on the stats on The Baseball Cube, Tolan the younger had little chance of ever reaching the majors leagues.  That being said, he’s going to have to spend the rest of his life with a bullet lodged in his liver.