Quote from Durham:  "It's something where I'm going to have to deal with it until it wants to leave," he said of the foot. "Throw everything at it. I've done all the treatments. We'll see. The season hasn't started yet. Hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow and this thing's gone."

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-giants-durham&prov=ap&type=lgns

"Hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow and this thing's gone." ?!?!?!?!?!!?!?! "...until it wants to leave." ?!?!!?!

No wonder he's been so injured the past 3 seasons:  He thinks it's a visitor that he's waiting to leave.

He'll make a great Lady Macbeth:  "Out damn spot!"

But seriously, this is not encouraging at all, not that I realistically thought he would survive this seasons unscathed, but I was just hoping for a generally better health year.  

But there are some long odds on that.  Even last year was actually as bad as the prior two seasons, despite all the games he played in.  I had biten on that bon mot, hook line and sinker when I was looking at his stat lines and noticed that his ABs for 2004 and 2005 were very close to each other despite the extra 20 games.  

So I did some analysis on his game stats and if you take out all his games with 2 PAs or less, counting those as non-starts (or at least not a full game played), he only had as many starts as he did the previous two seasons when he went on the DL.  The only difference last year, from what I remembered, is that they would hold him out for games and use him to PH (about 10 games).  Those games don't count for me.  Plus he had to leave some games early.  That don't count for me either.

I hope that if he is out for any health problem, just bite the bullet, put him on the DL and bring up Frandsen to play 2B for us so that we can see how our potential future 2B can play at the MLB level.  While pitchers' success rate is affected by whether or not they have played in AAA for a full season, position players' success rate hasn't.  

And we need a relatively healthy Durham to have a serious chance of winning playoffs games, whereas with all the problems other teams in the NL West are facing with their players, we probably could do without Durham for a couple of weeks and still contend for the division title.