The Dodgers: Worse than cursed

[Ghoulish Delight]

I've come to the conclusion that the baseball gods are flat out f*ing with the Dodgers. Taunting them.

Every team goes through a rough season. A few injuries, a couple bad trades that dont work out. Oh well, write off this season, get your rookies some valauable playing time, try again next season.

But no. Here we have the Dodgers, who have not once had enough healthy players to play with their "true" starting lineup. They suck, and rightfully so, it's a bunch of rookies out there. But do the gods let us poor fans just cut our losses and write the season off? Oh, no, the rest of the division's gotta suck too, keeping the Dodgers tantalizingly close to first place, just enough so that we actually still care about the outcome of the games.

But then they start really screwin' with us. "Oh look, the Dodgers have 2 starting All Stars, the first pair of middle infielders from the same team to do that in forever...haha, now they're both injured!" "Hmm, the Dodgers have a fairly commanding lead late in the game with a chance to move into sole posession of 2nd place and very close to 1st place...ho ho, not so fast. Your relief pitcher just twisted his ankle stepping out of the bleeding bullpen, and HIS replacement gave up a game changing homerun!" WTF?!

Let's look at the injury the rundown:

*Jayson Werth: Hit by pitch in spring training, broken wrist, out for most of the 1st half
*Milton Bradley: Screws up ligament in his hand making contact on a pop fly. Out or God knows how long
*Gagne: Compensating for a knee injury leads to a minor elbow inury which leads to a MAJOR elbow inury, out for the season
*Odalis Perez: Shoulder Tendinitis
*Wilson Alvarez: Shoulder Pain
*Paul Backo: blown knee, out for season
*JD Drew: hit by batted ball, broken wrist
*Jason Grabowski: shoulder pain
*Jose Velntin: Torn ligaments in knee
*Kelly Wunch: Twisted ankle
*Elmer Dessens: can't remember the injury
*Antonio Perez: Hamstring
*Iszturis: Hamstring
*Ricky Ledee: Hamstring
*Jeff Kent: Hamstring

And I'm sure I'm missing some. It's insane. That's 60% of the roster!

Here's what I notice...those last four on my list. Hamstring, hamstring, hamstring, hamstring. Now I know a lot of the injuries were real fluke stuff (hit by pitch, hit by a ball in play, tripped over nothing...), but 4 hamstring injuries? And several pitchers with shoulder/elbow problems? What's going on. Not to malign the Dodger's training staff, but you gotta wonder. Among other things, with wholesale changes at the end of last season and the off season, could it be that the trainers just haven't had the time or resources to integrate all of the new players' training and conditioning needs into the system? Because this volume of injury just doesn't happen at the major league level.

Why won't they just fade out of the standings so we don't care anymore? Why must we be taunted, 1st place so madeningly close to being in their grasp?