Brian Wilson's status for Thursday's opening day game against the Dodgers has fluctuated a bit wildly over the past weeks, but he'll start the season exactly where we thought he'd start the season: on the disabled list.
Manager Bruce Bochy confirmed that news on Wednesday before the second game against the Athletics at AT&T; the Giants made an "official" announcement later Wednesday, although they noted earlier that Wilson will be eligible to return on April 6.
"There is no point in pushing him," Bochy said.
Bochy had hinted at the move Tuesday, when he waxed optimistically pessimistic about how Wilson felt physically.
"He felt great today," Bochy said, via Jane Lee of MLB.com. "I'm very encouraged with his progress, and we'll decide tomorrow his next move. I don't think he'll start the season with us, but it's good to see him feeling good, and he's letting it go."
Look, expecting anything different would be silly, especially after going through a couple of weeks where Wilson suffered a setback, and then Wilson got better, and then Wilson was less than "50-50" (which is a sentence I feel like I've written 5,050 times this past fortnight).
And at this point, if Wilson's not 100 percent "go" for the beginning of the season, then putting him out on the mound is borderline irresponsible.
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He's got a strained oblique and anyone with remote medical knowledge knows that such an injury can easily turn into a tear if not treated properly.
Or if the oblique gets a ton of pressure exerted on it repeatedly, by doing something like, you know, throwing a baseball.
What'll be really interesting is whether or not Bochy gives Sergio Romo the "full-time" closer gig until Wilson returns. There's a good chance he'll go with a situational committee, but Romo's got closer stuff, and if Wilson struggles with injury later in the year, it wouldn't be all that horrible to have someone established who could step right in and shut teams down in the ninth. Besides, Romo's beard is big enough at this stage that people might not even notice the difference.
