Prior Injured

If you haven't heard the news, which I'm sure most of you have, Mark Prior has a strained subscapularis muscle which has shut him down for the time being. The subscapularis is a muscle that sits on the bottom side of your shoulder blade (the same side as the ribs). Its main action is to internally rotate the shoulder. If you held your elbow at your side at a 90 degree angle, an internal rotation motion would be to keep this elbow angle and bring your hand from your side to your stomach. Right now Prior is pain free with this motion at his side, but still has some pain with the motion at shoulder height. The Cubs have much more knowledgeable people working on this than me, so I trust them to do the right thing. Just another dissapointing Spring Training for the Cubs, hopefully they can turn it around.

Marquette
I didn't get to much of the game Thursday because I was at work, so I don't have much to comment on. This article appeared in the Journal Sentinel this morning about the loss of Novak for next season. Nobody will replace Novak next season. The three freshmen, Mortenson, and Fitzgerald along with the new recruits will be better shooters, but Steve was automatic this season and that will be sorely missed.

Big Sports Day

Congrats first to Arsenal who by tying Real Madrid today advanced to the quarterfinals of the Champions League. In soccer they play a best of 2 and the tie-breaker goes like this: 1. number of wins, 2. goal differential, 3. away goals. Arsenal was able to win at Real Madrid with an away goal, so they won today even with the tie. Congrats to them (and my old buddy Sean) after a rough Premiere League season.

World Baseball Classic
I got to see the US- Canada game today and was pleasantly surprised with the quality and intensity of the play. The US lost 8-6, but I'm a firm believer that if you have decent pitching which Canada did today, the playing field ends up being pretty level. In baseball, you have limited oppurtunities to score unlike other major sports like basketball or hockey. You only have so many oppurtunities to score, making it hard for a team to come back from an 8-0 deficit like the US had to today. Hopefully Canada can knock off Mexico and the US will beat South Africa to move to the semi-finals.

Cubs
This article appeared on cubs.com and basically states the Cubs mission this year: stay healthy and they have the ability to do a lot of good things. The Cubs had excellent health in '03 sans Prior running into Marcus Giles, and Sosa getting hit in the head, and lead them to the playoffs. If Wood can come back May 1st and stay healthy and Prior stays healthy, they have the ability to win the division. Both the Astros and the Cardinals took steps back last year and the Brewers are still a little young, but scary. The bullpen is improved. The offense should be better with Pierre and Murton/ Walker hitting in front of Lee and Ramirez. It all comes back to health and the Cubs have been unlucky the last two years; they should be luckier this year.

Marquette
Tommorrow is MU's first Big East conference tournament game ever. I'm hoping we start out better in the Big East than we finished in Conference USA. Our record since '00-'01 in Conference USA was 3-4, 1-3 if you take out the '01-02' tournament when MU went to the championship game. Unfortunately, MU plays Georgetown which will give them problems like they did on February 16th. Georgetown has a great frontcourt that MU will struggle with. Fortunately, Georgetown is/was an awful shooting team from the outside. It will be close, but Georgetown 66- Marquette 65.

More Injuries

Kerry Wood could not last two weeks in Spring Training this year before having surgery for a torn right medial meniscus. This injury orginally concerned me, because the right leg is the plant/ rotation leg during the pitching motion. However Wood only complained of symptoms while running, not pitching. All along I believed that he would be back around April 15th, now I'm thinking May 1st with the knee not allowing him to throw for 10 days.