Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Stan Conte Must Still Work for the Giants

Yes, I'm a conspiracy theorist. But even I was surprised it took me so long to figure this out. Dodger Trainer Stan Conte must still be working for the Giants, as there is no possible way to otherwise explain how the Dodgers' roster has more holes in it than Mark Sweeney's bat collection. The signs are right in front of us.

From the Dodgers' own site, here's the list of Dodgers that have hit the disabled list in 2008, along with their 2008 salaries (asterisk indicates games missed, though not a formal DL listing):

Andruw Jones, $14M ($9M salary + $5M signing bonus)
Rafael Furcal, $13M
Jason Schmidt, $12M
Jeff Kent, $9M *
Brad Penny, $8.75M
Nomar Garciaparra, $8.5M
Juan Pierre, $8M
Hidoki Kuroda, $5M
Takashi Saito, $2M *
Scott Proctor, $1.1M
Gary Bennett, $0.9M
Yhency Brazoban, $0.5M
Jonathan Broxton, $0.5M *
Matt Kemp, $0.4M *
Tony Abreu, $0.4M
Andy LaRoche, $0.4M
Blake DeWitt, $0.4M

So, accounting just for the players who have officially hit the disabled list, the Dodgers have had a total of $73M out of the lineup, or roughly 61% of the team's entire $118M payroll. Accounting for the players who have sat with injuries and NOT hit the official DL, that total goes up to $85M, or 72% of the payroll.

This is simply amazing. Conte is inflicting maladies up and down the Dodgers' lineup.

Reciprocally, let's look at some of the Dodgers who have NOT been injured this year:

Esteban Loaiza, $7M
Mark Sweeney, $0.6M

Conte is up to something here. This cannot be a coincidence. How can Esteban Loaiza, jettisoned from the team with his 5.68 ERA, not have gotten injured, thereby avoiding our seven-game debacle of an experiment? And why have no afflictions plagued Mark Sweeney, allowing for illogical daily appearances despite a sterling 0.97 batting average (he flied out again last night with a man on!).

Conte must be stopped. Someone, please, find the paper trail.

8 comments:

Eric Karros said...

Good food for thought Sax (trying my best not to upchuck said food). I think it'd be real interesting and even more intuitively graspable to see the depressing "61%/72% of payroll on DL" metric weighted by games missed/spent on DL (as is, I assume it indicates players that at some point in the season missed time/hit the DL?). That said, I'm not willing to calculate it myself.

Orel said...

Ned & Stan make a great team.

Steve Sax said...

That's a great call EK, let me see if I can throw that together... I can think of other weightings involving Andruw Jones which will also overburden the impact, so to speak.

Unknown said...

Why stop at Stan? Isn't it possible Ned is still on their payroll???

cigarcow said...

Conte is also a bit tubby. I'd expect any sort of athletic trainer to be in shape. And I don't mean roundish shape. Check out that gut in the picture with Saito!

Orel said...

You are pretty unforgiving if you call that a gut.

karina said...

What if we start a campaign: "Free Stan Conte"?

Mike Scioscia's tragic illness said...

Didn't Loaiza hit the DL with a sore shoulder?