So Brad Penny is probably going to miss more than one start after all ...

Will Carroll caught a lot of grief in the comments Monday for suggesting that Penny might be out for the season. He did apologize on Baseball Prospectus Tuesday for wrongful speculation about the Dodger medical personnel allowing Penny to throw a practice pitch after the problem appeared. Nevertheless, I did want to make a couple of points about Monday's discussion.

1) Enough with this "Carroll pretending to be a doctor" stuff. The guy has made it perfectly clear that he's not a doctor, but a medical reporter. To imply he professes otherwise is to set up a phony strawman to knock down. Obviously, if Carroll had had the ability to examine Penny himself, he'd have more information to go on. That being impossible, he used his sources and his observational skills, and describe what the likely scenario was. If he overestimated, it hardly renders him a poser.

2) People were awful quick to jump to the conclusion that Carroll did overestimate Penny's recovery time, taking on faith the word of a Dodger staff that told us in April that Hideo Nomo and Shawn Green, among others, would be just fine.

Of course, it does look as if Penny will pitch for the Dodgers again this season, and Dodger fans can be happy about that. But there still isn't any reporter whose opinion of a ballplayer's medical condition I value more than Carroll's.