MARK LOWE'S ELBOW PROBLEMS ARE WHO WE THOUGHT THEY WERE

Sorry. Anyway, Larry LaRue:

We've talked about this before - Lowe's injury was never as minor as the organization played it off as being, and so we knew from the get-go that things were a little worse than they sounded. What we didn't know was that the situation would get this bad this quick.

Lowe didn't just have a small divot in his elbow cartilage; he apparently had a full-width tear that had his bones rubbing right up against each other. As you can imagine, that's awful for someone who makes his money by throwing things. They tried the ol' cartilage recovery method anyway, but again, the regenerated fibrocartilage is structurally and biomechanically inferior to the tissue it's replacing, and when you're trying to grow as much of it as the article implies, you're just asking for major complications.

Mark Lowe's career as a pitcher isn't over yet, but it's a hell of a lot closer now than it was two months ago. Even if the procedure works and the new fibrocartilage fills in the hole, that's still way too much weak tissue to depend on for the long-term. It's a patch, not a solution, and if/when Lowe ever comes back, he's virtually assured of more problems down the road. Whether or not he's still a Mariner at that point, I can't say, but I'm afraid we probably already know the end to this story, even if the middle bits are still sorting themselves out.

So, yeah. The 2007 Mariner bullpen isn't going to be as strong as we thought. This probably goes a long ways towards explaining why Raffy Soriano won't get another shot in the rotation; the bullpen needs him, because the team knew that Lowe was in trouble and it doesn't want to rely on Jon Huber as the go-to #1 righty reliever. This also means that, barring the acquisition of some randomly-generated veteran setup man, Soriano isn't getting dealt, which takes away our most valuable bargaining chip. But we can talk about that another time. For now, best wishes to Mark Lowe in his recovery. It's just way too soon for his time to be up.