After discussing the proper use of waiver wire pick-ups and spending FAAB budget this morning in the Morning Buzz, I thought I’d be done discussing injuries for the day. We were still waiting to hear about what the Diamondbacks were going to do with A.J. Pollock, but everything else seems to be in order. Of course, Murphy’s Law then decides to kick fantasy owners in the groin and as the early part of tonight’s short-slate continues, we’ve racked up even more and it’s going to be a near-impossibility to start your week off properly and with a full complement of players.

We can start with the Diamondbacks waiting until close to 6pm ET – moments before this week’s lineup lock – to put Pollock on the DL. You certainly would have loved to have made that roster adjustment earlier, but why should the real world care about your fantasy? Then as the games proceeded, the hits just kept on coming. We learned Carlos Gomez would miss 4-to-6 weeks, Yunel Escobar hit the DL on Monday, Robison Cano was originally in the lineup but was a late scratch due to this quad injury he’s had, Carlos Carrasco left his start with a pectoral strain and Dan Straily went down after a comebacker caught him on the arm. It’s getting downright ridiculous.

During Saturday’s show on SiriusXM, Lisa Ann and I discussed the possibility of fantasy owners getting more DL slots and after today’s news, I’m starting to wonder if we shouldn’t just be allowed to implement that right now. We are in the SiriusXM Host League together and have just two DL spots to go with our five bench spots and given the state of players’ health right now, it’s just not enough. At one point already this season, I had both DL spot filled and all five of my bench players on the DL as well. Talk about starting off on the wrong foot.

Now, of course, I’m not going to sit here and cry that my whole draft strategy plan was decimated as a result (something I am currently listening to on the channel right now) and I should be allowed to have extra DL spots, but if this is what we are looking at for the future – if we are to expect more players at this time of year due to weather, conditioning or what not – then the possibility of unlimited bench spots should be afforded to us all. You can set up specific rules of activation once a team officially brings a player back in an effort to prevent one or two teams from hoarding injured players they want to bring back at various points of the season, but the fact remains that owners who get crushed by the injury bug this early in the season are at a distinct disadvantage.

Think about it – your team loses one or two guys to injury while mine loses seven. In an effort to field a legal lineup with healthy players, I’m now going to have to work 10 times harder than you are while blowing through my FAAB budget just trying to patch up holes in a sinking ship. While I would love to be somewhat frugal with my FAAB spending, you need to be competitive with your bids or run the risk of missing out on the top available players. So right off the bat, you’re behind the rest of your league-mates.

But then it gets worse, and this is why you need the unlimited DL spots. Let’s say you drafted early and you ended up with players like Jason Kipnis, Ian Desmond and David Dahl. Boom. There are three players you’re opening the season with on the disabled list and not by your own volition. It’s not like the David Price situation where you actually chose to draft an injured player. This was you just having your balls (or ovaries) stepped on by the fantasy gods.

Now you have both your DL slots full and one of your five bench spots taken up by injury. You’re now opening the season playing one roster spot short. If you get hit with even more injuries, as many people did, you’re left with some really tough choices. Do you continue to stash injured players on your bench or do you start making some tough cuts in an effort to catch up? I’d say “to level the playing field,” but it’s nowhere near level as the players you may be forced to cut are players you used relatively high draft picks to originally acquire. It doesn’t even matter if you blow through your FAAB budget too early because, in order to win the bidding on free agents, you’re going to have to cut some quality players to make room.

At least with unlimited DL spots, you can still make the conscious choice to save your FAAB budget for later. You can do some low-cost patchwork on your roster and slowly drop the band-aids every time a player of yours comes off the DL. Sure, the process doesn’t really afford you the ability to stash players like Yoan Moncada for the future, but you can still compete with the players you drafted and still have a little left over for late-season call-ups.

If we are living and playing fantasy baseball in a time where a multitude of injuries should not just be expected, but serve as the way things just are to be, then we need to start planning for them better in our league constitutions. A team that suffers a number of early-season injuries should not have to pack it in for the year months before the rest of the league because they got hit harder than the rest by something not even remotely within their control. Yes, some may opt to take on more risk by drafting those injury-prone players we urge you to avoid, but we shouldn’t simply add on to that risk by having constrictive roster limitations. We should at least try to keep the playing field level.

Obviously just an opinion here. Would love to hear all of your thoughts…