Jon Rauch to the DL, out for the season.

Holy cow that picture of Adam Loewen is blurry.

The Blue Jays official twitter page, and probably a bunch of other things as well, is reporting that Jon Rauch has been placed on the disabled list with a cartilage tear in his right knee, retroactive to Sept. 5th, when he last pitched. [sidenote-- really?  Has anyone noticed?  I know I haven't]

Now, my initial reaction was "whoopty fuck" since there's only two weeks left in the year, and Rauch sucks.  On top of that, he hasn't really pitched all that much lately (since Sept. 5th apparently), and the Jays have been just fine without him.  But then I had a quick think about this one.

There should be another update soon, but last week, the latest Elias Rankings pointed out that Rauch is still comfortably within Type-B status, and I don't think there's really any possibility of him falling out of that tree, considering the 8 people who are lower ranking type-B's than Rauch [sidenote #2-- WTF?].

The thing I'm more concerned about is Rauch being done for the year means that he can't beat up on September callups and get his piece of shit statistics to improve.  You know, the ones that other teams actually look at when considering whether or not to sign a free agent, such as ERA (4.85), saves (11), and WHIP (1.346), all of which aren't very good for a closer-type.

This has been a season complete with a bunch of blown saves and meltdowns, a career low k/9, a career high hr/9, a -0.7 WAR... basically Jon Rauch has been flat out terrible this season, by far worse than any other year of his career (almost to 2010 Aaron-Hill-OMG-this-has-to-be-an-outlier status), and the Jays now need to make a decision as to whether or not they offer him arbitration or not at the end of the year (assuming they reject his contract option).  By having Rauch make 2 trips to the DL, and having his worst season of his career, I find it pretty unlikely that he finds a raise on his $3.5MM contract this season, and will therefore accept arbitration if offered.  In other words, I don't think Rauch is going to be worth a draft pick for the Jays in the offseason, unless there was a handshake agreement between he and the Jays to state that he would reject arbitration.

And that, my friends, makes this entire season of Jon Rauch shittiness worth exactly half of one fuck.