Vince Velasquez plans to make only the one rehab start

Remember when your body healed? You could hurl your terrible young body down a flight of stairs, off a bike ramp, and into a gorge where they keep finding only people’s backpacks and scuttle back up, fresh as a daisy. These days, pain starts and doesn’t stop. You wish Advil Came packaged in fistfuls. But there was a point in your life when each individual body part didn’t slowly decide, as time went on, to shutdown and not be replaced.

For Vince Velasquez, that time is now. Hopefully. Because after leaving a start in which he faced only two batters, VV didn’t just use the 2016 Phillies as a perfectly understandable motivation to abandon the sport forever. It turns out he just had a bicep strain, and following a healing period, in which his body still did that sort of thing, he’ll get the ball for one the Phillies’ the local Double-A affiliate in an effort to use a game from their magical season to better only himself.

The Reading Fightins are currently burning through their schedule with the best record in modern baseball. The sudden appearance of Velasquez may remind the 24-year-old what it’s like to be on a team that isn’t infected by whatever parasite hive mind is controlling the Phillies.

Obviously, only time will tell whether Velasquez is ready to rejoin the mostly-intact Phillies pitching staff and its 4.34 ERA and its .254 BAA. Get well soon, VV!