Here are some excerpts from Peter Gammons weekly sitdown with Mike Felger on 890 ESPN...In the first half he covers the rise of oblique injuries in baseball as well as the personal situation that still seems to be distracting J.D. Drew at the plate this season.

On it's face I would agree with this, but: While I appreciate the worry and anxiety that Sox right fielder J.D. Drew must feel for his 19 month-old son as he spends his time in the bulky cast after having congenital hip dysplasia addressed by doctors, there is a potential bright side to this case at the end of the road.
 
The Boston Bruins first round pick this year, Zach Hamill, had the exact same issue when he was a newborn and is a pro hockey player after doctors told his worried parents he might never walk.

Drew has likely been distracted by this as Peter Gammons alludes to in this interview from Thursday, but that’s certainly only part of the struggles that Drew has experienced since coming to Boston. Drew was mired in a slump long before doctors examining a broken collar bone discovered his son Jack’s hip condition, and the $70 million man doesn’t look anywhere near being able to remove himself from the schnide.

Since his sons diagnosis around July 31 Drew has had the second-highest average in any month this season with a .289 batting average, albeit a punchless .289 batting average.

What Drew needs to do is regain the opposite field stroke to combat pitchers consistently pounding the outside of the strike zone against him, and when healthy may see his numbers return to the June levels that saw him hit .325 with four home runs and 15 RBIs with a .963 OPS.

The only other hope for Drew is that a familiarity with American League pitchers and ballparks will help Drew regain his form over the last month of the season and then the postseason. Whether it for personal reasons or general unfamiliarality, the American League has been a difficult transition for the notoriously dispassionate, passive player.

Anyway, who cares what I think? On to the master: 

PG: I think the Red Sox offensive problems of the last six weeks are distinct, and I’m not really sure when they’re coming out of it -- except to see David Ortiz hit well in Chicago.

We have no idea how long Manny is going to be out, and Drew might never come to grips with this thing with his son, but we’ll see. They may hit enough, they may pitch enough, but we’ll see. Clearly to me the Angels are the team to beat.


Do you believe that the injury with Manny is legitimate and fairly serious?
PG: I think they believe it is. Obliques, I got a hold of some people because it seems like I’d never heard of obliques before and I was told that they’d always been there before but maybe the term hadn’t been used as much.

There’s probably been an increase of about 20 percent in the last 10 years and it seems to have affected a lot of guys around the Major Leagues this year. The medical person I talked to said the incredible use of creatine in the gyms [is a factor].

It drains fluid from the muscles and dried-out muscles can strain a lot easier than muscles with the proper amount of fluid in them. All of these suppliments that players take do add to these injuries and this might be a serious problem for Manny.

I would like to say one thing. When I was talking to someone and they said ‘well know David Ortiz is going to be allowed to hit.’ Well, in the last five seasons David Ortiz has played 57 games without Manny Ramirez. His walk rate is a little higher with Ramirez out, but his batting average is about 11 points higher without Manny in the order and his home run rate is about 30 percent higher without Ramirez in the order. That excuse doesn’t fly. I got that from Elias this afternoon.

Wow…who would have thought that?
PG: There are a lot of myths…I have always thought it was a lot more important who hits in front of somebody than who hits behind somebody because it’s such a different game when pitchers are going out of the stretch and the first baseman is holding on sometimes with the possibility of speed.

Now the Red Sox don’t run but there are some teams that do. The Mets for instance with [Jose] Reyes and [David] Wright and those guys put a lot of pressure on people; they put guys on base and put a lot of pressure on people. That’s why I say it’s what is up in front that’s more important than what’s behind.

We were saying before the show that these oblique injuries seem to have come out of nowhere, and growing up as a kid it’s something you’d never heard of?
PG: I was told that they use so many things to condition because they train so hard. I’m hardly a trained athlete but I had trainers say to me that I ought to use creatine because it’s perfectly legal, it’s good for you and it’ll really help you recover and bounce back so you feel good after you train.

You can get it anywhere. It’s in gyms and nutrition stores everywhere, but from what I’ve been told it can dry out the tissue and draws the fluid from the muscles and that can cause the oblique problems. There has certainly been a lot of them and I just got a list of about 40 guys that had oblique problems.

They had them in the past, but I just don’t think they called them obliques and just called them muscle strains.

You mentioned JD Drew and his son, give us the backstory on why this might be affecting him?
PG: He’s such an intensely private family guy, so that he took three days off when they found out his son has a hip problem, a congenital thing that concerned him greatly.

I was just taking to a couple of the Dodgers players and they were saying that it has affected him greatly. It bothers him terribly. He does play hard. On that really screwed up play with Kevin Youkilis [at Yankee Stadium] where A-Rod made that bonehead play instead of just getting the 5-4-3 double play but still got a double play out of it, Drew is one of the few Sox players that could have beaten that out…but his at bats have seemed distracted to me.

He’s taken a lot of fastball right down the middle and is swinging at 1-2 or 0-2 sliders in the dirt, although Joba Chamberlain throwing a slider 92-mph nobody is going to be able to hold up on it. But he gets himself into holes by not swinging at hitter’s pitches and I think there’s a distraction factor there that has to be something at the root of it.

He hasn’t been this way in the past, and talking to the Dodgers players who said he was by far their best player down the stretch last year and he carried them. He gets some sympathy from his old teammates; not from the front office but from his teammates.