HEADLINES: PUJOLS & HIS ELBOW

[DRAFTAHOLIC]

More news from the wire:

So, Pujols will play as long as he can tolerate pain, perform and the Cardinals are in the race. If, come July, the pieces fall the right way (wrong way, really), Pujols will shut it down. July 31 is the cutoff date (after 105 games) for a player to have Tommy John surgery and be ready for the 2009 season. "This is not a curable problem without a reconstruction. What we hope is that it's a manageable problem," Paletta told the website. "We've been managing this problem since 2003, when he first tore it. So we've been managing it fairly successfully for five seasons now. But there comes a time when it's not manageable anymore.

[Secret Avatar]

This sounds really bad. The "there comes a time" language strongly suggests they anticipate that time will come soon and are "conditioning the market" for when they really drop the bomb.