The injured list for the Numenor Kings is beginning to look less like a roster column and more like a meal nobody ordered — cold mutton, served twice, with a side of something worse.
Denaigol Gandillas, reliever, is done for the year. Team physicians confirmed a torn rotator cuff, suffered during a spring training outing against the Minas Morgul Slayers while delivering what was, by all accounts, an unremarkable pitch — the kind that should not end anything, and did. The projected timeline sits at nine months, which means Gandillas will watch the 2053 season from wherever relievers watch seasons they are not part of.
Mind you, this is the second significant blow to Numenor's pitching staff before a single regular-season game has been played. Kings ace Hatchett lost the year to a torn UCL, as MESN covered at length during last season's stretch run. The Gandillas injury does not carry the same headline weight — relievers rarely do — but bullpens are built on depth, and depth is what the Kings are losing, one arm at a time. There is also Trundagh Aden, already on the injured list, also with a torn rotator cuff and out another 157 days, which means the Kings are entering spring not so much with a roster as with a list of intentions.
I'll say this much about Gandillas: he was not the kind of reliever who fills a box score and earns a nickname. He was the kind of reliever who gets an out in the seventh when the game is already close and nobody is watching, which is to say he was exactly the kind of reliever you cannot replace by simply pointing at someone else. The Slayers, for what it's worth, were not responsible for the pitch selection that finished him. Nobody was responsible. The shoulder just went.
The Kings entered 2053 with genuine aspirations in the Goblin Division. Whether those aspirations survive this stretch of the injured list depends on who Numenor can produce from the lower levels of the organization — and here's the thing: so far, nobody is saying much about who that might be.