I missed this before I posted the Edward Mujica analysis, but Jarrod Parker apparently broke his medial epicondyle:

There will be surgery, and it's not yet known how bad that is going to be -- a quick fix and he can get back to his rehab, but delayed? Or, because, as you can see in the picture, the bone is right in the elbow, did the break also screw up the ligament that was repaired during the Tommy John surgery? Here's a roundup of some of the medical stuff from Athletics Nation.

We're at the point now with Parker where you just have to root for him to make it back to pitching competitively at all, if that's what he wants to do. It's a lot of pain and a lot of boring-as-hell rehabilitation ahead for him, after a year of that already, after a prior year of it after his first Tommy John surgery, and at some point, especially if you start thinking that your arm and body just aren't suited for this pitching thing, you wonder if the value proposition favors moving on with your life now. Parker's 26, and odds are good that he's not going to get to the "free agent contract for untold millions" stage of professional baseball. He could go to college or get into coaching or scouting or do whatever he wants to do and just save himself the trouble. Mark Prior retired after the 2013 season, but his last game in the majors was August 10, 2006.

On the other hand, you could have said this to Brandon McCarthy around 2009 or 2010, and while he just had Tommy John surgery a couple of weeks ago, he's also currently on a four-year contract for $48 million. Kerry Wood converted to the bullpen in 2007 and made almost $30 million from then until the end of his career.

And then, of course, putting aside monetary rewards, there's the fact that even if Parker sticks to it and doesn't make it as well as McCarthy and Wood made it, if he follows the Mark Prior path, he'll still only be in his early 30s when he hangs it up and I'm here to tell you as a 33-year-old that early 30s isn't old. Parker will still have the rest of his life in front of him at that point, and, sure, he won't have made much money or done a lot of fun stuff in the meantime, but he'll have made a go of it, and if you only get to live once, you know, why not? On the one hand, putting in all this work to play a game might seem foolish; on the other hand, putting in work to get paid to play a game for a living is the least foolish thing I can imagine.