It’s Probably Good News For Chad Billingsley

Rick Scuteri-USA TODAY Sports

Lots and lots of roster moves today. I’m not going to run through all of them because Scott goes through this whole situation here. But I was fascinated by something. After the dust settled, we found out Chad Billingsley will not be placed on the 60 day DL. Now, I think it to be a good exercise to run through the scenarios here. The upside to having the season start early, is the ability to backdate any DL sentence to the 19th of March. I would have though this to be especially helpful in situations like Josh Beckett, Matt Kemp, and possibly Zack Greinke, this would open up a scenario where they could be ready to play in the stateside home opener, April 4th.

However, after all of the moves done, most notably Justin Turner and Chone Figgins both making the team, is the exclusion of Chad Billingsley being placed on the 60 Day DL. Yeah, I suppose the moves that were done made a decent amount of sense, DFA’ing the out of options Javy Guerra and transferring Onelki Garcia to the 60 day DL, but they kept Bills on the active roster throughout the offseason. They even DFA’d Justin Sellers when they had little 3b/SS/2b depth when they signed Erisbel Arruebarrena. So what does this mean? Probably great news for Chad Billingsley, and the pitching depth of the Los Angeles Dodgers in general.

I always have thought that there is no sense in losing players, no matter how bad they are. Moving an injured player to the disabled list is simply easier, and now the Dodgers have DFA’d 2 players instead of moving Chad Billingsley to the 60 day DL. My gut feeling is that the team believes that Billingsley is healthy enough, and is on track to provide something to the Dodgers before May 19th (when 60 days would be up), or else they would have kept Sellers in the first place.