So… A-Rod is out six to nine weeks due to surgery to repair a torn labrum.  It’s a temporary surgery, a stop-gap measure to allow him to play this season, after which he’ll have surgery that will supposedly fix it for good.

Consider me skeptical.

Two names come to mind when I think about this situation: Curt Schilling and Ken Griffey Jr.  To be sure, being named in the same sentence as Schilling and Griffey is normally a compliment, but in this case, you don’t want to be named in that sentence.

Schilling had a serious shoulder injury that required surgery, but tried to rehab the shoulder without it (for reasons which won’t be discussed here) so that he could return later in the year.  The end result was that Schilling’s career was effectively ended, as rehab failed and he had to have surgery anyway.  He missed the entire 2008 season, and while he hasn’t decided whether or not to attempt a comeback, it’s unlikely he can pitch at the same level he did before the injury.  A-Rod is going down that same path.  While he’s elected to have surgery, it’s not the complete surgery required.  Should everything not go according to plan, he may eventually need the complete surgery before returning to the Yankees lineup, and his rehab will be longer than it would have been had he just gone out and had it fixed the right way.

I think about Ken Griffey for where he was in his career when it started going downhill.  Aside from an injury in 1995 that limited him to 72 games, Griffey was for the most part an everyday player, and there was nothing to suggest a slowdown in production.  At age 30 he had 438 home runs and was averaging nearly fifty a year over his previous five years.  Then the injuries started to mount, and while he still averaged about twenty-five round-trippers a season (a respectable figure), he became Above Average When Healthy Ken Griffey instead of Perennial All Star and Future Hall-Of-Famer Ken Griffey.  The man who was once a shoe-in to break Hank Aaron’s home run mark now has no shot of clearing 700.

Will it be that way with A-Rod?  I don’t know.  It would have been that way with Barry Bonds, had designer steroids not propped him up at the end of his career.  A steroid-free Bonds probably breaks down before reaching 600.  How will a steroid-free A-Rod fare?