Key injuries impact playoff races

Injuries in spring training are bad, injuries in June are worse, and injuries at this time of the year -- especially to teams that fancy themselves playoff contenders -- can be absolute season killers.

Remember last season? The Padres lost Mike Cameron and Milton Bradley to freakish injuries with a week left and -- ooof! -- they missed the playoffs. By a single game. And the 163rd game at that.

The White Sox and the Diamondbacks aren't going through anything quite that dramatic. And neither are the Yankees. But all three teams are scrambling after severe injuries last week put a hurting on their playoff runs.

Here's a look at a week of ailing and wailing for those three contenders:

• Joba Chamberlain, the Yankees' young pitching hope, had to leave a game last Monday with a sore shoulder and was put on the disabled list on Wednesday with rotator cuff tendinitis. Though Chamberlain vows to pitch again in '08, a lot of questions surround his ailing right shoulder. As the New York Times' Tyler Kepner points out, catcher Jorge Posada claimed tendinitis in his shoulder earlier this year and he eventually had to undergo season-ending surgery.

Chamberlain made a visit to Dr. James Andrews on Wednesday and later said he'll be back in the rotation "way before" Sept. 1. For the Yankees' sake, he'd better be. New York is 23-9 in games in which Chamberlain appears. He's 3-1 as a starter, with a 2.76 ERA, in 12 starts. (The Yankees are 8-4 in those starts.) Since he started his last game the Yankees are 2-5.

New York begins the week four games behind Boston in the American League wild-card race.

• After nearly a month off because of elbow tendinitis Jose Contreras returned to the White Sox' rotation on Saturday and was throwing in the mid-90s when, 34 pitches into the game, he tried to outrun Boston's Jacoby Ellsbury to the first-base bag. He never made it.

A couple of steps from first, Contreras landed awkwardly on his left foot, rupturing his Achilles tendon. The injury is expected to knock him out of the rotation for the better part of a year. Considering he'll be 37 years old in December, Contreras may have thrown his last pitch.

The White Sox are one of the highest-scoring teams in the AL, putting up just under five runs per game. But their pitching is middle-of-the-pack, and without Contreras it threatens to fall a lot lower than that. As it is the Sox are on a terrible pitching streak. The rotation has a 6.41 ERA in its last nine games. What's worse: Starters have thrown only 46 1/3 innings. No team in the league has had fewer innings from its rotation over that span.