FanHouse JoseAscanio

The Cubs continue to make minor tweaks to their roster as they cling to relevancy in the NL Central race. After recalling Kevin Hart and Sam Fuld in the past few days, relief pitcher Jeff Samardzija was brought back to the big leagues Tuesday. He'll replace Jose Ascanio in the bullpen.

Samardzija, the highly popular pitcher who once played wide receiver for Notre Dame's football team, came onto the scene with a solid rookie season in 2008. He worked 26 times and compiled a 2.28 ERA. Earlier this year, though, Samardzija had a rough go at the major league level. In five outings, his ERA was a large 8.10.

The Cubs have had players miss time already this spring thanks to some very odd reasons. Mark DeRosa had to be hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat, and needed surgery to fix it. Meanwhile, pitcher Jose Ascanio, got jacked up in an attempted robbery. On top of that, Alfonso Soriano just broke his finger. Still, none of these guys are going through anything like Felix Pie is right now.

Get ready to cringe, fellas. From the Cubs official site,

...outfielder Felix Pie missed a couple of days early because of a twisted testicle.

Ouch.

I've no idea how it happened, and I'm not sure I want to know. Maybe he sneezed a la Sammy Sosa. Maybe Carlos Zambrano got angry at him, and thought he needed to learn a painful lesson. Who knows?

The only thing I do know, is that there aren't many other things I can think of that are more painful than a twisted testicle. Mine start to hurt just typing it. Kudos to Felix for only missing a few days. If that happened to me, I'd probably need a week or two off.

As we all sit around and wait for the blockbuster deals involving Johan Santana and Miguel Cabrera to take place, there have been a couple of smaller trades going down the last few days.

Just this morning the Cubs sent Will Ohman and recently acquired Omar Infante to the Atlanta Braves for Jose Ascanio.

Ascanio is a hard-throwing 22-year old righthander with limited big league experience. He has a mid-90's fastball, and in his 16 innings with Atlanta out of the bullpen last season, he was 1-1 with a 5.06 ERA and 13 strikeouts.

Anybody who's familiar with the Cubs knew that Will Ohman wouldn't be back with the team this season after spending most of 2007 parked deep in Lou Piniella's doghouse. After being demoted to the minors in August, Ohman said that the team knew of his sore shoulder that was responsible for his performance, while the club said they had no idea he was injured.

Ohman later admitted he was mistaken lied about it.

It's the second time Omar Infante has been traded this winter, as he was just acquired by the Cubs from the Tigers in the deal for Jacque Jones.