Team USA is running out of bodies and a couple of Yankees come back from the World Baseball Classic dinged up, so the murmur machine starts murmuring.

Here’s the real pain: The hue and cry, the sturm und drang, the whine and moan about how this tournament is causing injuries.

Please. Stop. It nags, it aches.

Baseball is causing injuries in March, some little and some bigger, just like it always has.

Swinging a bat over and over again after not doing it quite as much for the last few months causes oblique strains — happens every spring and you hope it doesn’t happen during the season. Dialing it up a bit more than you should can strain a shoulder, or pitching when you’re not feeling right — or maybe nothing in particular can do it instead. It just happens.

Dustin Pedroia could have tweaked his oblique in Sox camp just as easily. Ditto, Fill-In-the-Oblique-Victim. Although his sounds a bit more serious, Matt Lindstrom might have gone into in a Grapefruit League game not feeling quite right, too.

You go, Kevin Youkilis: “I think you’re going to have injuries regardless. In Spring Training, there are probably more injuries. If you go down over Spring Training and see how many guys sit out more than a couple of days at a time, there are probably 30 guys in camp who sit down with something for two days with something that is tweaked and things like that.”

This idea that most players aren’t in full gear is not fallacy. It’s true. Major Leaguers have their calendar, and this is before the bell normally rings. And maybe Team USA is that much further behind the curve, since the Asian teams have been training together longer and many Latin American players had the winter leagues and Caribbean Series. But we knew all that going in, didn’t we? Besides, you’re not hearing the players complain. Pedroia’s not blaming his injury on the tournament. None of the Team USA players are. And, yes, injuries might end up being their downfall in this tourney, or not — we’ll see Tuesday.

Sure, teams that thought twice about letting “their” players play in the tournament will think a third time, or not even think about it next time. More’s the pity, since they should know better. The fact that they pay their salaries is a valid part of the story, but that doesn’t make the line of thinking right. Guess they’re OK if the player gets hurt in their uniform, since it really is all about the money, then. Which, for every guy who chose to accept this invitation, this one thing is not.

David Wright, help us out here, man. Asked play for Team USA again, even with the increasingly daunting chance of injury, this veritable “rash” of injuries as it is being called in an almost viral sense, this plague of oblique strains, he said: “One hundred percent. I’d sign up right now. This has been one of the best baseball experiences I’ve had in my career. This is an incredible honor. I’ve had a tremendous amount of fun. I’d recommend it to anybody. If you’d let me sign up right now, I’d do it.”

This is baseball, people. You get dinged up, and if anything Team USA is coming up short because these guys are bowing out a lot more readily than they might have otherwise, even in Spring Training with their own team — and that’s fine, and good for them and their teams. No worries. Get right, and in Lindstrom’s case in particular, good luck.

But it’s not like they’re getting injured in a bar fight, or snapping a limb skydiving or doing any of the other activities prohibited in the boilerplate of contracts.

They’re playing baseball, getting ready for the regular season while enjoying what they consider the opportunity of a lifetime or they wouldn’t be there.

Things happen. Blame the tourney, and you’re in Classic denial.

Yakyu Haiku
That’s the American tradition of baseball in Japanese, and here’s an Americanized version of a Japanese tradition:
Yu gotta believe
This March outing will be huge –
Darvish on display

Bam Scribe: Internet ball writer
A little love for our intrepids out there doing the deed for the ol’ MLB-dot (aka, MLBAM), giving it their all to bring your team’s nation the news:
Mightily digging the Classic stuff coming out of Miami and San Diego, and it’s coming from the fingertips of four of our finest. Joe Frisaro has his news shoes on as always, and Matthew Leach is bringing his A game to Pool 2. Over in Diego, we’ve got national man Barry “Don’t Forget the M.” Bloom getting all international in his greatest old haunt of a city, and the man behind our great Spanish content the last few years, Jesse Sanchez, hitting all the right notes. No one else has it covered like this, people. (OK, OK, pompons down, sorry, sorry.)