Curtis Granderson sat out the first month of the season after being hit by a pitch on his right arm. (Chris O’Meara/AP)

Curtis Granderson is headed back to the disabled list after having his left pinkie broken by a Cesar Ramos pitch in the fifth inning of the Yankees’ 9-4 win over the Rays on Friday night. This injury comes just 11 days after Granderson was activated off the DL, where he spent the first month of the season after having his right forearm broken by the first pitch he saw in Spring Training.

There’s no official word yet on how much time the Yankees expect Granderson to miss (Joe Girardi said at least four weeks after the game), but Alex Rodriguez suffered a similar injury last July, a pinkie broken by a pitch, and spent 40 days on the disabled list. Rodriguez’s injury was to his bottom hand, while Granderson’s was to his top. It will be interesting to see how that effects his ability to come back from the injury. From one perspective, the lower pinkie is more engaged in a batter’s swing, particularly a power-hitter’s swing, but from another, the top pinkie is rubbing against the lower hand, a situation that recalls another Rodriguez injury, a sore left thumb in late 2011 that led Yankees’ hitting coach Kevin Long to teach Rodriguez to hit with his hands slightly apart on the bat, a remedy that could be in Granderson’s future.

In the meantime, the parade of Yankees injuries continues as Granderson goes down again, just when several of his teammates, including Mark Teixeira, Kevin Youkilis, Joba Chamberlain, and Eduardo Nuñez, were preparing to join him on the active roster. Here’s a quick look at the Yankees who have hit the disabled list this season (not counting pitchers Michael Piñeda and Cesar Cabral, who also missed all of last season):

*starts missed

The above list includes three of the Yankees’ four intended starting infieders (Teixeira, Jeter, and Rodriguez) as well as two of their replacement starters (Youkilis and Nuñez), their starting catcher (Cervelli, who hit .268/.377/.500 before having his hand broken by a foul ball), their home-run leader in each of the last two seasons (Granderson, who hit 84 homers in those two campaigns combined), and three-fifths of their Opening Day rotation (though that last one is a bit of a cheat given that Hughes didn’t miss a start and Nova was on the verge of pitching his way out of the rotation anyway). Twice this season they have had both members of their starting battery leave a game due to injury (Chris Stewart strained his groin in the game in which Pettitte got hurt and missed five games; Friday night was his first start since that game).

Despite all that, the Yankees remain in first place in the American League East with the second-best record in the AL, a performance in which Granderson, who played in just eight games between DL stints, has had almost no part. I continue to doubt they’ll be able to keep this up much longer (third-order wins put the Yankees closer to .500 than .600), but it sure is fascinating to watch both the Yankees’ awful luck with regard to injuries and their remarkable ability to keep winning despite them, at least so far.

Anibal Sanchez was just 2 outs from throwing his second career no-hitter, before Joe Mauer broke it up in the ninth. (Duane Burleson/Getty Images)

The wait for the season’s first no-hitter continues after the Tigers’ Anibal Sanchez took a no-no into the ninth inning against the Twins on Friday night only to allow a single up the middle to Joe Mauer just two outs away from the second no-hitter of his career. Sanchez hung on to complete his fourth career one-hitter, but whereas there had been two no-hitters by this point in each of the last three seasons, 2013 is still waiting for its first.

A perfect game was never in play for Sanchez, who walked the first batter of the game, Twins’ third baseman Jamey Carroll, on five pitches and issued another free pass to right fielder Chris Parmelee in the second inning, but he stranded both runners and retired 18 in a row after that, before walking shortstop Eduardo Escobar on four pitches in the eighth. In that streak of consecutive outs, the only really well-struck ball was a line-out to the left of shortstop Jhonny Peralta by Justin Morneau on a 1-0 count in the seventh. Mauer struck out in both of his at-bats during that stretch, both times swinging through curveballs.

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The Blue Jays’ Emilio Bonifacio paid tribute to Epy Guerrero. (Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images)

“They say now that Epifanio ‘Epy’ Guerrero has ‘the eyes’—that he can see the future major leaguer in a young ballplayer the way the visionary poet claimed to see a world in a grain of sand.” — People, 1989.

If you don’t know the name of Epy Guerrero, the legendary scout who passed away on Thursday at age 71, then at least you know his work. He was a key figure in opening the talent pipeline from the tiny Dominican Republic to the majors. In 1973, he founded the country’s first baseball academy, and in more than four decades of work for the Astros, Blue Jays, Yankees and Brewers, he is believed to have signed more amateur players who reached the majors than any other scout — 52 according to a new exhibit devoted to scouts at the Hall of Fame and on their website, though estimates have gone as high as 60.

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With six home runs and 13 RBI over his last four games, Miguel Cabrera is in the process of following up his Triple Crown season with an even greater one. Already he has 14 homers and 55 RBI to go with a .391/.467 /.701; he’s one homer shy of leading the league in all five categories.

Drew Sheppard, the maker of the hypnotic composite GIFs of Yu Darvish and Mariano Rivera that I’ve spotlighted in this space, has put together one on Cabrera for FanGraphs showing the Tiger sluggeres remarkable plate coverage while hitting for power:

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Andrew McCutchen and Starling Marte have helped Pittsburgh to the third-most wins in the National League. (AP)

The Pirates have spent the last two seasons teasing the baseball world, playing above .500 until late in the season before collapsing in epic fashion and maintaining the franchise’s streak of losing teams, which is now at 20. This year’s squad, though, is on an 11-2 tear and enters the weekend 29-18, tied for the second-best record in the National League. Is the end of their futility at hand?

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