Deep in Wrigley Field’s innards, behind mountains of moldy, broken down boxes and undistributed Beanie Baby™ dolls, in a corner so dark even Wrigley’s famous feral cats have yet to discover it, a Tribune Company employee named Earl whose position is unique in the whole of Major League Baseball hunches over the keyboard of his Commodore 64 computer.

Earl’s highly secretive job? To devise arcane names for commonplace baseball injuries so they sound not so scary and not so threatening to the Cubs’ hopes of ending their nine-decade-plus championship drought. (Aficionados consider his work re: Mark Prior the art form's highest achievement.)

Earl was still at work earlier this evening, and the proof may be found in Carrie Muskat's report at cubs.com…

Cubs second baseman Mark DeRosa was pulled from Tuesday's game against the St. Louis Cardinals in the third inning with left hamstring tendonitis.

Whew, what a relief! A run-of-the-mill pulled hamstring--the kind of hamstring injury that guys on other teams suffer--would have been so bad.

Nice win tonight.