True story: It was cloudy, breezy and growing unusually cold as the Dodgers filed onto the field for their usual pregame stretch today. The skies were gray. I asked Brett Anderson if he thought it was going to rain. “No,” he said. “I’m not pitching today.” (Outside joke.)

It didn’t rain Friday, but a couple droughts ended in the Dodgers’ 2-1 win over the San Diego Padres.

The game story is here. The box score is here. The photo gallery is here.

Prior to the game, Hyun-jin Ryu told us he’d been pitching with a torn labrum since he signed with the Dodgers.

Some final thoughts about that.

When Ryu underwent a contrast MRI on his left shoulder in March, the Dodgers announced only that the image “showed no changes since his 2012 MRI.”  Now, in hindsight, this seems like a classic case of “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” The MRI That Shows No Changes Since The Original MRI can no longer be equated with good health. It’s code for “go ahead, be suspicious.”

Ryu’s success the last two years demonstrates that it’s possible to pitch well with a torn shoulder labrum. That’s probably not too surprising. An MLB trainer once told me that if you were to MRI every player on the field, all of them would be diagnosed with a torn something. That doesn’t mean they can’t play well and it doesn’t mean they can. The presence of a small injury should not always be cause for alarm.

Another takeaway is that sometimes a small injury can be cause for alarm. Ryu never had a medical reason to believe he needed surgery, only a noticeable drop in his velocity that wasn’t improving. If indeed the tear in his shoulder labrum never got worse, as Ryu believes, then knowing the degree of an injury doesn’t grant us permission to draw a single conclusion about that player’s medical outlook (unless you happen to possess a medical degree and have access to said player’s medical files — which disqualifies all but a few people on the planet, including you).

So go ahead and feel surprised and deceived. But keep in mind that maybe no amount of certainty would change the way you feel about all this. Ryu’s season is over. Knowing when that became inevitable might as well be a moot point.