Anxiety caused by a team's fear of their pitcher sucking

The Detroit Tigers place embattled pitcher Dontrelle Willis on the 15 day disabled list with "an anxiety disorder".

But Willis said he has been feeling well on and off the mound.

“I have no idea, but (the doctors) didn’t like what they saw in the blood,” Willis said. “This is not something where I’m too amped up and I don’t know where I’m at, and I’m running sprints up and down the parking lot.”

General manager Dave Dombrowski said he could not provide details about Willis’ medical condition or treatment because of privacy regulations.

There is nothing physically, mentally or emotionally wrong with Dontrelle Willis, and if anything it's a surprise that the team would make up such a dubious, character disparaging ailment as an anxiety disorder, especially when Dontrelle and team sources gave absolutely no indication that he was emotionally distressed, as an excuse to place him on the 15 day DL. Dontrelle's remark about the team telling him they "didn’t like what they saw in the blood" confirms this is a phantom excuse to stash the struggling Willis, who got demoted last year due to getting hammered by AL hitting and had struggled during this spring training, on the DL.

An unspoken secret in MLB is that teams will often sneak a struggling veteran onto the DL with a phantom injury, such as a strained forearm/back/calf/face. They can't or don't want to send the player to the minors, so instead they make up an injury (that can't be confirmed or denied due to HIPAA medical privacy laws) for the player and place that player on the DL until the player stops sucking or they need that player to replace a departed or (actually) injured player.

MLB generally looks the other way because a) who cares and b) this allows teams to field better teams, which helps improve the overall MLB product.