SAVE OUR STARS
Injuries plague many of game’s top players
You hear it every spring — the managers’ cautionary refrain: “If we can just stay healthy …” Well, here we are, officially into the third month of the baseball season and, you know what? Nobody’s healthy. Or almost nobody. Every day it seems another big name goes on the disabled list. In the last few days we’ve seen Matt Kemp, the Dodgers’ main man, Nick Markakis, the Orioles’ big bat, and Troy Tulowitzki, the Rockies most important player, join the legions of others spending extensive time on the disabled list. The Kemp (hamstring) and Markakis (broken bone in wrist) injuries in particular figure to put huge crimps in two of the best surprise teams so far. Kemp’s aggravating of his left hamstring injury that sidelined him for three weeks earlier came at a time when Don Mattingly’s West-leading Dodgers were hitting their first road bump, getting swept three games by the Brewers. And Buck Showalter’s Orioles lost their fifth in a row, as their lead in the AL East had evaporated, the day they announced Markakis would be out for at least three weeks.
According to MLB, after 58 days of the season, clubs had used the 15-day disabled list a total of 227 times, down only slightly from the 235 at the same time last season. If it seems like more, it’s probably because so many star players have gone down. Currently (as of the last five minutes), there are 184 players on the disabled list, nearly 25% of baseball, including star third basemen Evan Longoria (hamstring), Pablo Sandoval (broken wrist) and Chipper Jones (left calf contusion), two-time Cy Young winner Roy Halladay (shoulder strain), and at least seven closers including the Red Sox’s Andrew Bailey (thumb), the San Diego Padres’ Huston Street (lat strain) and, of course, Mariano Rivera (knee). For the past few years, baseball has spent between $400$450 million on players on the disabled list and this season is on course to be the same.
It’s presently a tie between the Red Sox and San Diego Padres for teams hit hardest by injuries, each with 12 players on the DL. The Red Sox have their entire projected starting outfield — Jacoby Ellsbury, Carl Crawford, Ryan Kalish and Cody Ross — down for the foreseeable future while the Padres lost three-fifths of their projected starting rotation ( Tim Stauffer, Cory Luebke and Dustin Moseley) for the season and also had been without their entire projected outfield, Carlos Quentin (knee) Mark Kotsay (lower back strain) and Jeremy Hermida (hip flexor), as well as shortstop Jason Bartlett (strained knee) and their closer, Street. No surprise they had the worst record in baseball and were on pace for 107 losses. Indeed, injuries can really hurt. The Braves were 19-5 when Jones was in the starting lineup and 9-19 when he wasn’t. The Tampa Bay Rays have scored three or fewer runs in 11 of their 20 games since Desmond Jennings joined Longoria on the DL. And now Mattingly, looking at a Kemp-less Dodger lineup for at least a month, braces for the same frustration as his one bona fide power threat, Andre Ethier, now figures to constantly be pitched around. Ironically, the least injured team this season has been Minnesota (just three players), a year after the Twins led the majors by plenty in both days and players on the DL. That included their two best players, Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau, for most of the season — which
prompted manager Ron Gardenhire to repeat day after day this spring: “If we can just stay healthy …” Well, in the classic case of the operation being a success but the patient dying, Mauer and Morneau have been healthy but the pitching-poor Twins still stink.
While a lot of the injuries, broken bones, concussions, blown-out elbows and shoulders are unavoidable, it is these incessant, seemingly out-of-nowhere quad, oblique and calf strains — along with their accompanying unduly lengthy recovery processes (see: Mets shortstops Ruben Tejada and Ronny Cedeno, Yankees reliever David Robertson) that drive managers batty. There have been many theories offered as to why there have been so many of these types of injuries in recent years as opposed to the olden days — too much weight training and, yes, steroids — but Don Zimmer, one of the last refugees of those glorious times, has his own. We caught up with the Rays’ 81-year-old senior adviser the other day as he was heading out the door for his thrice-weekly dialysis treatment.
“We’ve had as many or more key injuries than any other team this year,” Zimmer said, noting that starting pitcher Jeff Niemann (broken leg), utility man Jeff Keppinger (broken toe) and closer Kyle Farnsworth (elbow strain) are also on the DL. “It was the same last year when we lost Longoria for a long time. I can’t explain it, other than to say, when I played, all we did in spring training was run, run, run. You came out of the game in the fifth inning and you ran 10 laps in the outfield. Or you’d also run 3-4 times around the bases. I don’t see that in spring training any more. I had thick legs and I pulled a hamstring a couple of times, but back then, they didn’t have the money invested in you that they do in these players today and you were afraid to come out of the lineup. So it’d be all black and blue and they just taped me up. After I took the bandage off, it would throb all night and then go back to the park the next day and they’d tape you up all over again. Ever see those pictures of Mickey (Mantle)? That was me, too. That was all of
us.”