Fowler eager to play after injury
Dustin Fowler’s knee injury in Chicago last year was devastating and led the A’s outfielder to sue the White Sox and their stadium management.
Fowler’s outlook for 2018 is much brighter. Friday at the team’s pre-FanFest media session, the 23-year-old said he is essentially all systems go and will be ready to play in spring training.
“Everything is coming along the way it should be,” said Fowler, who has an excellent shot to be the A’s center fielder. “I’m pretty happy with the way everything is going. I should be good to go.”
Fowler, acquired from the Yankees last summer in the Sonny Gray trade, was severely injured June 29 in his major-league debut for New York against the White Sox. While chasing a foul ball, he slammed into an unpadded electrical box along the rightfield line, leaving him with an open rupture of a patellar tendon that required immediate surgery. He missed the rest of the season.
In December, Fowler, 23, filed a lawsuit against the White Sox and the state agency that manages Guaranteed Rate Field, claiming negligence in failing to secure the electrical box. The suit alleges that the knee-level box created an undetectable hazard and that by failing to pad or cover it the team and agency displayed indifference to or conscious disregard for players’ safety.
Fowler said he can’t discuss the suit, but said, “Everything boils down to the box being on the field and not visible.”
The A’s emphasized after obtaining Fowler that he would not have been available except for the injury — he was ranked among the top 100 prospects in baseball when he was called up.
The lawsuit describes Fowler’s internal and external injuries as “severe and permanent.”
“That’s worse-case scenario,” Fowler said Friday. “As of now, I should be 100 percent cleared to go, perfect, but this is just in case something comes up.”
Fowler said he looked into the procedure he had and found players who had similar surgery — and one was a player the Georgia native is very familiar with: Hall of Famer Chipper Jones.
“Mine was ruptured down the middle so they had to sew it up differently, but the recovery time is the same,” Fowler said. “I’d never heard of it before, but guys I’d never would have thought of have had it, like Chipper had it done his first year in the big leagues. It’s good to see how many guys who’ve had it and completely come back.”
Fowler is scheduled to visit Dr. Charles Bush-Joseph on Thursday in Chicago. Bush-Joseph performed the emergency surgery last June and is expected to give the final OK for Fowler’s spring training schedule. Manager Bob Melvin expects to work Fowler in slowly.
“We’d heard all along he’s hitting the targets for what he’s doing,” Melvin said. “It was a tough injury, and I think the fact he is where he is is due to hard work. He’ll start running the bases when the pitchers are there and that’s the last hurdle for him.
“We’ll probably take it easy on him with games to start, but to know he’ll be ready to go when we get there is good to hear.”
Fowler said the one good thing to come out of the ordeal is that the injury enabled him to come to Oakland.
“I’m biting at the bit to get out there and play,” he said. “Every day the trainers say I’m right where I should be, I feel a little bit better. It was a bad injury, but I am very happy to be here.”
“I’m biting at the bit to get out there and play . ... It was a bad injury, but I am very happy to be here.”
Dustin Fowler