‘It’s the dead list’: Players loathe injury time
the final series of the first half is nine games, Nats fans can focus on the progress of the replacements: Michael A. Taylor in center, Brian Goodwin in left and some combination of Stephen Drew, Wilmer Difo and Adrian Sanchez at short.
The injured players, though, can focus only on themselves — their maladies, their progress, and the vast stretches of time left to stare into space and consider both. These summer days, man, they can be long and empty.
“I don’t have an existence,” Eaton said. “I go to the training room. What they tell me to do, that’s what I do. That’s the most difficult part. You don’t help the team win. There’s really no way to help them win.”
Eaton’s woes are exacerbated for several reasons. He tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee on April 28, when he had been a National for all of 23 games. He hardly knew his new team, his new fans. Now, the team’s season remains full of promise. Eaton’s season is over.
“When you’re on long-term DL, it’s even more mentally demanding than it is physically demanding,” Eaton said. “When you go home, that mental instability of the team playing, or they go on the road and I’m watching at home, not being able to help them win, it sucks.”
There is, too, a clear awkwardness for the disabled in their own clubhouse. Don’t mess with someone who’s hot. Don’t offer too much advice to someone who’s cold. Don’t get in the way. And don’t talk about being hurt to guys who are healthy.
Is a strained groin or a broken wrist contagious? Just might be.
“Like we’re lepers or something,” Werth said. “For me, I don’t want people to see me when I’m on the DL because I don’t want them to get those thoughts. And then when I’m playing, I see people on the DL, I don’t want to think about being there.”
Werth, at 38, has made more disabled list stints than he can remember; the foot injury that he’s rehabbing in Florida is just the latest. Turner, who is out because of a broken wrist, just turned 24 last week. This is his first full big-league season.
So there is advice to give him about how to handle your situation when you’d normally be preparing for a game (“Drink a lot of milk, take magnesium, take potassium,” Manager Dusty Baker said) as well as after the first pitch is thrown (“You have to play the game in your mind and what you would imagine doing in this situation,” Baker said). When Werth was in Washington and the team was at home, he would often hang around the clubhouse during the games because that’s the time the training and medical staff was free enough to work with him. Eaton comes to the ballpark, gets something to eat, gets his treatment in during the afternoon and goes home to watch the game on the couch — sometimes.
“I have to admit: I don’t watch every game,” Eaton said. “It’s very difficult, because you just want to be a fan and watch, but at the same time, it hurts your heart.”
When the team’s on the road, Werth finds himself wandering through the house in McLean, Va., the TV always on. He’ll see the inning, the score, the count. When the situation gets tense and tight, he locks in.
“I’m hanging by the moment,” he said. “I don’t have a lot else to do.”
At some point after next week’s all-star break, Werth will return, back in left field. Turner’s turn likely will come in August. Both will read as lines in the fine print: “Washington Nationals — Activated OF Jayson Werth; optioned Player X to Class AAA Syracuse.” Read it and move on. But for the players who live this time in baseball purgatory, who are part of the team but ostracized anyway, coming off the disabled list is nothing short of returning from the dead.