Let’s get right to the injuries today:
TRISTON CASAS, 1B BOS (ruptured patellar tendon)
Triston Casas simply stepped. His knee went into a position that overstressed the patellar tendon and it snapped, something you can see as he hits the bag. The knee collapses, Casas fell and reached immediately for his knee. He was stretchered off and will have surgery imminently (actually, Saturday evening at Mass Gen) to repair the tendon, a process that can take eight to twelve months. Casas’ 2025 is done for sure, but now the question becomes how much of ‘26 might be affected.
The positive news is that this injury doesn’t affect careers like it used to. Tendon repair is something that has simply gotten better with new techniques and tools. It’s not as common as ACL injuries, but it does happen and the return rate is solid across both sports and standard injuries. It’s very rare in baseball because it’s not a sport that taxes knees the way football or soccer, or even basketball do. It takes a bad step like we saw here.
There’s no reason to think Casas won’t come back and he wasn’t a speed guy to begin with, so losing a step won’t hurt his game. He’ll have to get his confidence back because there is stability and twisting the knee has to perform in hitting and fielding. It did make me wonder in the discussion about Luis Arraez’s collision and concussion, if a second/extended first base might be made flat or some solution that wouldn’t create that awkward step on the bag. I’m not sure how much that contributes to any of the injuries we see in similar ways, but I do know the number of injuries we see on that last step is far from zero.
WALKER BUEHLER, SP BOS (strained shoulder)
There was more bad news in Boston with Walker Buehler hitting the IL with shoulder inflammation. A source tells me that “working through it”, as Alex Cora put it, is merely waiting for the injection he had to take hold. There was some point tenderness and inflammation at the back of his shoulder and the medical staff got aggressive with it. There’s early indications that Buehler could miss only the minimum, but much of this will depend on his response to treatment and to throwing again, which should come early this week.
The indications are that this is more of a recovery issue than a de facto injury. Buehler is simply not getting back to 100 percent between starts. Some will point to this as a reason for six man rotations, but it would be much better to just do away with rotations altogether and individualize schedules. The downside is making them match up, but it’s far from impossible and can be infinitely reconfigured with the right roster and available depth. Of course, getting Buehler to recover on a more normal schedule would work too and is likely to be the focus of the Sox medical staff in the short term.
The Sox depth will be tested here, with Buehler’s injury timing about the only positive. Had this happened before Brayan Bello and Lucas Giolito were back, I’m not sure what they do. With three expected starters on the IL now, Hunter Dobbins is likely to get a couple starts and after that, it’s Quad-A arms that have a pretty serious drop in quality. The Red Sox should be a team that can think different and create something here, but they haven’t actually done that. We have to think of this as a conventional team in terms of construction and production until they give us evidence otherwise and right now, like many, they’re getting buried in injuries.