Under The Knife 6/12/23
I’ve subjected you to enough long intros lately, so congrats to Andrew McCutchen on hit #2000, and let’s get to the injuries:
The Mets put Pete Alonso on the IL with a diagnosis of a bone bruise and a sprain. I can explain the first part, but as yet, not the latter. A radiologist I spoke with on a different thing this week that sometimes a stress reaction and a bone bruise are roughly the same, at least on imaging. The difference is that a bone bruise is when you know there’s some sort of event or trauma, rather than an unknown origin.
The sprain could be a number of things but the worry is that the anatomy of the wrist is slightly altered. The bones, cartilage, nerves, blood vessels, and tendons are in a very complex alignment and moving any of them often leads to a literal domino effect. The sprain could be from whatever bone is showing the bruise impinging on the ligament, or vice versa. A lot depends on just how the ball hit him, even with the pad on. One of the key effects of a pad should be spreading the force over a larger area; think how the point of an arrow pierces skin. A ball isn’t sharp, but it does hit at a small spot (ignoring deformation.)
The details on Alonso’s injury are a puzzle but for most, it doesn’t matter. There’s no fracture that will necessitate a longer recovery. Assuming normal healing, he’ll be back in a month and hopefully, so will the power. We should get early signs about the timing of a return, when he begins swinging again and progresses through the rehab. It doesn’t replace his power in the lineups, as Steve Cohen gets a lesson in bad luck and the value of investing in sports medicine.
An interesting note here: a reader alerted me that he thought Alonso wore some sort of guard. The guard is visible in the video and I was able to confirm that Alonso does wear a Nike hand guard similar to this. No protective device is going to be 100 percent, but it’s good that Alonso wears it, as it may have mitigated some damage. That’s still a good outcome. If Alonso is only going to miss a couple weeks, as the Mets are saying, what might it have been without the pad. Don’t call this a pad failure when it might have saved weeks of Alonso in this case.
CHRIS SALE, SP BOS (fractured shoulder)