Under The Knife 6/25/26
All Text, Like The Old Days
KYLE SCHWARBER, DH PHI (back spasms)
Kyle Schwarber missed a game with back tightness and watched from the side as the Phillies pulled off the kind of comeback that gets remembered long after the standings forget it. The good news is that nobody around the club seems particularly worried. The better news is that Schwarber has earned the benefit of the doubt.
Durability isn’t usually the first thing people mention when discussing Schwarber. They talk about the home runs, the walks, the leadoff experiments, and the occasional baseballs that require air traffic control clearance. Yet he’s quietly become one of the most dependable players in the sport. The move toward more DH time has helped, but availability is still a skill, and Schwarber has shown plenty of it.
That doesn’t mean these little things get ignored anymore. At age-33, recovery starts becoming part of the scouting report. A back tightening up after a swing, a long flight, or simply the accumulation of a season doesn’t automatically signal trouble, but it gets your attention more than it would have at age-26. The body still does the same things. It just sends a few more reminder notices before doing them.
We’ve seen plenty of sluggers deal with this phase of their careers. David Ortiz spent years managing various back and lower-body issues while continuing to mash. Nelson Cruz seemed to have a maintenance issue every few weeks for the last decade of his career and still produced. The common thread wasn’t avoiding soreness. It was recognizing it early and refusing to let something minor become something significant.
The Phillies are in a position to think that way. They’re playing exceptionally well and don’t need to squeeze every possible inning out of Schwarber in late June. One missed game is an inconvenience. A back problem that lingers into August is a different discussion entirely. For now, this looks like a veteran player and a smart team making the same calculation: sometimes the best way to stay durable is to admit you’re not indestructible.
Quick trivia question - who has more homers, Schwarber or Bryce Harper? It’s a tougher question and closer than you’d expect. Schwarber is just behind Harper, 380 to 369 as I publish this, both at the same age-33. That missed season for Schwarber looms large in this total, but a few more 40+ homer seasons and my piece on Schwarber being a Hall of Famer isn’t going to be as tough a sell.
KYLE TUCKER, OF LAD (back spasms)
Who is Kyle Tucker? Ask that of a baseball casual and you’ll likely get an answer confused by three years with three teams. Ask someone who doesn’t follow baseball or sports and you get a blank stare. Which has always made me wonder, with Tucker and with this type of player, what is a star? Mike Trout at least got commercials, even if he was bad at them and didn’t want to do them. Fine, his choice. Does Tucker even do locals? Coming to LA, you’d think he’d get more attention, even just for the big dollar deal. The fact that he hasn’t produced doesn’t help either.
Now he’s dealing with lower back spasms, which may not be serious but arrive at exactly the wrong time. Back spasms are often the body’s equivalent of a check engine light. Sometimes they’re protecting something. Sometimes they’re simply reacting to fatigue, workload, travel, or a mechanical issue elsewhere in the kinetic chain. Maybe he just “slept wrong.” The challenge is that hitters use their backs for virtually everything. Rotation creates power. Deceleration protects the body. Even standing comfortably in the box can become difficult when the lower back decides it has had enough.
The timing naturally raises questions because Tucker is running roughly 150 points below his established OPS level. I’m always cautious about connecting performance and injury after the fact, but back discomfort has a long history of showing up before anyone realizes it’s part of the story. We’ve seen versions of this with players like Freddie Freeman and Bryce Harper, where nagging back issues affected comfort and consistency long before they created headlines.
What makes this different is that Tucker now plays for the Dodgers. Most teams would ask whether he can play through it. The Dodgers ask whether they need him to. That’s a very different calculation. They have enough depth to sit him, enough data to monitor him, and enough confidence to think about October while everyone else worries about Tuesday. If the spasms settle quickly, this becomes a footnote. If his production suddenly starts looking more like Kyle Tucker, we may discover the back was a bigger part of the story than anyone realized.
If you haven’t been keeping up with Injury Territory, catch up. Some great interviews, including one with rehab king Mike Reinold coming this weekend, plus a deep dive on what we mean when we talk about “arm slot.” Check that out for free, as something of a companion to what I do here at Under The Knife. Also, not sure why the normal videos and pictures aren’t attaching here for the past couple outings. Working on it with Substack.