UTK Flash 4/1/22
DeGrom out indefinitely
This is a big enough injury that I’m putting this out as a free UTK. If you like this kind of info — well, no one LIKES it, but if you want to know it, please consider subscribing to Under The Knife. Your subscription allows me to continue doing this.
This is not an April Fools joke, Mets fans.
This is decidedly not good news for deGrom, the Mets, or baseball in general. This is a very unusual injury in general, moreso for a pitcher, but again, the forces that deGrom puts on his body when throwing are likely very high. Do the Mets know? That’s unclear, though deGrom should have been captured at the very least on HawkEye data and possibly on Kinatrax.
After injuries to the elbow cost him most of last year, this is at least different. The unknown part of this is the location of the stress reaction. One MLB team doctor I spoke with told me that’s the key, saying “What you’re likely seeing is a muscle pulling on the bone too hard. The rotator cuff isn’t strong enough and would usually break before it stressed the bone. The lat (latissimus dorsi) is more likely.” With seventeen muscles attaching to the scapula, there’s a lot of possibilities.
A stress reaction is simply the early stage of a stress fracture, before the bone has separated. Catching this early is good, but the shoulder pain deGrom reported pointed to this. One doctor I spoke with was very intrigued with how the diagnosis would have happened. “Was [deGrom] pointing to his scap and they did an x-ray or did he complain of shoulder pain and the MRI just happened to catch the stress reaction? I bet there were multiple images.” He also pointed out that situations like this are often why a team does an immediate x-ray despite all signs pointing to a soft tissue injury that will necessitate an MRI.
DeGrom had a lat strain last season, one of the first in his series of injuries, and this may be related or at least show that the area is not dealing with the forces well. This history is very notable, given how it lingered and how it foreshadowed the other issues in his forearm and elbow.
The Mets have said they will shut down deGrom for at least a few weeks, while x-ray and other images will easily monitor the way the stress reaction … umm, reacts to the rest. Ramping him back up and monitoring that area as the forces return will take additional time, so the best case here is that deGrom is back in May. It took him nearly a month from his lat strain last year to get in a rehab stint (which went famously well), but that was muscle and not bone.
While not everything is known about this injury, we know enough to know that once again, the Mets will be without Jacob deGrom for the foreseeable future. I wonder if he thought about that opt-out clause while he was laying in the MRI today.