NEW YORK — They’re dropping like flies again.
For anyone who’s been watching baseball games night after night and holding their breath every time a baserunner running all-out to first suddenly pulls up lame, or when two fielders converge and collide under a pop fly in shallow right-center, it should come as no surprise that trips to the MLB injured list — not including COVID-19 cases — are up 30% from this same time in 2019.
It’s long been said that injuries are a part of the game but in the last few years they’ve been way too much a part of the game, to the point that they’ve become an epidemic, costing the owners millions of dollars and wreaking havoc on so many clubs’ best-laid plans for a World Series run. Going into the Memorial Day weekend, many of the game’s biggest stars and gate attractions — Mike Trout, George Springer, Luis Robert, Byron Buxton, Corey Seager and Pete Alonso — were on the injured list and there was hardly a team in baseball playing with a full-strength regular lineup.
But as one AL team exec surveying the carnage observed the other day: “Thank god for the overall mediocrity of baseball and the fact that nobody’s very good this year. It’s saving us.”
Indeed. There is no better example of that than the Mets who went into the holiday weekend in first place in the NL East despite having 17 players on the injured list, including five regulars — Alonso, Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, J.D. Davis and Jeff McNeil — while their two biggest offseason acquisitions, Francisco Lindor and James McCann, were both hitting under the Mendoza Line. Similarly, the Tampa Bay Rays have 12 pitchers — 12! — on the injured list and they too were leading their division going into the weekend. And then there are the White Sox who have somehow been maintaining their lead in the AL Central in the absence of two of their best three hitters, Robert and Eloy Jimenez, for what will be most of the season.
Go figure on all of them.
Of all the injuries so far, none was more confounding than Cleveland No. 2 starter Zach Plesac putting himself out of commission for at least a month by aggressively tearing off his shirt in the locker room last week and breaking his thumb on a chair. But most symbolic of what is going on in baseball was the fact that, as of Friday, the biggest division lead of any of the six first-place teams was the Mets’ 2 1/2 games over the Braves and Joe Girardi’s Phillies. A prime reason for that are the half dozen truly awful teams — Orioles, Pirates, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Tigers, and (so far anyway) Twins — along with the mostly bad Angels and Rangers, that keep showing on the schedule as welcome refuge for the beaten up far better teams. (Example: the Mets’ three out of four wins against the hapless Rockies this week, after a 3-6 road trip, that vaulted them into first place.)
On Thursday, it was particularly apparent the Phillies’ rash of injuries — in which the team was mostly without the services of Bryce Harper (forearm/shoulder), Didi Gregorius (elbow) and J.T. Realmuto (left hand bone bruise) during a 4-8 stretch from May 15-27 — was taking a toll on Girardi, who snapped at reporters for daring to ask why he didn’t let Jean Segura (with whom he’s been privately feuding) stay in the game as part of a double switch after pinch hitting. Was he hurt? Girardi wasn’t saying. Instead he said: “We’re going to approach this different. I’ve talked to people in our organization. A manager’s decision, that’s how we’re going to handle it, a manager’s decision, and I’m not going to share anything.” This was a few days after Girardi had lied to the media about Harper’s bruised left forearm, saying his slumping $330 million right fielder was out of the lineup “for competitive reasons.”
Most problematic with all these injuries is that no one in baseball has been able to come up with a plausible explanation for them or a remedy. “You hear all these theories, weight lifting, hitters swinging too hard and taking an over-abundance of reps in the batting cages to cause all these obliques,” said another exec, “but if you ask me the players and the times are just different today. Years ago, the Mickey Mantles, Stan Musials and Pete Roses played with their injuries. Today, the slightest twinge and they’re off to get an MRI and on to the injured list.”
And replacements are harder and harder to find. Sandy Alderson has especially had to scramble, bringing in faded retreads Brandon Drury, Cameron Maybin and now the much-traveled lifetime .226-hitting Billy McKinney to fill in the depleted Mets outfield. At the same time, with Aaron Hicks now down for the season with wrist surgery, Brian Cashman knows he can’t possibly think of making it to October without a center fielder. But where is he going to get one? This is one of the biggest challenges he’s ever faced as Yankee GM, at the same time he’s back to a patch-work Yankee rotation after Corey Kluber’s latest shoulder injury.
Cashman’s only consolation, as the Yankees get to spend the holiday weekend in Motown against the dreck Tigers (who they nevertheless lost to in extra innings Friday night), is that for all the absence of production at first base and the outfield, they have never been further out of first place than 2 1/2 games since May 11. As the man said, everybody’s banged up and nobody’s really that good this year.
