Greg Scholz answers your injury-related questions, including when we can expect Kodai Senga, Mookie Betts, Mike Trout, and many others, to return to action.
Before we dive in, here’s a quick glossary of terms commonly used by Inside Injuries:
- IRC = Injury Risk Category (three designations: “Low,” “Elevated,” “High”) — the overall likelihood a player will get injured
- HPF = Health Performance Factor (Peak, Above Average, Below Average, Poor) — our metric to predict player performance
- ORT = Optimal Recovery Time — the amount of time a player needs to fully recover from an injury (not the same as how much time they will actually miss).
Q: What really happened to Kyle Tucker? Hard to believe it’s just a “contusion.” He’s missed a month. Do you think there’s a fracture in the shin? If so, any idea how much longer he’ll be out? — J.C.
There is definitely a possibility that something like a microfracture or bone bruise may have been present. However, this isn’t that crazy of a timeline for a shin contusion. I know that may sound hard to believe considering a contusion is a fancy term for a bruise. For example, Brandon Lowe missed all of July and a chunk of August with a shin contusion in 2019.
Shin contusions, like all injuries, can range in severity. Minor ones tend to be played through and only last a few days to a week. More severe cases can result in a lot of lingering pain in the area, especially when under load. So the leg might feel fine walking around, but when a player goes to land on that leg while swinging or starts to get a jump on a ball in the outfield, the pain comes back and can significantly limit performance.
For Tucker, the good news is that he is back to hitting. As long as he is pain free through this process, he should be on the fast track to return. He may require a rehab assignment, but hitting is one of the first major hurdles he has to overcome. We could see him returning in the next week if all goes well.
The other piece of good news is that shin contusions rarely come with any long term concerns, so once Tucker gets the green light, he should be good. We’ll tag him with an Elevated Injury Risk, but that will decrease as the season goes on.
Q: When do you think we’ll actually get Kodai Senga back and what will his impact be? — Christopher V.
Senga should be back in the Mets rotation towards the end of July or early August. As for his impact, we expect a below average start or two before he returns to his 2023 form.
He’s in the final stages of recovering from a shoulder strain and will make his first rehab start this week for the Mets’ High-A affiliate. After that, he’ll likely require two or three more starts before returning to Queens. On the positive side, all signs indicate that treatment and recovery have gone smoothly for Senga since receiving a cortisone injection in May.
It’s his first serious injury at the major league level, but we will consider him High Injury Risk through his first few MLB starts this season. After that, we should see those numbers steadily decrease.
Q: What’s a realistic timeline for Mookie Betts and Yoshinobu Yamamoto? — Brett D.
For Betts, a realistic timeline would be 10-12 weeks total recovery time. Fractured wrists, while common, come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. The most likely type of fracture Betts has is a distal radius fracture. This is the most common kind of wrist fracture, where the radius breaks near the wrist. If he can start up physical therapy around the Week 6 mark, he would be on a great track to return in early August. There is some concern for complications, so his Injury Risk will be High for the rest of the season.
For Yamamoto, he could be back towards the end of July but, with rotator cuff injuries, there is a lot at play. Last season, for example, Nestor Cortes was limited to just 12 starts after a rotator cuff issue cost him two months in the middle of the season. He returned in August, made one start, and was shut down for the remainder of the year. With Yamamoto, his long-term health has to be a priority for the Dodgers, even if that means he misses additional time this season. We’ll know a lot more about his recovery and timeline once he starts throwing, but his Injury Risk will be High until September at the earliest.
Q: Any update on Fernando Tatis Jr.? Seems murky. For a player of his caliber you’d expect we would have some semblance of a timeline… — David P.
Tatis is dealing with a femoral stress reaction, which can be considered sort of the prequel to the more serious stress fracture. These happen over time, often resulting from overuse. As for the timeline piece, we expect he won’t return until after the All-Star break, but we’ll know more once the team shares a few more details about his recovery, such as the level of pain he is dealing with.
When it comes to stress reactions, because their nature surrounds the use of the injured structure, recovery tends to drag on even after pain has subsided. So even after Tatis is pain-free, he’ll still have a few weeks worth of rehab ahead of him.
The positive side of this is that the Padres caught it and addressed it for what it is. Too often we see stress reactions misdiagnosed as muscle strains or something similar. And since stress reactions develop into stress fractures if not treated, things would have been a lot worse down the road for Tatis. His Injury Risk will be High for the rest of the season.
Q: Doctors told Triston Casas that his injury was “inevitable” due to the power of his swing. If it was inevitable before, is a recurrence then inevitable? Or is something done to change mechanics with this type of injury? — Jonathan S.
With Casas, yes, a mechanical change will have to take place. When swinging a baseball bat, the body generates a large amount of force. Depending on mechanics, these forces are distributed differently from person to person. For Casas, it appears his mechanics put a lot of stress on his torso, which resulted in him suffering a costochondral separation.
Costochondral separations occur when the cartilage that connects the ribs to the sternum is torn. While a few of these injuries do happen in professional baseball, they wouldn’t be considered common, which again points to Casas’ mechanics being the root cause. In fact, these sorts of separations are more often the result of direct trauma and are seen at a higher frequency in contact sports.
As for his future, Casas’ Injury Risk will be Elevated when he returns. If he makes the proper mechanical adjustments, his long-term injury concern will be low.
Q: Likely returns for Mike Trout, Giancarlo Stanton and Jeffrey Springs — Mark O.
Trout should be back in the next few weeks. He said late last month that he was basically pain free, which is a great sign. That said, he has yet to resume baseball activities. Once he starts hitting and running at full speed, his return window will become much clearer. Meniscus injuries tend to heal well without complication so long as adequate precautions are taken during the ramp-up phase of rehab.
Stanton could return in the late-July to early-August window. For him, this is yet another hamstring injury. At this point, it’s likely going to be something that bothers him for the remainder of his career. The key for him will be monitoring it and continuing to work in the offseason on strength and flexibility in the area. His Injury Risk for the rest of the season will be High, so this is unlikely to be his last lower body injury of 2024.
Rounding it out, Jeffrey Springs just made a rehab start earlier this month and he should rejoin the Rays rotation in the next week or two. He began his rehab assignment in early June, and the standard 30-day window is closing, so if he needs more rehab work then he will need to agree to do so.
Q: What’s up with Josh Jung. Do hitters overcoming wrist injuries need time to get their power back? — Andrew H.
While it varies by player and rehab program, in general, we do tend to see a slight power drop off in the immediate weeks after a player returns from a wrist injury. This is because wrists need to remain strong through the completion of the swing to achieve proper extension. For power hitters, wrist extension is the final piece in the swing that drives the ball.
The concern with Jung, however, lies less in simply overcoming his most recent injury and more in if it was treated and healed properly before he began his rehab assignment. Jung reportedly has not been cleared to swing a bat since June 20 because he still has soreness in the area. He also visited a specialist in the past week to get a second opinion on the wrist.
If the specialist recommends a new treatment, Jung could remain out for an undetermined amount of time. If the soreness he was feeling was simply because he wasn’t 100%, then he could be back before the end of July. Regardless, his Injury Risk remains High.
(Top photo of Kodai Senga: Brad Penner-USA TODAY)
