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Update: DJ LeMahieu exits Sunday’s game with right knee inflammation

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(Getty)

7:33pm ET: LeMahieu will get an MRI and see an orthopedist tomorrow, Aaron Boone announced following the game. It looks like a deep bruise but they want to make sure that’s it.

5:45pm ET: LeMahieu has right knee inflammation, the Yankees announced. X-rays came back negative. Hopefully he’ll be able to return to action following the off-day tomorrow.

5:06pm ET: DJ LeMahieu was removed from this afternoon’s game in the third inning with a possible injury. He walked off the field gingerly following the bottom of the second and was slow going down the dugout steps. LeMahieu fouled a pitch into his knee two days ago.

I’ve honestly lost count of how many Yankees are on the injured list right now. I think it’s 13? At least 12, I know that much. Among those injured Yankees are three infielders (Miguel Andujar, Didi Gregorius, Troy Tulowitzki), and three outfielders (Aaron Hicks, Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton). Geez.

LeMahieu had a single and a fly out earlier in the game, not to mention several fairly routine defensive plays, and he seemed to be moving okay until the end of the second inning. With a sizeable lead and an off-day tomorrow, hopefully this is just precautionary. Stay tuned for updates.

Should LeMahieu miss time, the Yankees already have Thairo Estrada on the big league roster, and the recently signed Brad Miller in Triple-A as an obvious call-up candidate. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that. We’ll see.

Update: X-rays negative after Gio Urshela takes pitch to hand

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(Presswire)

7:14pm ET: X-rays on Urshela’s hand came back negative, the Yankees announced. That’s great news. That said, I’m sure Urshela’s hand is swollen and sore. He might need a few days before returning to the lineup. Hopefully he can avoid the injured list. Here’s the video:

5:38pm ET: Ah good, another injured Yankee. Gio Urshela exited this afternoon’s game after taking a pitch to the top of the left hand in the fifth inning. DJ LeMahieu exited the game with a possible injury earlier as well. Urshela will presumably go for x-rays. So many little easy-to-break bones in the hand.

The Yankees have either 12 or 13 players on the injured list. I forgot exactly how many at this point. Urshela is filling in at third base for Miguel Andujar and he’s been great, including reaching base three times Sunday. Add in the defense and you couldn’t have asked him for much more.

Thairo Estrada is already on the big league roster and the Yankees have Brad Miller in Triple-A as an obvious call-up candidate. If they need to replace LeMahieu or Urshela, they go do it easily. If they have to replace both? Goodness, I have no idea. Stay tuned for an update on Urshela.

Clint Frazier headed to injured list with left ankle strain

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(Presswire)

The Yankees just welcomed one player back from the injured list (Gary Sanchez), so now it’s time to lose someone else. Clint Frazier is heading to the 10-day injured list with a left ankle strain, Aaron Boone announced following tonight’s win. The Yankees believe it is a two-week injury. We’ll see.

“Fraz very much feels like he can play or is close to playing, but the MRI revealed enough in there — I don’t have the exact what it is — but revealed enough of some partial tear and it’s gonna cost him the ten days,” Boone told Lindsey Adler.

Frazier suffered the injury Monday night when he slid back into second base awkwardly. His spike got caught and he rolled over on his ankle. Frazier finished the game, but he was held out of the lineup the last two days because of soreness and swelling. He went for an MRI today. Here’s the play:

The Yankees have been kicking butt the last week or so and Frazier was a big part of that. He’s hitting .324/.342/.632 (150 wRC+) and looking awfully dangerous at the plate. Now this dumb, fluky injury will keep him out at least ten days. The poor kid can’t catch a break.

Boone said the Yankees will use Frazier’s injured list stint to recall Joe Harvey before his ten days in the minors are up. I have to believe another move is coming. The Yankees have five interleague games in National League parks coming up and I can’t see them going into those games without two actual outfielders on the roster.

The easy move would be sending down Jonathan Loaisiga and calling up … Billy Burns? Matt Lipka? Brad Miller? I have no idea. Maybe a minor trade is coming. Third catcher Kyle Higashioka is the only healthy 40-man roster position player not in the big leagues roster now. (The Yankees can put Luis Severino on the 60-day injured list to clear a 40-man spot at this point.)

Frazier is the 15th different Yankee to spend time on the injured list this season. They can’t catch a break. Sanchez returns, Frazier gets hurt. Giancarlo Stanton needed a cortisone shot in his shoulder this week and no one else is particularly close to returning. No mas.

Update: Aaron Judge placed on 10-day injured list with oblique strain, Thairo Estrada recalled

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(Jim McIsaac/Getty)

Sunday, 11:01am ET: As expected, Judge has been placed on the 10-day injured list, the Yankees announced. Aaron Boone called it a “pretty significant” strain and did not have a timetable for Judge’s return. Thairo Estrada was called up to fill the roster spot for the time being. The Yankees now have 13 players on the injured list.

Saturday, 4:34pm ET: Judge has a left oblique issue and is heading for an MRI, the Yankees announced. “Probably not, no” Aaron Boone said when asked whether Judge might be able to avoid the injured list.

3:17pm ET: Well this is potentially terrible. Aaron Judge exited this afternoon’s game with an apparent injury after a single to right field in the sixth inning. Replays showed him grabbing at his left side, which is a pretty good indication it’s his oblique, but we’ll see. He did not appear to lobby to stay in.

Here’s video of the injury:

Judge is the Yankees’ best hitter and best all-around player, and, as we saw last year, they are not the same team without him in the lineup. Losing him for any stretch of time would be devastating even if the Yankees were perfectly healthy otherwise. That is most certainly not the case though.

The Yankees do not have any 40-man roster outfielders in Triple-A Scranton. They’re all in the big leagues already. Trey Amburgey, Billy Burns, and Zack Zehner are the healthy actual outfielders with the RailRiders right now. First baseman Ryan McBroom can play some outfield as well.

Gary Sanchez is expected back next week and Giancarlo Stanton maybe not too long after that. The Yankees will probably have to roll with a Clint Frazier-Brett Gardner-Mike Tauchman outfield until Stanton (or Judge) returns, with Mike Ford at DH. Yeesh.

The Yankees have not yet released an update on Judge — the injury just happened a few minutes ago — and, if it is indeed his oblique, he’s likely heading for an MRI and whatnot. Could be a little while before we get definitive word about anything. Keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned.

DotF: Gio’s final start rained out; Ruta, Garcia have big games

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Some good injury news: OF Estevan Florial had his cast removed Wednesday and is 7-10 days away from resuming baseball activities, Aaron Boone told Brendan Kuty. Florial broke his right wrist crashing into the wall in Spring Training. If all goes well (I know, I know), it sounds like he could return to game action in mid-to-late May. Fingers crossed.

The Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders were rained out. The game will be made up as part of a doubleheader on June 3rd. LHP Gio Gonzalez, who will reportedly use his opt-out clause tomorrow, was scheduled to start tonight. Guess he won’t get to make one last Triple-A after all.

Double-A Trenton Thunder (13-10 win over Portland)

  • 2B Hoy Jun Park: 1-6, 1 R, 1 3B, 1 RBI, 1 K
  • SS Kyle Holder: 1-4, 1 R, 2 BB, 1 K
  • LF Ben Ruta: 4-6, 2 R, 1 2B, 1 RBI — now hitting .420/.500/.600 through 13 games … he played 36 games here last season, which ain’t a ton, so I think it’ll be a few weeks before the Yankees move him up to Scranton … he turns 25 in June and was a 30th round pick, but at some point the bat forces a promotion and forces the team to see what he can do at the highest level
  • 1B Brandon Wagner: 2-5, 2 R, 1 2B, 1 3B, 2 RBI, 1 BB, 2 K, 1 E (fielding)
  • CF Rashad Crawford: 1-4, 1 R, 1 RBI, 1 BB, 2 K
  • C Jorge Saez: 3-3, 2 R, 1 HR, 5 RBI, 2 BB, 1 E (catcher interference) — had been 3-for-16 (.188) on the season prior to this game
  • RHP Garrett Whitlock: 6 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 1 BB, 6 K, 2 WP, 9/2 GB/FB — 57 of 87 pitches were strikes (66%) … 16/3 K/BB in 18 innings

[Read more…]

The injury bug and a flashback to 2007

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(Presswire)

Twelve Yankees currently reside on the injured list. Twelve! It’s put a pretty big damper on the start of the regular season, to say the least. Sure, a few players on the shelf aren’t surprises: Didi Gregorius and Jordan Montgomery, to name a couple. The Yankees had time to plan for their absences. However, they could have never anticipated the myriad of injuries that have happened since spring training began. It’s a bit reminiscent of 2007, when a handful of Yankees suffered hamstring strains early in the season. This year, there have been various health issues, but a fair amount of them have been muscle strains, stiffness, or soreness.

Prior to 2007, the Yankees hired Marty Miller as the team’s director of performance enhancement. He lost his job by early May. Injuries piled up within a month of the season beginning and it proved to be Miller’s undoing. Hideki Matsui, Mike Mussina, Chien-Ming Wang, and Phil Hughes all suffered hamstring strains. Johnny Damon played through a calf strain and Andy Pettitte powered through back soreness from a weight lifting mishap. This season, there have been two calf strains (Troy Tulowitzki and Gary Sanchez), Giancarlo Stanton’s biceps strain, Aaron Hicks’s back stiffness, and Luis Severino’s lat strain. Those seem to be related to strength and conditioning issues. To add insult to injury, there have been some bad luck and pitchers break issues too. Miguel Andujar tore his labrum sliding back into third, Severino had shoulder inflammation before his lat strain, and Dellin Betances has a shoulder impingement and bone spurs.

Aside from the litany of maladies, communication has been a problem as well. Hicks, Betances, and Severino have all had setbacks. How many times have we heard that Aaron Hicks is close to ramping up baseball activities? He was suppose to get back into the swing of things before camp ended. The Yankees downplayed Betances’s velocity in spring training, and now we find out that he’s had a bone spur for years. There was no mention of that when he was initially diagnosed with an impingement. Severino, somehow, suffered a new injury (lat strain) while trying to recover from shoulder soreness.

Matt Krause has been the team’s director of strength and conditioning since the 2014 season. Are all of these muscle injuries his and his team’s fault? Who knows. One thing’s for sure: the optics are bad. Back in 2007, the way things looked almost certainly contributed to the team cutting Miller lose. Even so, Cashman declined to blame Miller for the parade to the disabled list:

Last month, when a rash of muscle-related injuries felled five key players in four weeks, Cashman did not blame Miller or his assistant, Dana Cavalea.

“I’m constantly evaluating everything we do,” Cashman said in a telephone interview at the time. “But do I blame Marty and Dana for this? No.”

Cashman had said there were many reasons the injuries to key Yankees could have occurred, apart from Miller’s new strength and conditioning program, in which some players had declined to participate.

That last sentence is telling, though. Players declining to participate in a team’s strength and conditioning program is not a good look! If that wasn’t the final straw, it was definitely alarming.

This year, Cashman hasn’t placed blame on the training staff. Nonetheless, his reaction to Severino’s lat strain makes it easy to wonder if its starting to become the subject of his ire.

Cashman certainly sounds annoyed that the team has no idea how the ace succumbed to a new injury. On one hand, I could see him questioning if Severino did something extraneous to the “protocol” that caused the injury. That would be a hefty and damning accusation to make, though. On the flip side, it’s the training staff’s responsibility to get players back on the field as soon as possible. The fact that they’re in the dark about how this happened, or perhaps the idea that it was never caught in the first place, is significant. Not only is it a physical issue, but it is also a communication deficiency. These kind of mistakes can (and already have) throw the season way off course.

To give the conditioning team the benefit of the doubt, a few of the players who have gotten hurt have a reputation for being injury prone. Tulowitzki and Hicks, in particular. Further, maybe Severino’s ailments are just a symptom of being a pitcher. Whoever or whatever is to blame, it’s been nothing but bad news all around. Fortunately, like that 2007 team, all of these instances have happened very early on in the season. That squad still won 94 games when it was all said and done. For this team to accomplish that, it needs to get its house in order. Part of that is some better fortune moving forward, but also identifying the source of the numerous muscle strains, setbacks, and communication breakdowns.

Yanks place Greg Bird on injured list with torn plantar fascia

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(Presswire)

Another one bites the dust. The Yankees announced this morning that Greg Bird has been placed on the 10-day injured list with a torn left plantar fascia. First baseman Mike Ford has been called up from Triple-A Scranton and Jacoby Ellsbury was put on the 60-day injured list to clear 40-man roster space.

Bird, who is no stranger to the disabled/injury list, is now the 12th Yankee on the injured list, and that’s after getting CC Sabathia back over the weekend. The Yankees are missing five of their nine starting position players, among others. The injured list, for posterity:

  • Miguel Andujar (shoulder)
  • Dellin Betances (shoulder)
  • Greg Bird (foot)
  • Jacoby Ellsbury (hip surgery)
  • Didi Gregorius (Tommy John surgery)
  • Ben Heller (Tommy John surgery)
  • Aaron Hicks (back)
  • Jordan Montgomery (Tommy John surgery)
  • Gary Sanchez (calf)
  • Luis Severino (shoulder)
  • Giancarlo Stanton (biceps)
  • Troy Tulowitzki (calf)

Bird has not hit much at all this year (57 wRC+) or the last three years for the matter (80 wRC+ from 2017-19), so I guess you could say this is not a big loss. Healthy players are better than injured players though, and Bird won’t be able to right the ship on the injured list. A torn plantar fascia? That sounds like a long-term injury. (And also a convenient excuse for his lack of production.)

In hindsight, Bird laboring while running down the line on a ground ball Saturday (the last game he played) probably should’ve been a bigger deal.

The 27-year-old Ford is a local guy from Belle Mead, New Jersey, and he signed with the Yankees as an undrafted free agent out of Princeton back in 2013. He is hitting .410/.467/.897 (235 wRC+) with more extra-base hits (four doubles, five homers) than strikeouts (seven) in ten games with the RailRiders this year. It’s also his third season at the level, so I’d take the numbers with a grain of salt.

Like Bird, Ford is a left-handed hitting bat-only first baseman. He can’t play other positions and isn’t especially nimble around the bag either, plus a platoon partner might not be a bad idea. The Yankees are replacing Greg Bird with an older and unproven version of Greg Bird, basically. Maybe the lefty hitting Ford will give the Yankees a shot in the arm against, uh, Chris Sale tonight.

(The Yankees should trade for Justin Smoak ASAP.)