PITTSBURGH — A full month remains between here and the annual outbreak of NFL training camps, with their daily medical updates about nettlesome knees, cranky quads, unstrung hamstrings and far worse, but it’s not exactly like we’re enjoying the calm before the storm when it comes to depressing injury news.
As Major League Baseball leans toward its midpoint, the summer game has more than compensated for the lull in football’s reliable carnage.
If you had to distill the 2024 baseball season into one highlight, a certifiable superstar writhing in pain in the dirt would be the unavoidable image.
As Pittsburgh Pirates pitching prince Paul Skenes prepares to make just his eighth big-league start this weekend, we’ve already documented the stark physical topography of what sometimes seems the most dangerous thing in sports — throwing a baseball really, really, really hard, a lot.
But this year, it’s been the game’s premier everyday players — Mike Trout, Ronald Acuna Jr., Mookie Betts — who have sustained the kind of injuries that threaten to curdle the season, both competitively for their own teams and aesthetically for everyone else.
Trout’s Angels likely weren’t going anywhere anyway, particularly post-Shohei Ohtani, but when they got to Pittsburgh the first week in May, the three-time MVP and 11-time All-Star had already been out of the lineup a week with a torn meniscus.
Fortunately for Trout, he did not have to do the whole writhing-in-the-dirt bit because he never even knew what happened to cause the pain he first experienced in late April.
His recovery is such that he’s only recently been able to ride a stationary bike, which is itself a metaphor for too much of Trout’s career.
“It’s getting there,” Trout told ESPN earlier this week. “Obviously slower than I thought, but it’s the first time with a knee injury. I’m trusting the process and taking it day by day.”
Trout will be 33 in August and has missed more games than he’s played since the start of 2021.
Acuna is still only 26 but has already torn the ACL in both knees, the left May 26 at PNC Park in a ridiculous accident of baseball circumstance. Leading off second base after swatting a double to start the first inning, Acuna noted something potentially useful in the way Pirates catcher Joey Bart was returning the ball to pitcher Martin Perez.
“I saw the catcher throwing the ball back to the pitcher very slow,” Acuna said afterward. “I was timing it so I could steal third (after the next pitch). But in that moment, he threw it hard. So I had to come back, and that’s when I felt it.”
He’s out for the season, which, as we’ve seen, isn’t necessarily a disqualifier for the Braves. They won the World Series in 2021, three months after Acuna tore the ACL in his right knee. But it subtracts one of the game’s most compelling players from the narrative in progress. Acuna is the reigning National League MVP based on a 2023 season when he became the first player ever with 40 homers and 70 steals in the same summer. He’s also, according to MLB.com, the only player ever to compile 145 homers, 190 steals and an OPS of .900 by the start of his age-26 season.
As for Betts, who was second in last year’s MVP race, he went to the dirt a half-second after taking a 98 mph fastball on his left hand last Sunday in Denver and will miss six to eight weeks. That forced the Dodgers to put Ohtani in the leadoff spot, which isn’t exactly a fate worse than death, but the game is still without one of its top players until end of July.
While the Betts news was sinking in, Yankees superstar Aaron Judge was involved in a virtual replay of the Betts incident, a fastball crashing into his left hand, a superb season potentially aborted. That was Tuesday against Baltimore. The 2022 American League MVP missed Wednesday’s game but was able to play and launch his 27th homer the next night.
