Two things seem to happen every year: the first is that—once there is no reason to hide an injury report—a gaggle of injuries come to light. Mike Napoli’s leg, Rougned Odor’s ankle, and so on and so forth. This happens to every team in baseball, and probably every team in sports. The second seems to be more Ranger-specific: someone is going to get hurt in some weird and unexpected way. It wasn’t just you, Josh.
This one is both.
Austin Bibens-Dirkx pitched the final two-plus months of the season with two broken bones in his (right) pitching hand, and based on what we know, we might be able to crowd-source a little more information about who’s responsible. It happened while the 32-year-old rookie was in plain sight of fans, perhaps even in someone’s cell phone shot. Maybe even yours.
“I was signing autographs over here next to the dugout,” Bibens-Dirkx smiled sheepishly. “And on top of that metal grate, there’s a little extra ‘grippy, make-sure-you-don’t-fall’ point to it; I was just trying to slide (sideways), fell, caught my hand, caught myself, and… two bones. Broken.”
The date was July 28th. We know that because Bibens-Dirkx started the very next day, taking a loss in a five-inning performance against the Orioles. It was also his final start of the year, though the extent of the injury would not be known until late August.
“I didn’t think it was broken,” Bibens-Dirkx explained. “We didn’t find out until about a month later. It was still kinda bothering me, so the trainers were like ‘Let’s just go get an MRI and check it out.'”
The bones he broke were the pisiform and the triquetrum (You can see a diagram here). In layman’s terms, both are part of the heel of the palm, closer to the pinky-side of the hand than the thumb-side. “On fastballs, it didn’t really bother me,” Bibens-Dirkx chuckled about the ordeal. “But any time I’d throw a breaking ball, slider… anything that pinched that spot… It wasn’t comfortable, but with adrenaline, you’re in front of 40,000 people, you don’t really think about ‘my hand’, it’s more ‘I need to make a pitch.'”
The story ends well enough: after the season was over, Austin went to see Dr. Thomas Graham, a hand specialist in New York who ran him through a short series of tests, including swinging a golf club and swinging a bat (“even though I’m not very good at it,” he added). While surgery was an option, Doctor Graham said he thought the bones might heal on their own, and to give it until Christmas to decide.
By the time the holidays had come and gone, the hand felt fine and was making progress towards a full recovery. After being removed from the 40-man roster early in the offseason, Bibens-Dirkx re-signed with Texas on a minor-league deal, and will be with the team in big-league camp for Spring Training.
As far as Rangers Weird Injury list goes, that’s about the best-case scenario.
Michael Luna says
But what really happened?!
My theory: he broke it high-fiving Derek Holland’s dog.