Late Monday night, Boston Red Sox interim manager Chad Tracy struck a cautiously optimistic tone when asked about injured infielder Curtis Mead, saying, "It looks like we dodged a bullet, maybe."
That optimism was short-lived, though. Mead, who had just been acquired via trade over the weekend, underwent further testing that revealed his left wrist was actually fractured. The injury happened in Mead's second at-bat as a Red Sox when he was hit by a pitch. There is no timetable for his return at the moment.
Tracy made his weekly appearance on WEEI's Rich & Ken with Ted Johnson Wednesday afternoon and explained how things played out and why the news around Mead changed so dramatically. Watch the full interview above.
"First of all, I will say, if you watch the entire thing, I did say, for the time being, it looks like we dodged a bullet, maybe," Tracy said. "Like, in the sense that you get X-rays after an instance like that, immediate X-rays, and this is pretty standard with a bone injury. All you can do is give the information you have in the moment. And the information we had in the moment was the X-ray, the floral scan X-ray, that you get did not indicate a fracture.
"The follow-up question to that, which most people didn't – Tim Healey asked like, is there a plan for more scans tomorrow? And I said that's a possibility. So, I don't know if that was out there, but it's always possible based on how the player reacts through the night, how he's feeling, and do we feel like we need to do a follow-up MRI because sometimes swelling will hide things with an X-ray. It's pretty standard, actually. Curtis went through that in 2023. He broke that hand. Very similar situation. Scans came, initial scans came back negative, and he actually resumed some activities and it was still bothering him. Went and got an MRI, and there it was.
"So it's not uncommon for that to happen. So we get the original scans that we have, let everybody know this is the information we have at this time, and then if there's a follow-up scan that shows something else, we give you that information at that time. So that's how all that goes down."
That all makes sense, of course, but the flip-flop drew extra scrutiny because it's not the first time it's happened this season with the Red Sox. The team expressed early optimism around Roman Anthony and Garrett Crochet's injuries as well, and both have now missed multiple months, and still don't seem close to returning.
As for Mead, he was expected to meet with a hand specialist in Boston on Wednesday to take an even closer look at the injury and figure out the next steps. MassLive's Chris Cotillo reported late Wednesday afternoon that Mead is not expected to have surgery, and tentatively faces a 6-8 week recovery, which could mean a return at or close to the end of the regular season.
