(SportsRadio 610) - Astros manager Dusty Baker doesn’t seem all too concerned about the lingering hand injury that limited Yordan Alvarez to 135 games during the 2022 season.
"It’s tough, but we have six weeks," Baker said. "He did pretty good last year, sometimes with a hurt hand."
Alvarez slashed .306/.406/.613 for a 1.019 OPS, which was the second-best mark in the majors.
He also finished with a career-high 37 home runs and 97 RBI for the season, including a third-place finish in MVP voting.
While the statistics don’t lie, there should be some cause for concern despite the quip from Baker and Alvarez’s downplaying the nagging injury, which he says flared up during the offseason.
"I felt a little bit of discomfort, but it’s something we’re going to work on," Alvarez said through an interpreter. "I’m going to take the next couple of days off here, like I did in the offseason to prepare, but it’s not something that’s going to be an issue during the season."
That’s the most concerning part.
There’s no way to tell at this stage whether it is going to be an issue once the regular season arrives. I’m sure he didn’t anticipate it being a problem during the offseason, much less the first few days of spring training.
While surgery was considered following the World Series, Baker said the doctors felt like it wasn’t necessary.
Players play through pain all of the time, sometimes we don’t find out about it until after the fact, similar to Martin Maldonado last season.
The veteran catcher played through a broken hand and a sports hernia for nearly five months, which ended up requiring offseason surgery. Neither one of those injuries was disclosed until after the Astros had won the World Series.
Meanwhile, as the Astros monitor Lance McCullers Jr., who was shut down last week because of soreness in his throwing arm, bring veteran left fielder Michael Brantley along slowly after shoulder surgery, they’ll err on the side of caution with Alvarez.
“The easy solution for that is just rest,” Alvarez said. “We decided it was better to lose a couple of days of hitting right now rather than the season.”
Shaun Bijani has spent the last 16 years covering the Houston sports scene for SportsRadio 610. Follow him on Twitter @ShaunBijani.
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