Easiest, when half the roster sits on the IL relegated to rooting from the dugout, is to blame the training and Strength & Conditioning staff. Yet this is a bit of a simplistic and knee-jerk reaction. Which trainer is to blame for Jamie Arnold taking a line drive to the face?<\/p>\n
The flurry of injuries that decimated the A\u2019s felled so many key players both on the big league roster and the minors. The list produces a pretty good team: Brent Rooker, Luis Severino, Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, Jacob Wilson, Tyler Soderstrom, Joshua Kuroda-Grauer, JT Ginn, Leo De Vries, Jamie Arnold, all out for the season, and now Gage Jump likely following suit. Denzel Clarke and Zack Gelof also have missed appreciable time along the way.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s insane, but the injuries fall into various buckets so let\u2019s examine the buckets\u2026<\/p>\n
Kuroda-Grauer, who was humming along when one not-so-fine day he fouled a ball off of a ball and ruptured his testicle, and Arnold, whose cheek and sinus bones could not withstand a line drive that creamed them on the fly, suffered injuries absent any potential blame (other than perhaps not insisting every player wear a cup). These injuries demonstrate how not everything can be a referendum on the adults in charge.<\/p>\n
Unrelated to preparation or diagnosis<\/p>\n
Gelof\u2019s knee laceration, incurred while sliding hard into the side wall where there was wire netting, is an example of an injury that cannot be traced to stretching, conditioning, or anything related to the preparation or diagnosis of the human body.<\/p>\n
The same can be said of the unfortunate play where a poor Gelof throw caused Kurtz to get tangled up with the runner going by and the 1Bman\u2019s thumb was a casualty of the collision. Most likely Wilson\u2019s shoulder injury, the result of diving for a ground ball, also falls into the category of a \u201ca baseball play\u201d in which a perfectly conditioned body could still suffer the malady.<\/p>\n
Most likey, Langeliers\u2019 injury was also \u201cjust one of those things\u201d as he tore a meniscus running the bases. One can question the strength and conditioning program when a player\u2019s body doesn\u2019t hold up to an ordinary event, but most often it\u2019s just that if you run the bases 1,000 times 999 of those times it will go smoothly and once in a while it just doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Ordinary injuries with room for questions<\/p>\n
Now we get into the gray area, where you can easily say, \u201cThat injury happens around MLB all the time\u201d and yet you can also ask, \u201cCould it have been prevented?\u201d<\/p>\n
Rooker injured his knee, but it was not a single event. Rather it was pain that worsened over time, starting with a bone bruise contusion. A cortisone injection and rehab were supposed to alleviate the problem, but didn\u2019t and subsequently tests revealed an articular cartilage tear and loose bodies in his left knee, leading to season ending surgery. Certainly there is room to ponder a misdiagnosis or poor decision-making along the way, but it\u2019s not a slam dunk to draw any particular conclusion.<\/p>\n
Soderstrom is another example where a player went down with a known injury, in this case a hip impingement, then tried to come back and \u201cplay through it\u201d only to punt soon after and shut it down. One can reasonably question the wisdom of this decision, given how inevitably Soderstrom succumbed to surgery soon after.<\/p>\n
Similarly, De Vries had a known shoulder issue that affecting his throwing at SS but continued to play for quite some time before eventually shutting it down, being diagnosed with a labrum tear and having surgery that will likely keep him sidelined for about 8 months. This is an especially troubling arc considering that had De Vries undergone surgery 6 weeks earlier he might be ready for the start of the 2027 season \u2014 but we also don\u2019t know exactly when the labrum tore so we are left with as many questions as answers.<\/p>\n
Severino, Ginn and Jump fall into a common category: arm injuries for pitchers because, well, pitching is really bad for the arm. Ginn\u2019s is an elbow impingement, Jump\u2019s shoulder soreness from impingement, Severino\u2019s shoulder strain the most significant. Did the A\u2019s staff do anything wrong failing to prevent these injuries from happening?<\/p>\n
One could always ask whether the \u201cbetween starts\u201d regimen is the best possible one \u2014 teams differ around how bullpen sessions, long toss, treatment and the like are managed \u2014 and perhaps there could be better communication to catch problems in the earliest stages. (For example, Jump threw a fastball 91 MPH last night which could have been seen as a big red flag but went on to throw a couple dozen more pitches before exiting.) But pitcher arm injuries are hardly an \u201cA\u2019s special\u201d and in fact the A\u2019s have not been hit any harder than their opponents in this regard.<\/p>\n
Rooker and Soderstrom are examples of a puzzling response to managing an injury, De Vries possibly as well at the minor league level, but they are not the only ones.<\/p>\n
Lawrence Butler looked very slowed down the first half of 2026 following his knee surgery and you wonder if the A\u2019s whiffed not easing him in with a rehab stint at AAA and a more gradual return to full time RF duty with the big league club. Last year saw Wilson try to play through a hand injury that left him clearly diminished and both Wilson and Max Muncy had injuries from HBP in which a fracture wasn\u2019t properly diagnosed the first time.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t know why Denzel Clarke keeps suffering soft tissue injuries, particularly to his hamstrings, but this issue cropped up again while rehabbing a separate injury (bone bruise). Last season, Clarke missed significant time after injuring his right adductor muscle rounding 3B to score on a base hit.<\/p>\n
All bodies are different and you shouldn\u2019t be too quick to judge who comes to the party with a little more baby fat than his peer. Nonetheless it\u2019s hard to imagine that Kurtz wouldn\u2019t benefit from a slightly more svelte physique and Butler came to camp looking like he had \u201cbulked up\u201d in ways that only hampered his mobility.<\/p>\n
Just looking at all the bodies on the field it\u2019s not hard to imagine where some improvements could be made in the \u201cstrength and conditioning\u201d realm \u2014 but fans are also far from strength and conditioning experts and players have considerable say in how they manage their own bodies.<\/p>\n
Like I said, when you take a deep dive you are left with more questions than answers. But it\u2019s the internet, so here\u2019s where you get to weigh in with what you think the answers are despite the apparent murkiness of the landscape. The only part we are all likely to agree on is that the A\u2019s have a far better team on the IL than they can put on the field, and if the team is to be competitive going forward that script needs to flip. Somehow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Easiest, when half the roster sits on the IL relegated to rooting from the dugout, is to blame…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":804698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2391],"tags":[537,11729,79023,90963,69541,5,4558,4,3226],"class_list":["post-804697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-athletics","tag-athletics","tag-athletics-analysis","tag-athletics-discussion","tag-athletics-injuries","tag-athletics-prospects","tag-baseball","tag-general","tag-mlb","tag-mlb-athletics"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/117268890474967452","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}