ARLINGTON, Texas — One swing stalled Kyle Tucker’s season and created a void the Houston Astros are struggling to fill. On June 3, Tucker fouled a sinker off his right shin and crumpled to the dirt in discomfort. An on-field microphone picked up a pained profanity upon impact, but Tucker still attempted to finish his plate appearance.
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A few short steps told Tucker that was impossible. He exited the batter’s box and began an absence that has now spanned 53 games and 65 days. Houston is 32-21 without Tucker, but the lineup’s limitations without him have become glaring during this grueling stretch of its schedule.
Seventeen of the Astros’ next 25 games are against teams that entered Wednesday at least 10 games over .500. Whether Tucker will appear in any of them is a mystery, much like the injury preventing him from playing.
The team’s official diagnosis is a “right shin contusion.” Last month, general manager Dana Brown described it as a “deep bruise of that bone.” The Astros refuse to make head athletic trainer Jeremiah Randall available for interviews, leaving Brown and manager Joe Espada as Tucker’s unofficial spokesmen.
Analyzing Tucker’s actual progress is impossible without insight from Randall or Tucker himself. In their absence, The Athletic surveyed three orthopedic surgeons with experience treating similar injuries. None of them has examined Tucker, but they spoke in general about sustaining bone bruises and how difficult recovering from them can be.
Kyle Tucker reacts to being hit by a pitch in early June. (Logan Riely / Getty Images)
A media relations specialist from Houston Methodist, the Astros’ official healthcare provider, did not respond to a similar request to speak with one of their physicians.
“The thing with these is they are truly like snowflakes,” said Guillem Gonzalez-Lomas, an orthopedic surgeon at NYU Langone Health. “Every case is a little bit different. You have players who get hit today — same impact — and tomorrow they feel like they can run and slide and it doesn’t affect them. In other instances, just the way that contact gets absorbed and sustained, it might be months. It’s really hard to predict with these blunt trauma injuries.”
Vagueness or being hard to predict has long been Houston’s hallmark when discussing injuries to any of its players. Calling Tucker’s injury a “contusion” is correct, all three surgeons said, but many fans who’ve bruised something on their body may fail to grasp why an athlete is struggling to recover from one.
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“When you think about what this injury really is, it’s almost a microfracture of the inside of the bone,” said Steven Flores, an orthopedic surgeon at UT Health Houston. “Not a true break in the sense, but an injury to the internal aspect or medullary aspect of the bone itself. More impact, more activity is just going to continue to aggravate that and not be able to heal.”
Bone bruises are best described as an MRI finding, Flores said. Fluid or blood pools at the point of impact and produces a signal during an MRI.
Bone bruises impact the bone’s outer cortex, all three surgeons said, but a membrane surrounding bones called the periosteum “can just continue to cause pain,” Lomas said. Trying to assign an accurate timetable is impossible — and perhaps why the Astros have struggled to formulate one.
“Sometimes it can take two to three months,” said Brian Schulz, an orthopedic surgeon at Cedars Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute. “Everybody is different. There’s players that will get hit and have bone bruises and they feel fine and play the next day.”
Said Lomas: “You really have to communicate transparently with the player and move them along as tolerated to speed up the recovery. But it is absolutely possible — and it happens — for these injuries to sometimes take months to fully resolve.”
In his last extensive comments on July 13, Tucker acknowledged he still could not “do everything normally right now.” Tucker did not accompany the club during the first leg of its current nine-game road trip, but still appeared to have a slight limp while doing light, on-field activities during Houston’s last homestand.
“The hard part is the body has to heal it enough to where the player isn’t experiencing pain before you can push it,” Schulz said. “You have a little bit of jeopardy of the strength of the bone if you were going to try to push through it. You could risk creating a full-blown tibia fracture. There’s not a lot of stuff you can do to speed it up.”
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During an interview on the team’s flagship radio station Wednesday morning, Brown said Tucker is “pretty much pain-free.” A day earlier, Brown told a group of reporters in Arlington that Tucker is still restricted to “limited baseball activity.”
All reporters have observed is Tucker playing light games of catch in the outfield, but Espada claims more work is being done away from public view. Tucker is hitting in the batting cages and, according to Espada, doesn’t feel much pain while doing so.
Kyle Tucker exited the game after fouling this ball off his shin pic.twitter.com/NZwplzezrv
— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) June 4, 2024
That Tucker is able to swing and hit — even with an injury to the front leg in his batting stance — did not surprise any of the three surgeons. Even though Tucker has to plant his leg before swinging, it does not inflict as much irritation as more explosive movements like running or a quick change in direction.
“In the leg, a lot of the muscles and muscle fibers attach directly to that periosteum,” Lomas said. “So, when the player is trying to do something explosive, the muscle fibers are yanking on that very sensitive area. Many times, it’s not that there’s a structural problem, it’s that the area is irritated and it gets irritated by these explosive movements.”
Doing more of those explosive movements will signal a more meaningful step in Tucker’s recovery, the surgeons suggested. Asked on Wednesday whether Tucker has resumed running, Espada requested a reporter’s definition of running. Then asked if Tucker is sprinting, Espada replied, “No, he’s not sprinting yet. Very light run. Jog.”
Until that changes, a more concrete timeline for Tucker’s return may be impossible to calculate. Espada and Brown have struck optimistic tones across the last two days, during which Tucker has worked at Minute Maid Park away from public view, but they are still hesitant to confirm he’ll return within the month.
A precedent does exist for such a prolonged absence, with a caveat that no two injuries are created equal. On Aug. 17, 2015, New York Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira fouled a ball off his left leg and missed the remainder of the season.
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According to reports at the time, Teixeira initially received a bone bruise diagnosis, but after not improving, further testing revealed a fracture. Los Angeles Angels third baseman Anthony Rendon had a similar saga last season. Rendon fouled a pitch off his leg on July 4 and did not return for the rest of the season.
Last month, Tucker said the team took a “good amount” of imaging on his shin, but did not disclose any specific tests. Asked whether it is possible a fracture has gone undetected, Flores said, “The diagnostic tests are so good that it would probably be extremely rare for that to be undiagnosed.”
Said Schulz: “Even if there’s a small crack in the bone, the treatment is the same as if there’s a bruise in the bone.
“I think the likelihood of something being missed is low. I think they’re just dealing with an injury that takes a while to get better.”
(Top photo of Kyle Tucker: Logan Riely / Getty Images)
Chandler Rome is a Staff Writer for The Athletic covering the Houston Astros. Before joining The Athletic, he covered the Astros for five years at the Houston Chronicle. He is a graduate of Louisiana State University. Follow Chandler on Twitter @Chandler_Rome
