Thursday, June 26, 2014

Two bits of News

Bit 1 - and most of you will probably already know this - Grossman down, Hoes up.

Bit 2 - Carlos Correa has been diagnosed with a broken right fibula and already had it operated on.  He is gone for the rest of the season.

In many ways, I am glad that it is a bone injury - they tend to heal better than soft tissues, such as muscles, ligaments and tendons.  I wonder whether what happened is (i) Correa slid into third base facing LF, sliding with his right leg bent under him (ii) then he overslid the base, and the outside of his foot caught the bag, which didn't give, meaning (iii) the full momentum of his slide bent his foot laterally (ie. the outside part of the foot upward) (iv) tearing the very bottom of the fibula away by virtue of the sudden stretching of the deltoid ligament which runs between the lowest part of the fibula and the inside of the foot.  So bending the foot up and out would have suddenly stretched this very strong ligament, so it probably tore at it's origin (where the ligament comes from).

If this is the case, then I would think that the operation is relatively simple - screw the bit of bone back onto the fibula, and allow to heal.  A small bit of bone will could take a long time to heal, but I would not think that this is a career threatening injury unless infection sets in.

The major alternative mechanism of injury involves some twisting of the ankle which could result in a spiral fracture of the fibula, but this would not have been easily apparent to the doctors, and shown up on the first x-ray.

However, note is made that (i) something weirder may have happened which means that the prognosis could be better or worse, (ii) my orthopaedics days are waaaay behind me, and this is all just speculation and (iii) the Astros front office has become famously tight-lipped about this stuff anyhow and (iv) they shouldn't be sharing health related information anyhow with this whole "patient confidentiality" thing (ie. it is none of our business).

Time will tell.

I hope Mike Bob Grossman puts it back together at OKC, and returns to the majors and tears it up.  I think time is running out for him, especially given who is on the LF depth chart right below him.