Adrian Beltre doesn’t wear a cup. That came back to… bite him when a ground ball crushed his testicles. There’s internal bleeding and he may need surgery to repair the injury. Apparently, he played through the injury when it occurred and scored the winning run in the game. The Mariners just put Beltre on the DL when this article was written. Tough break.
4:30 p.m.: This is no laughing matter, despite the jokes that will inevitably fly after news of this breaks. It turns out that Mariners third baseman Adrian Beltre injured his testicle last night after a groundball took a bad hop and hit him in the groin area. No, he does not wear a protective cup.
There was some tearing of the testicle and apparently is some internal bleeding in there. The team is going to wait a bit to see whether he requires surgery. If the surgery was to take place, he would need a month’s recovery time. If there’s no surgery, he’d need about 10 days to two weeks.
Josh Wilson has been activated for now. We’re still waiting to see how severe Jack Wilson’s hamstring injury is. There’s a Grade 1 tear in that, but the team is still deliberating whether or not to keep him active. We should know before gametime, but he’s going to miss at least a few days.
Back to Beltre, he was hurt on a hard grounder that kicked off to his right in the eighth inning.
“It hurt pretty bad,” he said. “It was hurting me pretty much the whole game after that.”
Told that some were suggesting he was brave for staying in the game, he quipped:
“I don’t know about brave. Maybe stupid.”
Beltre has an appointment with a surgeon tomorrow to discuss whether he needs an operation.
“It’s a shame,” Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik told me moments ago. “You hate to see something like this happen, but your first thoughts have to be about the player. You want him to make a complete recovery.”
By the way, the Mariners had not yet put Beltre through waivers. So, it’s not like they could have traded him yesterday, before all of this happened.
Had the team been double-digits back in the wild-card race, Beltre may have been put on waivers by now in hopes he’d clear and a deal could be made. But the team has been playing winning baseball since the Jarrod Washburn deal and the idea now — as with Russell Branyan — is to keep the team as is in hopes of a strong finish.
Nothing wrong with that.
Mariners manager Don Wakamatsu said the Beltre situation is indefinite and that “he’ll be out for who knows what right now.”
Wakamatsu said Beltre, who stayed in the game long after hurting himself, could feel pain when he dove back into third base after getting on in extra innings. He also felt it when he applied the tag on Scott Podsednik during a 10th inning pickoff at third.
Oh yeah, he also scored the winning run. Guy’s a gamer.
“If it’s a major surgery, it could be at least a month or maybe more,” Wakamatsu said. “So, yeah, there’s a chance of that. Right now, they said there’s some coagulation of it right now. So, it’s healing already. It’s just a matter of whethewr they’re going to have to go in and fix it surgically.”
The surgeon who is supposed to look at Beltre is in surgery at the moment. The team is expecting to hear from him shortly. Wakamatsu mentioned that this type of surgery needs to be done within 72 hours of the initial injury, so the waiting around won’t happen for much longer.
By the way, Zduriencik confirmed the story Larry Stone and I told you about in the last blog post, how Mariners executive Jim Na has resigned and that western crosschecker scout Ron Tostenson will not have his contract renewed. Also, that special assignment/amateur scout Tom Davis will be reassigned.
In Na’s case, “he just had other things that he wanted to pursue,” Zduriencik said. “He also mentioned wanting to coach his daughter’s softball team and wanting time to do that.”
Na was the team’s director of baseball administration.
