When Toronto Blue Jays 3rd baseman Brett Lawrie injured his oblique, one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was that those tend to be slow-healing injuries, and if there was one player whose attitude doesn’t gel with slow-anything, it was probably going to be Lawrie. If anything, this was a player who was going to try and come back sooner than expected; so it was hardly a surprise when the 22-year old was a bit ahead of the curve, starting rehab games that would have lined him up for a 3-week turnaround from the strained oblique.
Not so fast, apparently:
JF: Lawrie felt ribcage soreness Monday, rehab shut down, won’t play rehab game at least until Saturday.
— John Lott (@LottOnBaseball) August 21, 2012
That was later clarified by Lott to mean Monday, as Lawrie will have to sit out the next seven days based on rehab rules. More interestingly, it seems that Lawrie may not have been 100% accurate about his physical state when it came to reporting the injury and his progress in the rehab process to the Blue Jays’ training staff and doctors:
Farrell: “He’s got to express anything that he is feeling to get back to the point of being able to go day in and day out in the lineup.”
— John Lott (@LottOnBaseball) August 21, 2012
While the Blue Jays are still hopeful that Lawrie could still return to the team in September, it’s an indefinite timetable at this point; and as it is with setbacks go at this time of the season, the possibility of Lawrie being shut down for the rest of the season is definitely out there. It’s seems like a very Brett Lawrie-like thing to try to tough out an injury, but at this point, with the rehab shut down, one has to wonder just how many games did the sophomore risk by potentially withholding information about the injured oblique to the team? Wanting to return to the field too much could be a bad thing, I suppose.
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LOVE his attitude, but yeah, he’s got to be smarter than that.
This kid is a key to this franchise’s future, so let’s get this right. I’ve experienced an oblique injury myself (yes, playing baseball) and it was 2 full years before there was no trace left of the pain. Not saying I couldn’t play during that time (I did), but the lingering pain was “still there”.
Now, of course, I had niether the treatment nor the trainers that Brett has going for him, so hopefully, his timeline won’t resemble mine much at all, but yeah, those things do hang around is all I’m saying.
2 years! That’s a hell of a perspective on that type of injury. Crazy to think that guys in the bigs seem come back after 5-6 weeks.