For someone who loves baseball as much as Casas, this is a nightmare.
Triston Casas’ season is done after the Red Sox announced this morning he ruptured his left patellar tendon. It occurred on this horrible looking play last night in the second inning:
The Sox have only placed Casas on the 10-Day IL for now and not the 60-Day, but you have to figure that’s because they have a 40-man roster spot open and not because there’s some hidden optimistic news about the injury. A ruptured patellar tendon typically takes at least six months to heal, and often takes up to a full year, which puts us into November as the earliest recovery time.
For Casas, a guy who lives, breaths and sleeps baseball, this is a nightmare. He was already approaching a very significant crossroads in his career after missing 99 games last season with torn cartilage in his rib cage, and now this injury is likely to cap him at just 28 games this year. When added together, he will have played just 91 games over two seasons with very limited production to show for it (0.0 fWAR and -0.3 bWAR).
By the time he’s ready to come back next season, the first base situation could look completely different as his injury has seismic ramifications on the roster construction both in the short and long-term. We’ll have plenty of time to discuss those in the coming weeks since the Sox now have traffic jams at almost every other position and no obvious candidate to play first base, but for now, we can just take a moment to be sad for Triston Casas and every unfortunate thing this injury means for his career.