‘It’s a bummer’: Twins’ Alan Roden discusses season-ending thumb injury

It’s natural for a new player, after a trade, to want to impress his new team. For Alan Roden, he’ll largely have to wait until next year.

“Yeah, it’s tough,” Roden said Tuesday. “I’ve never been injured before in my career during the season. This is a new thing for me not being able to strap it on every day and figure it out for that night.”

Roden, after a dozen games with the Twins, was shut down for the rest of the season with a sprained ulnar collateral ligament in his left thumb. He met with a hand specialist Monday, and he’s leaning toward undergoing surgery to repair the ligament, which would sideline him for about two months.

Acquired from Toronto as part of the Louie Varland and Ty France trade, Roden had six hits in 38 at-bats (.158 batting average) after joining the Twins with one homer, one RBI and five runs.

“The way things turned out, it’s a bummer for me to not be able to play the rest of the season, but you can only go forward, rehab it and then hopefully come back better than ever,” said Roden, who expects to have a full and normal offseason after a possible surgery.

He initially injured his thumb Aug. 10 at Target Field on a catch against the side of the left-field wall. He then aggravated it on Thursday with a headfirst slide at home plate.

“I think surgery is probably the best option, just in terms of the predictable outcomes and timeframe to get me back swinging,” he said.

The Twins acquired 13 players from all their trade deadline deals, parting with 10 major league players, and Roden was the only one who immediately joined the big-league club. It was a unique way to join a team, immediately after a fire sale.

He didn’t put up the numbers he wanted during his rookie season, batting .191 with two homers and nine RBI over 55 games when including his time with the Blue Jays.

The next step in his development will be looking more like the hitter he was in the minor leagues. In parts of two seasons at Class AAA, he hit .320 with 12 homers, 66 RBI and nearly as many walks (51) as strikeouts (54) across 103 games.

What was the biggest difference between pitchers at the two levels this year?

“They’re good at exploiting those [weaknesses] and being intentional about attacking you in certain ways,” he said. “It’s on me. It’s on players to be able to recognize that and deal with it any way they can.”

“Just being in the environment itself a transition and something you need to learn,” Roden said. “For me, in this time, it’s trying to be around the people here. Try to take in as much information as possible.”

Simeon Woods Richardson is scheduled to pitch four innings in a Class AAA rehab assignment Thursday as he moves closer to rejoining the major league roster.

Woods Richardson, on the 15-day injured list after he underwent a procedure to remove a parasite from his digestive tract, threw two scoreless innings with four strikeouts in a rehabilitation start Friday in Omaha.

“It’s always good to throw strikes,” said Woods Richardson, whose velocity was down by 1.5 mph in his first rehab start. “It’s always good to command the strike zone. My body felt good. I wasn’t really exhausted. That’s always a great sign coming back from not pitching in a while.”

Woods Richardson needed to build his innings back up after he lost weight and didn’t throw for several days because his illness made it difficult to even move out of bed.

* Twins lefthanded pitching prospect Connor Prielipp struck out five in 3⅓ innings but yielded two runs, three hits and four walks in his Class AAA debut Tuesday in St. Paul’s 11-4 victory against Round Rock at CHS Field after making 19 starts at Class AA. His fastball topped out at 98 mph. Baseball America rates Prielipp, 24, as the organization’s No. 9 prospect.