Royce Lewis is just as tired of being injured as you might expect, and he’s ready to try anything to avoid it.
“I’ve made significant changes. I’ve spent a lot of money on my body. I’ve been doing everything I possibly can,” the Twins third baseman said Thursday, one day after going on the injured list because of a strained right adductor muscle. “If someone said, ‘Hey, if you smoke cigarettes like Babe Ruth and that’ll work,’ then I’ll do that, too. I’m open to anything.”
Lewis arrives at the ballpark five to six hours before games, he said, and is devoted to pregame work intended to prevent injuries. That also means “being away from family, taking time away from communicating with family or friends, and basically not living a life,” he said. All that “to eventually just get hurt [again].”
Doctors believe the injury is a consequence of the quad injury he suffered in March, that it’s other muscles compensating for the strength that has returned slowly to the quad. He began feeling some tightness before Tuesday’s game, though “it never got over a three or four on the pain scale,” he said. “It was something I was able to manage. And then when I got a hit, I started jogging — I swear I wasn’t even running hard yet — and I noticed, ‘Oh, that is significantly tighter.’ It probably went up to a seven or eight on that scale, out of 10. And then that’s when I let the staff know. I was hoping we caught it ahead of time. Unfortunately, it was a Grade 2 strain.”
Still, the news could have been a lot worse.
“Well, I’m not playing today, so I would say yeah, it’s bad news,” Lewis said. “But it feels great. Today, it felt very loose, like I can go play DH. But you know, you’ve got to be available for the field.”
Advance warning
The Twins had a lot of heroes in Thursday’s 12-3 victory over the Tigers — Jose Miranda, Ryan Jeffers, Bailey Ober — but as far as the team’s front office was concerned, the individual who deserved much of the credit was head groundskeeper Larry DiVito.
It was DiVito who brought Thursday’s forecast to the attention of both teams, the umpires and Major League Baseball on Tuesday. Rain will halt the game, probably for good, by 3 p.m. at the latest, he told all parties, and the scheduled first pitch of 1:10 p.m. could make it unlikely that they could play the five innings necessary for an official game.