Category: Baseball Injuries

Chris Duncan was off to a pretty good 2007 season, but now he needs to find out how to treat bursitis. According to reports, Chris Duncan is going on the disabled list today. The reason given is a knee infection and knee bursitis. The interesting thing is that the infection isn’t staph and he hasn’t had a fever in several days.

According to his father, Dave Duncan:

“He doesn’t have a fever. He had a fever yesterday. So the infection has been getting out of there. They’ve got him on intravenous antibiotics. The cultures come back tomorrow morning, and they’re hoping to let him out of the hospital tomorrow.”

Akinori Iwamura is probably the best Japanese third baseman you’ve never heard of. Nope, it’s not because he plays in Japan, it’s because he plays for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Akinori Iwamura goes balls out each and every game, and he pays the price in injuries.

Akinori Iwamura is injured again due to chasing a foul ball into the bullpen. He was checked out after the incident, but decided to keep playing. The pain got worse, so he’s out four to five days now with what has been termed an eye bruise. At least he won’t be out for a couple of weeks.

Buck O’Neil is the oldest living former Negro League player. Buck’s 94 years old and recently completed a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame for the induction ceremonies. When he returned home to Kansas City, Missouri he was admitted to the hospital suffering from fatigue.

Putting aside the slap in the face the Baseball Hall of Fame did to him by not inducting him, but asking him to talk, let’s focus on medical fatigue and how to treat fatigue.

On Buck O’Neal’s condition, Bob Kendrick, a friend and marketing director for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, said:

The Boston Red Sox are scraping in the AL East, so the news that their catcher needs to have surgery to deal with torn cartilage wasn’t welcome news. Jason Varitek has been a stalwart behind the plate for the Red Sox this year and his disappearance from the daily line up will hurt.

The funny thing is that torn cartilage is a misnomer. The proper term is a torn meniscus. The meniscus sits between the knee and the thigh bone and provides cushion for the pressure placed on the knee joint. Jason tore the meniscus in his left knee, which leads to pain and the inability to place full weight on the join.

Boston manager Terry Fracona said:

Mark Mulder has had the kind of season that makes you want to cry. To see a pitcher that is used to success fall flat is never easy, but to watch him fall with so hard stirs up curiosity. Morbid curiosity.

During the season the St. Louis Cardinals have said that Mark Mulder wasn’t suffering from a any physical ailments. To the untrained eye he looked like something was wrong, but without any sort of physical evidence you couldn’t tell. The local media were imploring the Cardinals to shut down Mark Mulder so he could fix whatever is wrong, but the team let him continue to pitch.

It was a mistake.

Luis Ayala of the Washington Nationals has been scheduled to undergo surgery to remove a bone spur in his elbow. The will be performed by Dr. Lewis Yokum next week. Ayala’s bone spur lead to a decrease in his pitching velocity, control and statistics.

What is a bone spur?

• A bone spur is a another term for osteophytes. They are bony growths that occur around joints in your body. You typically see bone spurs in the feet, arms, legs and back.

What causes bone spurs?

• Bone spurs form as a way for your body to help fight another underlying problem such as arthritis. The body tries to create these bone spurs in joints that are damaged to help distribute the weight and force on the joints. While a good idea in theory, the bone spur gets in the way of the joint and can actually cause a further loss of mobility and even more pain.

Jake Peavy, the San Diego Padres ace pitcher, suffered a bruised rib cage on his right side while celebrating the clinching of the National League West division. A bruised rib cage makes pitching very painful and it showed as he was hammered in the first game of the Padres/Cardinals division series match up.

The San Diego Padres considered giving Peavy a cortisone shot for the pain so he could pitch later in the series, but decided against it. Bruce Bochy, the Padres manager said:

There is, I guess, a very small risk that if we did that, there could be some effects from it. I would say he’s out. Not 100 percent, but 99.

Effects from a cortisone shot? That’s a weird one.