DETROIT — When Kerry Carpenter has been in the Detroit Tigers’ clubhouse recently, he has not lingered for long. He has popped out of the training room, maybe stopped and chatted with a teammate or paused briefly at his locker. Then it’s back to the training area.
He is still here, lingering like a ghost while the Tigers sorely miss his left-handed bat.
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Carpenter went on the injured list May 29 (retroactive to May 27) with what the Tigers called lumbar spine inflammation. Carpenter had been dealing with a lingering back issue and underwent tests the previous evening. The tests resulted in an immediate shutdown.
“It wasn’t very good,” Carpenter said that day. “Going in there, trying to treat it as much as we could, but it ended up not being good to go.”
On the Tigers trip last week, the team altered Carpenter’s diagnosis to a lumbar spine stress fracture. The team hasn’t indicated a timetable for his return.
Dr. Neel Anand, an orthopedic spine surgeon and the director of the Cedars-Sinai Spine Center in Los Angeles, described a lumbar spine stress fracture as a crack in the bone that tends to appear clearly on MRIs and CT scans.
“It generally occurs from either stress, as the name suggests, or some significant strain to it,” Anand said.
In baseball, Anand said the injury is more common in pitchers. It is also seen often in gymnasts or high jumpers who often arch their backs in competition. Recent MLB position players to suffer stress fractures in their backs include Jazz Chisholm, who went on the IL on June 29, 2022, with what was later diagnosed as a stress fracture. Chisholm did not return that season. Evan Carter of the Texas Rangers is dealing with a stress reaction — less severe than a fracture — and is expected to miss at least a month. Carter previously suffered a stress fracture in the minor leagues. He went on the injured list June 16, 2021, and did not play again that season.
“It usually tends to get better on its own, but that takes time,” Anand said. “It can take six weeks or three months for a stress fracture to settle down. It generally means stopping doing what you’re doing if that is truly being diagnosed.”
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The Tigers have a 6-8 record since losing Carpenter, not out of line with their season performance. But a lineup that entered Wednesday ranking 24th with a .668 OPS has felt his absence in an outsized way.
Detroit’s OPS against right-handed pitching was .700 before the injury. In a small sample since Carpenter went on the IL, Detroit entered Wednesday with a .603 OPS against right-handers, ranking 27th in MLB over that time frame.
Those stats alone hint at how valuable Carpenter had become to the Tigers. While Spencer Torkelson (91 career wRC+) tries to find himself with Triple-A Toledo and Riley Greene (112 career wRC+) deals with peaks and valleys in the big leagues, Carpenter had posted a career 129 wRC+. Despite the Tigers’ reluctance to play him against left-handed pitching — Carpenter is just 1-for-16 against left-handers this season — he had become arguably Detroit’s most impactful bat.
Kerry Carpenter opens up the scoring with a 2-run shot! pic.twitter.com/2cjsPHVhRA
— MLB (@MLB) May 25, 2024
On a team still trying to develop its offensive core, Carpenter has been a needed success story.
And there are more numbers that shine light on just how well Carpenter was playing.
Before his injury, Carpenter had a 1.004 OPS against right-handed pitching, good for seventh in MLB among hitters with at least 100 plate appearances, trailing only Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Tucker, Juan Soto, Rafael Devers and Freddie Freeman.
“You’ve seen us suffer,” manager A.J. Hinch said Sunday. “He’s a really big bat. Go grab anybody’s lineup and pick that dude in the middle who dominates and take him out and see how it feels.”
Carpenter has not spoken since the new diagnosis, and he is not doing baseball activity.
“He’s doing a lot of therapy and a lot of work,” Hinch said. “To get things to heal, there’s zero baseball activity, so there’s not much to speak of on the baseball front. On the rehab front, whether it’s heat or exercise, those aren’t really glorious to talk about or write about, but it’s just general physical therapy that he’s going through until he can introduce baseball activity in the weeks ahead.”
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Anand said Carpenter should be able to return to full strength once the injury is healed. The timeline, of course, can be different for everybody, and Anand could only speak on stress fractures in a general sense.
Still, if Carpenter’s injury sounds concerning, that’s because it is.
“If he truly has that,” Anand said, “I’m gonna say it’s going to be hard for him to finish the season.”
What we know about Javier Báez
The Tigers placed shortstop Javier Báez on the injured list with lumbar spine inflammation Tuesday. The injury is being described as very different from the issue Carpenter is dealing with.
“I’m not diagnosing either one of them,” Hinch said, “but it’s not the same issue as what Kerry has gone through.”
Báez, who has said he dealt with back pain last season, has already had an MRI and is expected to undergo further testing.
“Honestly, it’s a very generic term,” Anand said of lumbar spine inflammation. “It means really nothing. It literally means back pain. … He inflamed something in his back. It could be literally anything.”
Báez was still in Detroit on Wednesday and said he plans to leave Thursday to visit doctors in Florida. There’s also no clear timetable for his return, though the Tigers are expecting his absence to be longer than the minimum 10 days.
“If someone is going to use that term (inflammation), it generally is minor,” Anand said. “Nobody would use it for a major fracture or something significant. … Rest. Ice. Then get on an exercise program. Ninety to 95 percent (of cases) get better within a few days or a week or two, unless there’s something substantial. Generally, it means the MRI was quite normal.”
(Top photo: Duane Burleson / Getty Images)
