As anyone reading this blog already knows, the Blue Jays recently acquired star shortstop Troy Tulowitzki suffered a cracked scapula (shoulder blade) in the first half of last Saturday’s double header against the Yankees.
It was a bizarre play, but the injury has left an obvious hole in the Blue Jays lineup. The initial reports circulating from the team are that the timetable for Tulowitzki’s return is two to three weeks depending on how fast he heals.
#BlueJays GM Alex Anthopoulos says possibility Troy Tulowitzki could return in 2-3 weeks, depending on pace of healing. Guarded optimism.
— Shi Davidi (@ShiDavidi) September 13, 2015
With this being such an unusual injury, Josh & Greg reached out to ESPN injury expert Stephania Bell as part of today’s podcast in order to try and find more information about exactly what this injury means. Normally we leave out interviews on the podcast so that they can stand for themselves on the show, but in this case I thought it was notable enough that key parts should be written out. (You can listen to the whole thing here)
Joshua Howsam
So, Troy Tulowitzki went down on the weekend against the Yankees, and he cracked his scapula. How rare an injury is something like that?
Stephania Bell
Its so rare that I couldn’t find an instance of another baseball player having this injury. The Scapula is the shoulder blade (for people who might not know), and typically when you hear about fractures of the scapula it’s what we call a high energy injury, meaning it takes a lot of force for this to happen. The scapula is protected by muscles that lay over the top of it, and unless you have a direct impact with a particular line of force it’s pretty hard to do. So, you hear about it if people fall from a height, motor vehicle accidents. We do see it sometimes in football, but as you can imagine those collisions particularly if it’s a helmet to the back of the shoulder it’s a little easier to see why it might happen.
Now you do have a couple examples, still rare, but two pitchers, Brandon McCarthy now of the Dodgers & Michael Wacha of the Cardinals who both had stress fractures of the scapula and that’s even perhaps a bit easier to understand because the repeated stress through the shoulder with throwing, but this with Troy Tulowitzki is something I haven’t heard of before and I asked around with some folks who are in the area of baseball medicine working in the pros and they couldn’t recall an instance of this either
Josh
That’s interesting. Considering the fact that it broke from being run into by Kevin Pillar’s chin and Pillar was fine, does it suggest that possibly there was a pre-existing injury there, or was it just one of those fluke things?
Stephania
I don’t know that I could say that, in fact I don’t know, because I haven’t seen any films or any data specific to Tulowitzki’s injury to tell you exactly where the crack is. But I will tell you that the chin is very hard, and so it’s not necessarily surprising. It doesn’t seem like much, but the jaw is incredibly hard. Bone is funny, if you get it at just the right angle, and just the right force factor, sometimes you can create damage there that surprises you.
Josh
Now obviously as you said it’s a rare injury for Tulowitzki, and for baseball in general. Given that you don’t know exactly where it is, and how deep the fracture is, can you just speak to general recovery times for something like this?
Stephania
Interestingly, you typically describe recovery from this in months, and that’s something that the Blue Jays don’t have in terms of a time frame available for Tulowitzki if you’re talking about this season. That said we’ve heard that the GM, Alex Anthopoulos, said that within 2 to 3 weeks they’re hopeful for a return. Now that sounds very optimistic to me, but again, since I don’t have all the information, I can’t say one way or the other whether that will or won’t happen.
I will tell you this, Tim Kurkjian, my colleague, said that a source told him that the muscle on the back of the shoulder blade was “crushed”, so a lot of trauma to the soft tissue. Again as I told you, the muscle overlays the bone there, so there had to be damage to the muscle in order to get to the point of the bone where you had the injury. Think of how painful that is alone. Your shoulder blade has 17 different muscles that attach to it. Your rotator cuff muscles are all a part of the shoulder blade either on top or underneath it. So every time you go to move your shoulder any kind of movement of your arm, your back, some of the movements through your chest and that’s either going to make the muscles there painful, or potentially aggravate the boning injury as well.
If the crack is small, and there seems to be some suggestion that it is a small fracture, it may have been so tiny that it was difficult to determine on the initial imaging exam. It may be the case that they’re going to bring him back in a couple weeks and re-image it, and see what they see. If it looks good, then really it becomes a matter of pain tolerance and this is not to… you hate to see pressure put on Tulowitzki to just gut it out, no matter what the status is of the team. I think its hard for people to appreciate just how painful it is to have an injury like this, to just try and move your arm. Tim was telling me that yesterday that he had heard that Tulowitzki couldn’t even raise his arm 90 degrees right now, well imagine trying to progress to not only throwing, but swinging a bat, between the velocity, the complexity, the movement. It’s hard for me to imagine that he’ll be able to do it. You never say never, because athletes are great at proving us wrong, but it’s really tough to imagine.
Josh
Well if the worst happens and he is out for the season, just one last question, would something like this have a lasting effect going into next season after it’s healed, or when it’s healed is it healed?
Stephania
No, it shouldn’t. That is the silver lining here, that this is the type of injury that he should be able to recover from fully, but he may not be feel like he’s 100% for several months.
I take any injury report that the Blue Jays put out with a massive grain of salt, and in this case the initial reports struck me as overly optimistic, so after listening/reading to this I’m now fully expecting that we will not see Mr. Tulowitzki the rest of the season. I pray that I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.
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You can also see Stephania talking about the Tulo injury over at ESPN.com.
Featured picture courtesy of Arturo Pardavila III under CC BY 2.0. Photo has been cropped from its original size.
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