The offseason is now here for the Boston Red Sox and the health of Roman Anthony is going to be a massive question mark that hangs over this organization for months.
Boston won’t play another real game until late March, unless the collective bargaining agreement negotiations mess things up and impact the 2027 season. That is over five months away after Boston was knocked out of the wild-card round by the New York Yankees on Wednesday night.
Anthony unfortunately was forced to exit Game 1 after aggravating his hand/wrist injury that forced him to miss roughly three months of time earlier in the season. After Anthony left Game 1, he went for imaging back in Boston and it revealed “new strains to different muscles in his wrist” while also “exacerbating” the old injury. The injury that knocked Anthony out for months was a partially torn ring finger CMC ligament.
So, now what? Well, the best thing about the offseason is time to recover. If everything goes as planned and there are no issues with the 2027 campaign, Spring Training will begin in February. That’s four months away. Even if Anthony suffered the exact injury again, he has more time right now to recover than it took between when he first got hurt and when he returned to the field.
Unfortunately, it’s a freak injury. Back in June, Alex Speier of The Boston Globe quoted Dr. Mark Cohen of Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush University, who said he hadn’t heard of an injury like Anthony’s in 32 years of practicing medicine. Sometimes, there is just bad luck involved. But that doesn’t mean the process to get Anthony back was wrong. Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow spoke about the process on Wednesday, as transcribed by MassLive.com’s Chris Cotillo.
“As far as I know, the rehab and the return to play was the appropriate one. Last night in the game, he did something where things changed, things worsened and we needed to take a fresh look at it,” Breslow said.
Anthony spoke about the injury himself on Wednesday and whether his elite swing speed is the cause.
“I’ve had above-average bat speed I think for a while before this has been a problem,” Anthony said, as transcribed by MassLive.com’s Christopher Smith. “Maybe it’s something to do with it, but I don’t think that’s the reason. I think it’s just an injury that happened and maybe wasn’t 100%. I wish I had that answer, but I think it could be a bunch of different things, to be honest.”
Again, sometimes guys just get unlucky. When you suffer an injury that a doctor says they haven’t heard of in 32 years, that’s a pretty big sign of bad luck. Barring further setbacks, there should be enough time between now and Spring Training for Anthony to work his way back. The exact severity of the injury hasn’t been revealed yet, but even if it was as bad as his previous injury, there is more than three months to go until Boston returns.
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