The New York Mets don't know the severity of Francisco Lindor's calf injury, but he's going to be out for a while.
Calf talk has become a thing in New York baseball lately, especially for the New York Mets. They lost outfielder Juan Soto to a calf strain for a couple of weeks, and the result was a 12-game losing streak. Now shortstop Francisco Lindor has a more severe version of the same injury, and the basic timeline for his recovery has him out into early June, according to an update written by Anthony DiComo of MLB.com.
Lindor sustained the injury on Wednesday night, and on Thursday the Mets put him on the 10-day IL. That move was preemptive to a longer stretch of missed games, as Carlos Mendoza made clear in his initial comments.
“He’s going to be down quite a bit here,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “I don’t think we’re anticipating something like we knew right away with Juan that it was kind of like the best-case scenario and it was going to be on the short side of things. I don’t think we’re dealing with the same thing here.”
Truth be told, the Mets still don’t know exactly what they’re dealing with yet, as their medical staff hasn't made a call beyond the initial injury. Lindor is trying to make it sound like his timeline for a return is closer to that of Soto’s as he compared this injury to a 2019 calf strain in Cleveland that put him out for three weeks, saying that this version of the injury isn’t as severe.
But DiComo got a completely different opinion from Dr. Spencer Stein, a specialist in sports orthopedic surgery at NYU Langone, who said the worst case is a six-week recover timeline.
“A lot of this is just time,” Dr. Stein said.
The Mets don’t have a lot of time right now, unfortunately. Their season is sinking fast, and they’re currently eight games under .500 and 9.5 games behind the division-leading Atlanta Braves after last night’s 4-3 loss to the Colorado Rockies.
Lindor said, “I hope so,” when he was asked if he thought he would be back by midseason, but the only timeline in place right was about whether he expected to return at all this season after an injury run that’s included offseason elbow surgery, a broken hamate bone in his wrist and now this injury.
"A hundred percent,” Lindor said as he guaranteed a return. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This kills me not being on the field, but I trust the trainers and I know they have good care here, and I’ll be back. I’ll be back hopefully sooner rather than later.”
The Mets will mostly plug in Ronny Mauricio, who’s a competent shortstop who had two hits and scored a run against Colorado last night. We’re about to find out what kind of team the Mets will be without Lindor, and right now they have a huge mountain to climb to save their season.