LOS ANGELES – Last May, Teoscar Hernandez suffered a groin muscle injury. He missed just two weeks.
This spring, though, Hernandez admitted he came back too quickly and never had his legs at full strength the rest of the season. The numbers showed it. Hernandez was hitting .315 with a .933 OPS, nine home runs and 34 RBIs in the Dodgers’ first 35 games. After he returned from the injured list, he hit .223 the rest of the way with a .672 OPS. His defense in right field also suffered.
The Dodgers aren’t going to let that happen again now that Hernandez is on the IL with a strained left hamstring.
“Because, fool me once,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “He wanted to get back and felt he was good, and you look back and he wasn’t. So we’re not going to make that mistake again.”
An MRI taken after Hernandez suffered the injury while running out a ground ball in Wednesday’s game revealed only a Grade 1 strain at the back of his knee at the base of the hamstring – “the best-case scenario we could get from this,” Hernandez said.
The prognosis he was given was a month to recover. Even with last year’s experience, Hernandez said he is hopeful it won’t take as long as that to recover.
“I think it was a little different because it was in my groin,” he said of last year’s injury. “Everything I do, you use that part of the body to do it, especially in this game. But I think if I give it time, right and rest like I should, the hamstring should heal soon and maybe I’ll be back on the field sooner than they say.”
Hernandez took last year’s injury and the subpar numbers he posted the rest of the way as motivation in the offseason. He increased his workouts and dropped about 12 pounds before reporting to camp this spring. He suffered through a slump in late April and early May and Roberts moved him down in the batting order. But Hernandez heated up and batted .367 (22 for 60) with a 1.018 OPS over his last 18 games before the injury.
“Yeah. I was feeling really good,” Hernandez said. “That (injury) came out of nowhere. But I understand sometimes it’s part of the process, part of the game. I trained so hard this offseason just to be on the field every single day for my team, my teammates. But unfortunately it happens. Now it’s a different time. I need to get stronger. I need to get better and be back as soon as possible.”
TALL GUY BACK
Right-hander Tyler Glasnow has resumed his throwing program after a setback. But Roberts described the progress as “just okay.”
“I think that he hasn’t got over the hump as far as where we feel like he can really progress, so we’re right now in kind of a holding pattern,” Roberts said. “Still building, but I wouldn’t say we’re moving too far forward too fast. And certainly with the back, you have to just be very mindful of not trying to push it too much, too.”
Roberts said Glasnow is not in pain from the back spasms that landed him on the Injured List following his start in Houston on May 6 when he left the game after one inning – “but he doesn’t feel the freedom to kind of push it, you know? To really stretch it out or to get off a mound, and things like that.”
UP NEXT
Phillies (RHP Andrew Painter, 1-5, 5.40 ERA) at Dodgers (RHP Yoshinobu Yamamoto, 4-4, 3.09 ERA), Sunday, 1:10 p.m., SportsNet LA, 570 AM