BOSTON — Dustin Pedroia will have season-ending surgery on his left hand Thursday in hopes of getting him back to full strength for next season.
The Boston Red Sox second baseman sat out Tuesday night in the middle game of the three-game set with the Baltimore Orioles at Fenway Park because of a left hand injury that he has dealt with for most of the season, according to manager John Farrell.
“We’ve asked him not to slide head first anymore, which he’s doing,” Farrell said before Wednesday’s game. “You go back to opening day of last year and that’s where a lot of this has originated from.
“He’s aggravated the left hand again by being taken out at second base on double plays early in the year and mid-year. With the exception of sliding head first, Dustin plays the game as he’s wired and that’s what makes him the player that he is.”
Farrell said an MRI exam was done on Pedroia, and the results revealed enough inflammation to shut down the second baseman.
Pedroia conceded that it took longer than he expected to regain strength in his left thumb after last year’s surgery in which a tendon from his wrist was used to reattach the torn ulnar collateral ligament in the thumb. It was a procedure he described earlier in the season as “kind of like Tommy John (elbow) surgery, only with my thumb.”
Unable to do much weight lifting in a truncated offseason, Pedroia was still strengthening his thumb when he landed hard on his wrist after being flipped by Milwaukee’s Carlos Gomez on a takeout slide April 4. Bad timing, says Pedroia, whose all-out style of play doesn’t exactly help him protect himself from exacerbating an injury.
“You fall down a lot,” Pedroia said. “I dive around and do things, so it was just unfortunate that, when it happened, I was still rehabbing from my thumb surgery and I just kind of fell awkwardly and that area got pretty inflamed. We tried to manage it the best we can and just get through it.”
At the very least, Pedroia’s injury helps explain a season in which his on-base-plus-slugging percentage slid to .711, the lowest mark in his eight full major league seasons.
“(If) you don’t have your hand strength, you’re not able to follow through the way you normally do. That makes it tough,” Pedroia said. “It’s tough going out there and trying to do what you’re accustomed to doing and you can’t. But I will soon.”