For the first time in his career – shocking, when you consider how many scares he’s had – Kris Bryant landed on the disabled list yesterday.
A sore left shoulder was the culprit, inflammation caused by an uptick in swings, he said, as he tried to work through a slump. He will be eligible to return from the DL in a week, and hopefully all of this will be behind him.
That said, Bryant provided a little more context for the shoulder injury, which, while it may have reached DL-level bad thanks to all the extra swings, it actually traces back upwards of a month:
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So, then, Bryant says he first felt the flareup after a headfirst slide about a month ago, but felt it wasn’t too bad, played through it, and it got better. Then, after adding the additional swings, that’s when it got too bad to keep playing.
I know what you’re thinking, and it’s what everyone is thinking upon hearing this: so could the original shoulder issue be a partial explanation for Bryant’s uncharacteristic power outage over that same period of time?
He says no, and instead joked that it’s just the wind at Wrigley Field.
Given that Bryant flashed the big, cheeky grin after the wind line, you can presume he just wasn’t going to get into the potential connection between the shoulder injury and the power issue. And it could very well be the case that the two are not connected at all, but, I mean … it’s a shoulder issue he feels on his swing, and the time period for it basically overlaps exactly with the deepest/longest power slump of his career:
Whatever the case, and whether there’s a connection or not, here’s hoping that the 10 days of rest will do Bryant’s shoulder good. Moreover, hopefully it will give him an opportunity to re-set, and work through whatever else has been bugging him at the plate – if it isn’t the shoulder – so that he can come back raking right when the Cubs need him most.