More of the latest on Jason Heyward, who has been out a couple days while feeling under the weather. The Cubs right fielder – and one of their best bats this year – left the Cubs game on Sunday because he was feeling fatigued and having trouble catching his breath. Since then, he’s had a number of tests to make sure he’s OK (the details have remained unspecified), and could be close to a return.
Cubs manager David Ross confirmed after last night’s game that Heyward passed all his tests, and was available to pinch-hit last night if necessary.
“He’s passed every test. I talked to him. He was available to pinch-hit,” Ross told Cubs.com after the game. “I didn’t know if that was going to be the case going into the game. But, talking to him, he came into my office, it was nice to see a smile on his face. He’s been through a lot of tests the last couple days and he felt good. Talked to him after the game. He feels good and feels like he’ll be ready to go [Wednesday].”
Your hope is that whatever Heyward was experiencing was just a matter of him being a little physically run down – because sports – or a very minor bug. You can understand why he and the Cubs and the doctors would be extra cautious at a time like this.
No one has mentioned COVID-19 in this context, and Heyward has apparently continued to test negative. But you are reminded that it is part of the protocol that if a player has symptoms, he has to sit down for some time while additional testing takes place (we saw this earlier in the season with Kris Bryant, who never tested positive). So, even if no one has mentioned COVID-19 as an actual concern in this instance, when you’ve got a guy experiencing fatigue and shortness of breath, he was probably always going to have to miss at least a couple days for some more rounds of testing.
Glad to hear that it’s so far, so good on Heyward, and I hope he’s in the lineup tonight for the Cubs. On the year, Heyward is hitting a whopping .300/.415/.540 with a 154 wRC+, and has already been worth 1.4 WAR in just 35 games. (He had a nice rebound year in 2019, you’ll recall, and even then he was worth only 1.9 WAR over 147 games.)