Dave Roberts on Corey Seager’s rehab: ‘It’s quicker than I would have expected’

Wednesday marks 25 days since Corey Seager was hit by a pitch that broke the fifth metacarpal in his right hand. Initial diagnosis had the Dodgers shortstop missing at least four weeks, if not up to two months.

There’s no clarity in Seager’s actual return timetable, though it doesn’t seem so far off as it once did.

“It’s quicker than I would have expected,” manager Dave Roberts said Tuesday. “You’ve got a young body that certainly heals pretty quickly, and you’ve got an eager player. So it kind of lends itself to that.”

Seager accompanied the Dodgers on the current road trip to Atlanta and Pittsburgh, in part because it was more efficient than to leave part of the training staff in Los Angeles only for him. Seager spoke with reporters on site in Atlanta on Saturday — here is Bill Plunkett’s summary in the Orange County Register — and revealed he’s been getting weekly scans on his hand to track the progress of his bone healing.

But he’s also been adding baseball activities, slowly but surely. He’s been able to play catch and take ground balls, and recently started swinging a bat with his left hand. Roberts said once Seager can start swinging with both hands, a return should take a couple weeks from there. So a return prior to the All-Star break is possible.

“When you start taking the two-hand swings, given the fact that he’s already done the rotation stuff, the core stuff, the one-handed swings, it’s a pretty quick ramp up,” Roberts said. “I’m sure he’s going to be standing in on bullpens to gauge velocity and the spinning of the baseball.”

Links

Ross Stripling’s GOATS: On the Bump podcast — a tremendous listen — features Stripling and another current major league pitcher remembering an all-time great. This week, Walker Buehler is the guest, discussing Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez.

Ben Clemens at FanGraphs was enthralled by a pair of bunt attempts by Julio Urías against Ian Anderson on Friday in Atlanta, one very high and one quite low.

Patrick Dubuque at Baseball Prospectus argues that, with third basemen playing further back than ever before with impunity, there are advantages to dropping down a bunt.

Jon Greenberg at The Athletic detailed the current state of major league announcers traveling with teams to broadcast road games on-site. Very generally, it’s up to each team at this point — no Dodgers announcer has traveled to road games yet this season — with this caveat: “MLB isn’t holding up individual team travel, not as long as the team is at the 85 percent vaccination mark and the broadcasters are vaccinated.”

Dave Roberts was a guest on High Heat on MLB Network, and told Alanna Rizzo, “We’ve leaned a lot on our starters early on, kid of preserving our pen as we go down the home stretch. Hopefully we can kind of pull back on the starter usage and rely a little bit more on the pen down the stretch.”

Here’s a longer clip of said interview:

In case you missed our friends at Secret Base, they detailed the beef history between Pedro Martinez and Mike Piazza, teammates briefly with the Dodgers who both got away on their way to the Hall of Fame. A clip: