SAN FRANCISCO — Flying home on the team charter earlier this week, manager Gabe Kapler couldn’t help but notice Evan Longoria, with a splint on his right hand, and think of the third baseman who has been relegated to the clubhouse and the dugout Friday for Opening Day festivities.
“With Longo, given how competitive he is, I think it’s especially tough,” Kapler said. “He’s a professional. He’s preparing for the moment that he is ready, but there’s no question that this is a challenge for him.”
The good news is that the Giants and Longoria may not have to wait much past the start of May for that moment to come. Longoria, who had surgery last Tuesday to repair a ligament in his right index finger, was enjoying the free movement of all his fingers as he sat in front of his locker Friday morning. Gone was the brace that immobilized his finger for 10 days following the operation, replaced by a layer of medical tape, covering the area where he also had the stitches from the procedure removed.
The timeline for recovery from the operation was pinned at four to six weeks, but by going under the knife last week, Longoria believes he can be back within about a month of the start of the season.
“It’s a pretty straightforward surgery and it’s only 4-6 weeks, in the grand scheme of a full season, if you can … have a week and a half head start to get ready and hopefully then it’s just a month,” Longoria said.
The damage in his finger was a lingering effect of taking a pitch to the hand from Mets closer Edwin Diaz last Aug. 18. The blow knocked him out for two weeks but he returned to the lineup without undergoing surgery.
He played through the pain last season but never regained his form from before the injury, batting .200/.283/.388 over the final month of the season. But it is the throws from third base that eventually convinced Longoria to opt for surgery.
“I don’t think I could go the whole season trying to play through this. I definitely wouldn’t be effective,” Longoria said. “I couldn’t really throw. … I’m going to try to be fully healthy with this and hopefully go out there for five months and play good baseball.”
Instead of Longoria, Wilmer Flores is starting at third base in the Giants’ Opening Day lineup.
La Stella dealing with scar tissue
At second base, Thairo Estrada took the spot expected to be occupied by Tommy La Stella, who began the season on the 10-day injured list despite appearing in a couple Cactus League games as he neared the end of his rehab from offseason surgery on his Achilles sheath.
The Giants have not provided a timeline for La Stella’s return, and he said he is taking the process day-by-day. His swing appeared to be in midseason form in two Cactus League games, slugging a couple extra-base hits in four at-bats. But the acceleration required while running the bases and the side-to-side movement needed to play defense proved too much of an obstacle to make the Opening Day roster.
La Stella and the Giants discussed carrying him as a designated hitter but decided to play it safe instead.
“It was always up in the air, so we understood this was a realistic possibility,” La Stella said. “We wanted to make sure we weren’t sacrificing what would hopefully be long-term success in this process for short-term gains now.”
A little more than five months removed from surgery, La Stella is still feeling discomfort in the back of his left ankle, where he has a scar of about two inches from the operation. Dead tissue left over from the operation is still causing him pain. But after a follow-up consultation last week with Dr. Robert Anderson, who performed the operation, La Stella isn’t concerned.
“There’s always scar tissue elements of this that there’s really nothing other than just breaking through it, and that can take time,” La Stella said. “It’s a little more challenging than getting it from a manual perspective. It’s mostly just using it will gradually break it down.”
Wade resumes baseball activity
LaMonte Wade Jr. had been totally shut down since he exited a Cactus League game last Monday with what doctors determined to be a bone bruise in his left knee. But he has slowly begun to ramp up baseball activity in the past few days.
There is still no official timeline for Wade’s return, but he has started to play catch and take swings, though not against live pitching.
The knee, he said, was “responding really good” but that it was “still in the early process” and he has only just begun to work out on consecutive days.
“The treatment’s been making it feel a lot better, so just hopefully continue trending in the right direction,” Wade said.
Wade almost certainly would have found a spot in the Opening Day lineup against Marlins right-hander Sandy Alcantara but will be forced to watch from the dugout, alongside La Stella and Longoria. It would have been Wade’s first proper Opening Day, in front of a full house of fans, but he was keeping his spirits up.
“I’m still going be out there with the guys cheering them on and watching the game,” Wade said. “The atmosphere, I assume, is going to be really exciting and fun to be a part of.”