Javier Baez talks about the reason for his down years:
“Honestly, all I can say is I didn’t make any excuses when I struggled for three years,” Baez told ESPN recently. “It’s not that I wasn’t working. I was pretty much playing hurt. I didn’t want to get out of the lineup. I didn’t want to miss time. I had good energy the whole time. I didn’t have a negative attitude. It was f– –ing frustrating for sure, but I’m the same guy every day. My teammates know that.
“I kept pushing it and pushing it and A.J. [Hinch] was the one that pulled me aside and pretty much told me we have to do something about it.”
ESPN.com
A long time theme of this blog is that poor performances are best explained by some kind of injury. I would not be surprised if Patrick Corbin pitched hurt for the last five seasons. It doesn’t take much to throw off an athlete’s game.
I’m replying a couple days late, but this was the case too, with late-career Joey Votto. In Aug. 2022, Votto’s season was shut down when he announced he needed shoulder surgery for his rotator cuff. Amazingly (to me), he said he’d had issues with it for SEVEN years! He made comments to the fact that he dealt with it the best he could, with varying degrees of success from month to month and year to year (he put together an MVP-worthy season in 2017 & was still pretty good in 2021). But by summer of 2022, he had trouble sleeping and even lifting his arm.
There’s so much that we as fans don’t know about what personal injuries a particular athlete is going through. I often think of an injured Baker Mayfield trying to gut out a season for the Browns — because he didn’t want to let his teammates and coaches (and fans) down by ending his season prematurely… when in fact it would have been better for everyone involved if he had been shut down & was able to get healthy. It didn’t benefit him or the team for him to continue trying to play with his injury. And his poor performance ended up ruining his relationship with the Browns.
Anyway, well said David!