KANSAS CITY, MO. – Irredeemable optimist that he is, Royce Lewis considers his doctor’s diagnosis — that he probably won’t play for the Twins again until mid-May or even June — to be good news: He won’t miss the entire season.
“I wouldn’t even call this long. It’s not the knee, so we know it’s not surgery,” Lewis said Saturday, shortly after the Twins put their third baseman on the 10-day injured list and recalled prospect Austin Martin. “Not going under the knife is very important. This is a win.”
It doesn’t feel like it to the Twins, who will once again be without one of their most dynamic hitters for an extended time. But yes, it’s better than missing an entire year after knee surgery, which Lewis, though still only 24, has done twice.
“It’s really hard news to get. I mean, you feel terrible for Royce, having to deal with this after everything else he’s gone through,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “You feel bad for the team as well. We got three innings out of him, and it was a pretty amazing contribution.”
It was a first-inning home run, a third-inning line-drive single, and then, disaster. Lewis rounded second base after Carlos Correa doubled into the left-field corner and limped into third base. A magnetic resonance imaging test found “a significant strain” of the quad muscle in his right leg, Twins President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey said, an injury that will require a month’s worth of rest before Lewis can even begin working out again.
“He’s a unique healer. He seems to come back pretty quickly. He’s already feeling better than he felt yesterday. He’s very optimistic and that’s the way we want to approach this,” Falvey said. “It’s going to be a few weeks to figure out how it’s recovering. But it’s significant enough that he needs some time to build back. We’ll check back in a month, in terms of what the next few weeks after that look like.”
Lewis will return to the Twin Cities after Sunday’s series finale to connect with the Twins medical team. He said Dr. Chris Camp, the Twins medical director, had consulted with doctors who work in other sports like football and soccer to determine the best course of treatment. One thing he learned, Lewis said: It probably could not have been avoided.
“It’s just part of the game. Truly, it’s out of your hands,” Lewis said. “You work as hard as you can for something, and it’s taken away from you. I feel like I ran [the same way] I have all spring. I ran first-to-third plenty of times. It was nothing out of the usual, just a normal play. [It was] a freak deal.”
