Soriano's surgery set for Tuesday
Posted by Bruce on Sun, 09/13/2009 - 18:02
After today's 5-2 victory over the Reds, the Cubs announced that left fielder Alfonso Soriano will undergo arthroscopic surgery on his left knee Tuesday. Team doctor Stephen Gryzlo will perform the operation.
Soriano will miss the rest of the season, but the Cubs are glad he's having the surgery this week so he can begin his rehab with their training staff before he goes home to the Dominican Republic for the off-season.
Soriano is batting .241 with 20 homers, 55 RBI, an on-base percentage of .303 and a slugging percentage of .423. Lou says you can figure him to bat sixth in next year's lineup, as his days as a leadoff hitter are done.
Because it was inflammation the MRI wouldn't have justified having surgery in May. He was probably going into the trainer's room with a lot of inflammation, lack of mobility and nagging pain. That doesn't justify surgery. Plus, I think Lilly's surgery was just thrown on there since he was going to be out anyways.
""Lilly already was scheduled to miss Saturday's start against the Cincinnati Reds at Wrigley Field because of the shoulder soreness. But MRI exam results showed no major damage, only tendinitis." - I'm guessing that this is similar to what Soriano's knee looked like since Lilly went on the DL with shoulder inflammation.
The Cubs haven't always revealed a lot of info about injuries but from watching him play and knowing what I went through, it was almost the same kind of timeline. If you don't play for 4-6 weeks you can come back great only using PT. With playing and trying to do PT at the same time it almost does no good. He feels great one week and horrible the next until it gets to the point where you just shut him down.
You are correct though, either way he should have taken the time to nip this in the bud in May, I don't disagree there.
Last Summer, Derrick Rose went through something similar after playing in the Summer League. The Bulls shut him down for about a month and he was able to play the entire next season fairly healthy. With Soriano being over 30 it's going to be more difficult, but if he's the hard worker everyone says he is, I woudn't be surprised to see him get back to his norm next season.
Hopefully this will be a bit of a humbling season for Fonzi. He's a proud guy and works extremely hard, but I think he has allowed himself to become careless at the plate and in the field which has put a spotlight on his already weak defense and lack of plate discipline. He's obviously never going to be an above average LF, but he can at least make most of the routine plays and get some outfield assists.
...and I don't understand why this was allowed to go on for as long as it did with no action.
Knee's are straight forward, and a scope done in May would have allowed him to be back healthy in June.
I can hear Hendry now, placing the blame for Soriano's poor performance on his knee and saying he will bounce back and have a great 2010.
A knee injury really isn't all that straightforward. While you are correct in saying that a scope done in May would have had him back in June (probably), teams generally try to work through rehab/physical therapy at first because every time you cut someone open, there could be an issue. Since it's an inflammation injury, at least from what they've said in public, they would have gone the PT route to break down and re-strenghten the muscles around his knee.
I had an issue when I played in college where my outside quad area was so much stronger than my inside quad/groin area that it caused the patella tendon to actually shift and rub against the bone, causing major inflammation. So, for the next 8 weeks I had to have all the muscles surrounding the knee broken down so I could re-strengthen them correctly. This meant a lot of time working the abductor/adductor machines, which I thought was a bit girly.
From watching Fonzi and knowing that he was having issues with his knee there were times when it looked like he was putting in the rehab/PT work and other times when it looked like the PT wasn't working. Now that he's started hobbling around like Kirk Gibson he should just get it scoped and do the PT work so he's ready for ST.
...was hampering him a great deal, a quick MRI (in May) would have revealed whether it was something that required a scope and could clean up what needed to be cleaned up.
Scopes limit the amount of trauma and are not nearly as invasive as "cutting someone open" (Lilly just had one done and was back in 3 weeks). Unless I missed something, I don't believe he even had an MRI until the last couple of weeks, and if that showed surgery was an option they should have done the same thing back in May.
Sure, there are times when rehabiliation is the best option, but it certainly doesn't sound like they did all they could to figure out what was going on with him.