The strange case of Kyle Tucker and the broken hand

Jesse Rogers of ESPN dropped the injury news about Kyle Tucker last night, and as could be expected, the online takes by Cub fans have included lots of breathless condemnations of the front office and Craig Counsell. I’ve seen quite a few posts calling for people to be fired over the information that has come to light.

But I think it would be good to take a closer look at the timeline of when the injury occured, Tucker’s performance afterward, when the injury healed and Tucker’s batting slump to have a more informed opinion.

The Timeline as we know it

6/1 – Tucker injures his hand on a slide against the Cincinnati Reds. Initial Imaging show no break, but Tucker is rested for a couple of games

6/4-6/30 – Tucker comes back into the lineup, and has his best month, statistically, in June, slashing .311/.404/.578.

6/? – As some point in June, more imaging was done on Tucker’s hand, and it showed a hairline fracture between the ring and pinkie fingers on his right hand

6/? – Later in June, another image was taken, and the fracture appeared to be healing

6/? or 7/? – As some point additional imaging was taken, and the fracture was shown to be healed

6/28 – Tucker goes 4-5 with a double and a home run at Houston.

6/29 – 7/18 – Tucker has only 2 extra-base hits (both doubles) in a stretch of 14 games. But he gets on-base via a hit or walk in all but one of those games, and scores 9 runs.

7/19 – Tucker his a home run in Boston, that last one that he hit up to this point.

7/20 – 8/18 – Tucker only has 2 extra base hits in 24 games. Although, he still gets on base in 20 of those games and scores 9 runs.

7/22 – Tucker fouls a ball off his knee against the Royals and is given a day off

8/19 – 8/20 – Tucker is benched

8/20 – The news comes out about his fractured hand, which has since healed.

8/21 – Tucker is back in the lineup, batting 2nd

So what does it mean

Looking at this timeline, it is really difficult to say how much impact the hand injury has had on Tucker’s slump. He was able to play through it to great effect in June, but his slugging disappeared in July. The correlation is unmistakable, but correlation does not equal causation. And the Cubs may have not wanted to release information about the injury to prevent other teams from using the information against Tucker when he was hitting.

He was still a very productive hitter in July, getting on base at a nearly 40% clip, which is extremely valuable, even if he is not producing his expected slugging. At that point, any replacement may not have provided the same level of value, but we can’t really know this.

Obviously, the numbers in August have fallen off a cliff, and it is legitimate to question why he was not given more time off or dropped in the order. My guess is that teams tend to want to allow their star players to work through their slumps on the field. And if there is no current medical evidence of an injury, and the player is saying that the slump is not injury related, you can’t just put the player on the IL.

The only option is benching, and with Tucker’s production in July, it is understandable that they would think they would get at least that level of value from his, if not more. With the benefit of hindsight, we can easily see that it was a mistake to keep playing Tucker, as he was not able to break out of his slump, leading to frustration on his part and booing from the fans when he did not run out a couple of ground balls.

No one, possibly not even Tucker, knows for sure if and/or how much the injury played into his slump. . It certainly makes sense that it could be some of most of the issue, but we’ll never know for sure. Could the foul ball off his knee have contributed? Possibly. But for people to say that Cubs personnel should be fired over the situation is, in my opinion, ludicrous.

What’s next?

So, belatedly, Tucker has been given several days off. I’m assuming additional imaging has confirmed that his hand is fully healed. And as I write this, it looks like he is back in the lineup today.

Hopefully the two days off will help Tucker get back into a better frame of mind. It will be interesting to see how the crowd reacts. I’m guessing the online communality will be skeptical of the decision.

The other issue is the timing of the injury announcement, and who was the source to Jesse Rogers. If this is coming from Tucker’s agent, to deflect some of the criticism toward him, which has made the front office and manager look like the bad guys, I could see it having negative implications on him returning to Chicago after this season.

However, if the front office leaked the news to take some of the heat off of Tucker, it might be a positive in the relationship. We will see if anyone breaks the news about who broke the news.

Overall, I think this is a great example of people making knee-jerk proclamations online when they don’t have or have not consumed all of the available information. But the chances of that changing are lower than the Colorado Rockies making the playoff this year.