The Texas Rangers put second baseman Marcus Semien on the injured roster and broke his left foot over the weekend, tracing Thursday’s game. The result of the foul ball hitting the top of the foot, Semien was initially diagnosed with a contusion, but after receiving multiple comments, the diagnosis has been modified to a fracture of the third meta- and lisfranc sprain. Semien turns 35 next month and his last injury is worth il, which is a wrist bruise in 2017, his offensive season is weak, with a .230/.305/.364 triple slash line, but he is still fixed with 2.1 Wars due to his still fixed gloves. The injury is likely to end Semien’s regular season, which could be his 2025 given Texas’ position in the rankings.
I can’t think of many wonderful times to break your feet. Just talking for myself, I might consider a broken foot than I really don’t want to attend a wedding. But Semien is a professional athlete, not an introvert middle-aged baseball analyst, who writes at home about people surrounded by computers and cats, and his team is on the edge. The Cleveland Guardians of Texas swept hard, but those three wins only brought the team back to the .500 mark, with a record of 9-13 in August.
Semien pointed out on Sunday that he did not think the surgery was needed, and he was actually even more worried about Lisfranc Sprain’s concerns:
“Hopefully we can get back to this game and we will see where we are at that time,” Semien said. “I’ll watch it here for a while. What we’re most worried about is just trying to stay intact by staying away from it. If you tear that year, it could be a year. I just want to stay intact and let another fracture heal.”
For those who, like me, get most of the knowledge of human bones from the song Dem Bones:
Your fate is connected to metatarsal
Your third meta bone is attached to the lateral wedge
Your lateral cunieform is connected to the conductor bone
Your sea guide bone is connected to the talus
I heard the words of elattrache!
Or, more helpful, meta bones are bones in the middle of the foot that help bridge the toes and ankles. The outer wedge is one of the “suspension bridges” of the foot, keeping the foot stable. Lisfranc ligaments are like suspended cables that bridge this way and help put everything together. Imagine the inevitable fate of Golden Gate Bridge in any disaster movie in California, and you have a good idea of what is happening in Semien’s feet.
Semien has a good reason to be the most durable player in baseball games today, and has beaten 21 games in 1,145 games since the start of the 2018 season. In baseball, health now can be widely predicted for future health, and even for batsmen, whether we call it a skill or not, Semien’s endurance brings a lot of value to his team, even in his smaller seasons.
Semien’s bats aren’t what they used to be, but the Rangers are still welcome, and they do their best to score consistently throughout the midsummer. Texas has scored two or fewer runs in 49 games this season, making it the fifth largest in baseball, behind only the Royals and the three worst teams in the league (White Sox, Rockies and Pirates). Semien’s April was particularly brutal, with a 0.182/.258/.245 line, but although he still has no preseason forecast since then, hitting a .244/.320/.400 is worthy of respect. This is not my arbitrarily optimistic performance. The projection system both kept him at about .720 OP for the rest of the season, if not feet.
More importantly, Semien may offer offensive abilities than anyone else in Texas will have to play second base for the rest of the year. We expect Ezequiel Duran to get the vast majority of the game time throughout the game, despite his August, and even Steamer, which is our most durable projection system as it focuses on Duran, it can still predict his OPS is .676. The OPS’s Forty Points is a major downgrade, which is the weakest part of the Semien game. Elsewhere in the lineup, Josh Smith needs to provide services in the outfield, and Zips doesn’t predict that Cody Freeman is better than Duran, projecting at .242/.288/.384. A year ago, I might have suggested that Rangers just roll dice and throw Justin Foscue to the scene for six weeks, but he only has 105 WRC++ this year and his bats have to be the ones that carry him.
As of Monday morning, the Zips had a 9.1% chance of entering the playoffs with a 9.1% chance of a healthy SEMINEN dropping, meaning that this injury beat a quarter of the Texas playoffs. Each loss has a significant impact on the fate of the Rangers in the last wildcard team 4 1/2 games behind the Seattle Mariners 30 games away.
The Rangers still get into the playoffs well – sometimes baseball is weird sometimes, and any player can only do a lot of players – but Midnight ticks a little for them this weekend.
