Dustin Pedroia ‘at peace’ with Manny Machado’s career-altering 2017 slide
Nearly four years since the hard slide that started his recurring knee issues, Dustin Pedroia doesn’t have any bad feelings toward Manny Machado.
In April 2017, Machado, then with the Orioles, slid into second base on a double play ball with his studs up, and his follow-through made contact with the back of Pedroia’s knee. Though the second baseman played through the injury the rest of the season, he had surgery that offseason and ultimately played only nine more games the rest of his career, leading to his retirement on Monday.
Asked about that play — Machado insisted at the time that he wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt Pedroia — during his retirement press conference on Monday, the incident seems to be well in Pedroia’s past.
“I’m not upset about anything anymore,” Pedroia said. “That play could’ve happened my rookie year. When you play second base and you play second like me, you hang on the last possible second to get the ball because, you watched it, if there’s a slim chance at a double play, there’s one guy on planet earth who could turn it. And you’re talking to him. It happened. Unfortunately, I just got caught in the wrong position and that was it.
“But I think I’m at peace with everything knowing that I did me and the training staff and the doctors did everything we possibly could’ve to try to continue to play baseball. And we made it back. I played nine games when 90% of the doctors said there’s zero chance you could play. I’m proud of that. The way it ended, it ended that way and that’s OK. I just hope I did enough during the time I had to play to impact everyone. That’s the only thing I care about.”
As a result of that slide, Pedroia ended up having six knee surgeries as he continuously tried to get healthy and return. He revealed Monday that he had a partial knee replacement in December 2020, which made him realize his career was over.
But even after hurting his knee on that slide in 2017, Pedroia battled through it to play 105 games as he batted .293 with seven homers and 62 RBIs. He admitted he was dealing with excruciating pain throughout that 2017 season that made tearing the UCL in his thumb in 2013 feel “like a massage,” but he doesn’t regret playing through it.
“It’s funny, I remember when I got the first MRI after that play, a doctor said, ‘Hey man, you could ruin not only your career but the rest of your life with this injury. You tore all the cartilage off on your medial compartment on your femur and your tibia. Your cleat just got stuck, and it’s a bad deal,’” Pedroia recalled. And I said, ‘Well, can I play?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you could try to. It’s going to go. When it goes, you’ll know.’ So, I just remember everyone there saying, hey, we need you. It was a no-brainer. If I had to do it all over again, it wouldn’t even be a question. Of course I would. You do the things that you can for your teammates, and you play to win. That’s sports. It was pretty painful, but we got through it. …
“We didn’t win that year, but I think it led up to the next year, the way guys looked at playing through pain and injury. That helped a lot in ’18 of our younger guys seeing, if you want to be a champion, you’ve got to go through things to get there. This isn’t all, you just show up, throw your gloves out there and play. It hurts. There’s going to be physical pain to do that. Our guys went through that year and look at what happened. So, I’m proud of every part of playing through what I did.”
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3pRO2ck
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February 01, 2021
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