Monday, July 18: The day Grady Sizemore’s career ended. No, he didn’t die in a fire or get mauled by a bear (although that would be quite the news story). Sizemore reinjured his surgically repaired knee sliding into second base during a July 17 game against the Baltimore Orioles. This is the same knee he had surgically “repaired” in 2010 (good ole microfracture), an injury that has made the once vaunted outfielder to look like a shadow of his former self.
It’s not like there’s a laundry list of baseball players that have successfully returned from microfracture surgery. It’s a procedure just recently came into being in the 1980s and really didn’t gain a footing in the sports science until that later part of the 1990s. The sports world is more familiar with the procedure in a basketball context, including such notable patients as Amar’e Stoudemire, Jason Kidd, Tracy McGrady, and Greg Oden. That short list includes some successes and tragic failures. While we’ve seen a handful of full recoveries, the list of players that continue to experience symptoms and/or fail to recover altogether is long and punctuated by exasperation. McGrady was half the man he used to be after his procedure(s), and is still unable to stay on the court for more than a few games at a time. With Oden, a promising career may have come to a crashing end before it ever had a chance to take flight.
With Sizemore, it’s hard to imagine him every recovering to the point where he’s back to being, well, Grady Sizemore. Don’t forget, Sizemore was going to be baseball’s next superstar, with a rare combination of power, speed and charisma. He was a three time All Star and the cornerstone of the Indians offense. A 30-30 player as recently as 2008 (33 HR, 38 SB), Sizemore has just 17 steals in his last 200 games over the course of the last three seasons and is now barely a threat to run. In 61 games in 2011, he hasn’t managed to swipe a single bag, being thrown out twice. While he has hit 28 home runs over that same span, his power too has clearly diminished, with a slugging % of .426 compared to a .491 mark through the first five years of his career. And while he was only a .279 hitter before the injury bug started to take its toll, he’s managed just a .239 AVG since—a below-replacement level outfielder in almost every sense.
Sustaining further injury to an already ailing knee will only serve to exacerbate an already tenuous situation and one that will force the Cleveland Indians to make a difficult decision as a franchise. Sizemore has an $8.5 million team option ($500k buyout), and that number doesn’t seem appropriate for a player with as much obvious downside as Sizemore offers. The questions surrounding Sizemore’s future are varied. If not Cleveland, where? Assuming Sizemore is unable to return to form (and that certainly seems to be the case), what type of player will he be and how much is that player worth on the open market?
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