Spencer Torkelson and Ridiculous Baseball Injuries

Detroit Tigers prospects like Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson are so skilled and physically impressive it can sometimes be easy to forget how young they still are. Torkelson was six when the first iPhone was released. Greene can’t drink legally for another seven months.

Young people make a lot of poor decisions. They aren’t the only ones who make poor decisions, of course, but they are really quite adept at screwing up. I say this as both the parent of a teenager, and as a recovering teenager myself.

And so it is that Spencer Torkelson, probably the single most exciting player in Detroit Tigers camp right now, has taken himself out of spring training action for about a week. He didn’t get hurt on the field, and he wasn’t being irresponsible and getting into bar fights.

Spencer Torkelson tried to open a can without a can opener.

Young people strike again. Chris McCosky offers the details:

According to two sources familiar with the incident, Torkelson was making dinner at a house he shares with Jake Rogers and Riley Greene. They didn’t have a can opener in the house so he tried to improvise with a wine opener that had a serrated, half-inch knife on the other end. The knife folded up on him, making a half-inch cut in the index finger. He took three stitches to close the wound. No muscle or tendons were affected.

It’s a perfectly understandable incident, and almost quaint in a way. It’s nice Spencer Torkelson still acts like a dumb kid and hasn’t has his hands insured by Lloyd’s of London. He even made fun of himself on Twitter.

In the end this little injury won’t matter too much. Spencer Torkelson should be back swinging the bat and fielding grounders in a week or two, and presumably he’ll be a bit more careful around sharp objects.

But this incident did remind us of a few more ridiculous injuries to baseball players. Hit the jump to read about them.

Trevor Bauer and the Drone

Trevor Bauer is many things to many different people. He’s a talented pitcher. He’s a multi-millionaire. He’s the leader of an army of Internet trolls. He’s a terrible rapper. He’s been on the leading edge of advancements in pitching over the past decade. And he’s a drone hobbyist.

Hobbies are great, and professional athletes need breaks from the grind like anyone else. But during the 2016 American League Championship Series Bauer sliced open his finger while doing routine drone maintenance and was forced to miss his Game 2 start. Bauer did start Game 3, but that resulted in the spectacle you see above, when his cut opened and he went full Red Wedding on the field. Bauer was forced to leave the game after retiring just two batters. Cleveland went on to win the series, but Bauer wasn’t terribly effective in the World Series, going 0-2 with a 5.40 ERA in one of the tightest Fall Classics ever.

Yoenis Céspedes and the Wild Boar

Yoenis Céspedes first breached the public consciousness with an amazing hype video that concluded with footage of the Céspedes family at a pig roast. It took nearly a decade, but the pigs got their revenge.

Céspedes became a fan favorite in New York after the Tigers traded him to the Mets at the 2015 trade deadline. He went wild in Queens, batting .287 with 17 home runs and 44 RBIs in just 57 games with the club, helping them to the World Series. He re-signed in New York and had a good 2016 season, but then the injuries struck. He missed half of 2017, then most off 2018, and in 2019 the team announced Céspedes had suffered a severe leg injury in a violent fall on his ranch in Florida. It was widely assumed he fell off a horse, but then the details emerged:

The Post has learned all involved parties agreed that Cespedes was injured on the ranch stepping into a hole after an interaction with a wild boar.

Welp.