Well… that’s not what you want to see.
10:45am update to this post, thanks to Justice delos Santos’s reporting: “Jerar Encarnacion said he’ll need about 4-6 weeks to recover. He noted that it was just his left ring finger, not his entire hand.”
Susan Slusser was the first person I saw on the timeline post it, so I’m using her report of Jerar Encarnación’s fractured hand diagnose to present the news: the San Francisco Giants will be without one of their expected Important Bats to start the 2025 season.
Giants say Jerar Encarnacion had a fractured left hand and will get more testing. (Which usually can indicate potential need for surgery).
— Susan Slusser (@susanslusser.bsky.social) 2025-03-22T16:30:41.051Z
In yesterday’s game against Cleveland, Encarnación attempted a diving catch in the outfield which led to his departure:
He had X-rays on his left ringer finger soon after, and today we get the report on its result and it turns out it’s not just the finger, it’s the hand. Without knowing the severity, this is anywhere in the realm of 6-12 weeks of recovery time, and optimistically a couple of weeks of rehab time to get back into game shape (so, 8-14 weeks, in theory).
Outside of Giants fandom, Encarnación is an out-of-options 27-year old corner guy with not much defense and not much pitch selection. In his brief MLB career (58 games), he has an 8:1 strikeouts to walk ratio (66 to 8). But he has great bat speed and hits the ball hard. It’s a skillset Giants fans have grown unaccustomed to and so that’s why it was so easy for him to impress in his brief stint with the team last season.
He was 16-for-53 in Spring Training with a pair of homers and, most importantly, 14 RBI. He was penciled in as the team’s primary DH, too. This is, potentially, a big loss on the offensive side, particularly if Jung Hoo Lee is not ready to start the regular season (though, there’s renewed optimism that he will be after his stated plan to start in tomorrow’s game against the River Cats).
But, it’s worth keeping in mind that the only path the Giants have to scratching and clawing to maybe have the chance to take one shot at possibly competing for the 3rd Wild Card spot is through their pitching and defense, and Encarnacion — as potentially helpful as he might’ve been to the lineup — was neither a pitcher nor a good defender. So, instead of winning games 3 to 2, they’ll just have to win games 2 to 0.
This injury would seem to guarantee a spot for Luis Matos now, and maybe that was never really in doubt. It possibly eases the competition between Brett Wisely and Casey Schmitt, too — on the other hand, despite his reassignment to minor league camp yesterday, there is the matter of veteran Jake Lamb. Encarnación wasn’t a veteran in the same way, but given his age and his overall experience a case could be made that the bench is lacking a Dude Who Has Seen A Lot In Baseball.
Whatever the outcome for the Giants, it’s still a huge bummer for Encarnación.