Mariners infielder Shed Long Jr. sidelined with stress fracture in shin
This season of opportunity is ending sooner than expected for Mariners second baseman Shed Long Jr.
The 25-year-old was Seattle’s every day starter when the club broke camp, but will now wrap up his first full season in the big leagues on the injured list.
Long was placed on the 10-day IL with a stress fracture in his right shin Friday, meaning he is unlikely to return during this final two-week stretch of the regular season.
“Unfortunately his season is probably over,” Mariners manager Scott Servais said during a video call with reporters Saturday.
Long is now undergoing tests and speaking with doctors about how to proceed with the injury.
“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “But, it’s a relief at the same time, because I haven’t been able to feel myself playing at 100% and see what I can really do. It’s a relief to know that I can take care of this and come back and feel good, and be able to move and not hurt.”
Long has been dealing with the shin discomfort since spring training, and it gradually got worse, he said. Last month against the Rangers in Arlington, he fouled a ball off that area of his leg, only aggravating it more.
“It’s something I’ve been battling through, but it was my choice to battle through it, and I wanted to,” he said. “I mean, who wants to come off the field? Definitely not me.”
There have been good days and bad days, he said, but he has consistently felt discomfort to some degree.
Following an impressive final month with the Mariners last season as a rookie — he hit .289/.337/.518 during his September promotion with five doubles, a triple, four homers, 10 RBI and six walks to 20 strikeouts — Long entered the year as the presumptive starter at second base.
He started 32 of his 34 games played there, and while he made strides on defense, his bat didn’t show up in the same way it did last fall. Long slashed at .171/.242/.291 with five doubles, three homers, nine RBI, four stolen bases and 11 walks to 37 strikeouts through 168 plate appearances, and was on an 0-for-7 slide before he landed on the IL.
“I know he didn’t have the season he was looking to have,” Servais said. “I do think Shed made a lot of progress in other areas of his game. I thought his defense and the amount of work he put in getting comfortable at second base, and all of the nuances around the bag and the different arm angles and throws, I thought he made huge improvement there. Just offensively it wasn’t the season he was hoping to have, and just never really got on a good roll. I thought there were signs of him starting to come out of it, but just wasn’t able to consistently get the results he was looking for.”
Though, Long said he didn’t know if the shin pain caused his offensive production to dip.
“I’m not a guy that will say that this happened because of this, or I wasn’t swinging well because of this,” Long said. “I mean, I just wasn’t getting it done. It probably impacted me more than I know, but that was something that I wasn’t trying to think about.
“It was my choice to play through it, so I was going out and trying to do what I had to do to help the team win.”
Long was expected to move into more of a utility role following the trade deadline, with the acquisition of Ty France from the Padres and the return of Dylan Moore from the IL, but will instead sit out the rest of the season, and turn his focus to getting an opportunity with the Mariners again next spring.
“The one thing I will say with a lot of our players, they’re so young,” Servais said. “You don’t want to take a small little sample size and say, ‘OK this guy isn’t going to get it, or he’s not going to figure it out.’ You have to be patient with it, because very few guys just come to the big leagues and just stick for six, eight, 10 years. It doesn’t happen all that frequently.
“Guys come up, they get a little success, maybe they struggle a little bit. Sometimes they have to take a step back whether that’s a reduced role or even oftentimes a trip back to the minor leagues before they come back. We have a lot of guys that are young. They’ve got a lot of upside. We still love Shed. Definitely think there’s opportunity for him, but obviously now we can’t get a look at that again until next year.”
