A-Rod Heads to Surgery After All

First, Alex Rodriguez was having surgery to repair a cyst in his hip and would be out about 10 weeks. Then it turned out he had a labral tear as well, surgery for which would normally cost him 4-6 months. Then the Yankees and Alex decided to try draining the cyst and playing through the season with the injury, waiting until after for surgery. Now, we find out that Rodriguez is in fact going under the knife, having arthroscopic surgery to try and repair the labral tear.

However, the current estimate/best hope is that Rodriguez will only miss 6-9 weeks. How is that possible? Well, for one, the surgery is set just to repair the tear itself. The 4-6 month rehab from a typical version of this injury comes from issues with the hip and femur bones that result from the tear. For now, Alex Rodriguez will wait on that part of the surgery, if needed, until the off season.

However, it’s still not all candy hearts. According to Stephania Bell the normal rehab for just a labral repair is 10-16 weeks. Granted that A-Rod is a motivated professional athlete and thus, we would expect a shorter time frame, it is not unrealistic to expect that nine weeks may be optimistic, much less six. Another good point that Bell brings up is that A-Rod has already and will miss the rest of Spring Training with the surgery and rehab. How fast will he be able to jump right back into baseball?

All told, I think 10 weeks, about mid-May is the best reasonable case for the A-Rod we expect to come back. That’s about 25% of the season gone. If he does manage six weeks, he might only miss 15-20 games, but if there’s any delays in the rehab, or he takes more than a week to get back to full speed after recovering, we could be looking more at a June return. And if there are any major set backs, still possible, it could end up being a lost season entirely.

10 weeks was/is going to be a big blow to the Yankees. If it turns out to be longer than that, well, I don’t know in what looks to be a super tight AL East race.