Injuries Will Sideline the Astros’ Alvarez and Blue Jays’ Bichette Until the Playoffs — or Longer

The Astros have spent nearly the entire season missing the superstar version of Yordan Alvarez, first because the 28-year-old slugger struggled during March and April and then because he missed nearly four months due to a fractured metacarpal in his right hand. He heated up upon returning to the lineup in late August, but on Monday night he sprained his left ankle, an injury likely to sideline him for the rest of the regular season and perhaps longer. He’s not the only American League star whose best hope for returning to the lineup is during the playoffs, as Blue Jays shortstop Bo Bichette has been ruled out for the rest of the regular season with a sprained ligament in his left knee.

Alvarez suffered his injury in the first inning of Monday night’s game against the Rangers in Houston. He followed Jeremy Peña’s leadoff single by drawing a walk against Jack Leiter. Carlos Correa then hit a weak comebacker toward the mound; Leiter tried to throw while on the ground but airmailed the ball far beyond the reach of first baseman Jake Burger. Peña scored easily as Adolis García retrieved the ball, but the right fielder’s throw home was nearly in time to nab Alvarez, who instead of sliding went in standing up, only to slip on home plate. He immediately began limping, had to be helped into the dugout, and did not return to the field — he started in left field — when the half-inning ended. Instead, right fielder Jesús Sánchez shifted to left and Zach Cole entered the game in right. Cole, who homered off the Braves Hurston Waldrep in his first major league plate appearance on September 12, hit his second homer off Leiter in the fifth inning of what turned out to be a 6-3 win.

“When he stepped on home plate, I had a front-row seat,” Peña said after the game. “His ankle kind of twisted, and when he had to plant again, I saw it twist again. And it’s not pretty. You don’t want to see that, especially Yordan Alvarez. We need him.”

You can see video of the play in question here, but you’re on your own if you want to seek out the still shot of Alvarez’s leg bending in ways that it shouldn’t. Colleague Dan Szymborski invoked Stretch Armstrong in his piece on the teams most impacted by injuries this year, which should give you an idea.

Alvarez, who left Daikin Park on crutches and in a walking boot, underwent an MRI on Tuesday. Manager Joe Espada called the sprain “pretty significant,” but did not say whether the Astros would put him on the injured list or offer a timetable for his return.

“This is going to keep him out for a while,” Espada told reporters. “Let’s not get into days, weeks, any of that. We are going to take one day at a time, but this is going to take some time to heal.”

“It’s a Grade II [sprain], I’m told by a trusted source, and that the swelling was immediate and also significant,” wrote Will Carroll at Under the Knife. “Not a high ankle sprain, but a standard one and even on the low end of the standard return time, Alvarez will be into the playoffs. It’s normally a three-to-six-week quote for this, and his case has complications,” referring to Alvarez’s injury history, which includes his missing all but two games in 2020 due to arthroscopic surgery on both knees.

That’s a significant blow for the Astros (84-69), who slipped past the Mariners (83-69) and into first place on Wednesday by completing a three-game sweep of the Rangers in Houston, clinching their season series in the process. As I noted in Wednesday’s look at the playoff picture, Houston led the division by 3 1/2 games as of September 5 but lost ground to the Mariners, who won 10 straight, by going 6-4 during that span. Seattle’s streak finally came to an end with a loss to the Royals on Wednesday night.

Timing-wise, the Wild Card round starts on September 30, two weeks from this past Tuesday, with the Division Series on October 4, still inside the three-week best-case-scenario window. The ALCS is scheduled to start on October 12, and the World Series on October 24, with the latter date just shy of six weeks from the point of the injury.

Alvarez hit just .210/.306/.340 (74 wRC+) before landing on the IL on May 5 with what was originally diagnosed as a muscle strain in his right hand. In late May, after his rehab suffered a setback, the team — which might be the majors’ most tight-lipped when it comes to specificity about injuries — revealed that he had actually fractured his fourth metacarpal, but that the bone was 60% healed. He suffered another setback in early July, and only returned to the lineup on August 26. In 78 plate appearances since returning, he hit .369/.462/.569 (183 wRC+) with three home runs, though he entered Monday in a 2-for-18 slump after a sizzling 21-for-40 stretch.

Elite hitters don’t grow on trees, as the Astros were reminded during Alvarez’s previous absence, which Szymborski estimated as the majors’ single most impactful in terms of 2025 WAR (3.3), with the Astros leading the majors at 17.6 lost WAR due to all of their injuries, which have been particularly heavy on the pitching side. Even including Alvarez’s 32 games as a designated hitter, the team’s DHs have combined for an 85 wRC+ (.227/.291/.383), the fifth-worst mark in the majors. Jose Altuve has been the most effective DH fill-in, hitting .268/.332/.484 (124 wRC+) in 211 plate appearances there while giving the Astros defense a boost with his absence, as his metrics at both second base and in left field are brutal. Espada has also relied heavily on whichever catcher isn’t starting behind the plate that day, but both Victor Caratini (.180/.261/.290, 55 wRC+ in 115 PA as a DH) and Yainer Diaz (.206/.240/.258, 34 wRC+ in 104 PA as a DH) have fared poorly in that capacity. Alvarez himself DH’d in just nine of the 19 games he played after returning, manning left field for nine as well and pinch-hitting once. As with DH, left field has been a sore spot for the Astros; their players at that position — including Altuve in 45 games — have hit a combined .230/.309/.359 (86 wRC+), the last of which is the majors’ seventh-lowest mark at the position. For their two games since Alvarez’s injury, both against righties (Merrill Kelly and Jacob deGrom), Diaz and Caratini split the DH and catcher duties, with Altuve at second, Sánchez in left and Cole in right.

While Espada may move the pieces around, Cole is the most likely beneficiary of increased playing time in Alvarez’s absence. The lefty-swinging 25-year-old, whom the team drafted out of Ball State University in the 10th round in 2022, hit a combined .279/.377/.539 (151 wRC+) with 19 homers and 18 steals in 82 games at Double-A Corpus Christi and 15 at Triple-A Round Rock before being called up in late August. In his first six games in the majors, he’s hit a scorching .333/.429/.667 (201 wRC+) in 21 plate appearances, but also struck out seven times.

Those strikeouts are an issue for Cole. Just before the All-Star break, Eric Longenhagen graded Cole as a 35+ FV prospect based on reservations about his hit tool, which he assigned a present value of 30 and a 35 FV (other outlets concur). Longenhagen was more impressed by Cole’s running (60) and throwing (70). Here’s the report:

Cole barely played in his first two years at Ball State before breaking out enough as a junior to earn a 10th-round selection. Now he’s pushing 25 and threading the needle of being too toolsy not to be intriguing, but too unrefined to project him to actualize his plus raw pop. Lithe and long-levered, Cole has the range to play a passable center field and the cannon to be a defensive asset in right. He has a good eye, big-time juice, and enough loft to leave the yard in any direction. But this is a long swing with extraneous movement and an imprecise barrel. Cole is repeating Double-A and also repeating his 38% strikeout rate from last year, driven largely by in-zone whiff. Such a flawed hit tool likely resigns Cole to being an up-and-down fifth outfielder sort, but the type who has an incredible feat of strength or two mixed in between all the whiffs.

Cole did lower his strikeout rate to 35.1% by the time he was called up, but that’s still alarmingly high. Even so, it’s not out of the question that the occasional knock can offset those woes, at least for the short term.

As for Bichette, he sprained the posterior collateral ligament of his left knee on September 6, when he collided with Yankees catcher Austin Wells while being thrown out at the plate in the sixth inning. He finished the game, but an MRI taken a couple of days later revealed the sprain, and so he was placed on the IL retroactive to September 7. The Blue Jays did not offer a timeline for his return at that point.

On Monday, the 27-year-old shortstop received a second opinion on the knee from Dr. Dan Cooper in Dallas. “Along with double-checking the diagnosis, Bichette and the Blue Jays wanted to look ahead on this injury to make sure that his eventual rehab would come without any additional risks or stumbling blocks,” wrote MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson.

The follow-up “confirmed what the first [diagnosis] was, which is just a sprain to his knee and nothing further required,” said manager John Schneider on Tuesday. “It’s rest and rehab, then getting back as soon as he can.” Toward that end, Bichette won’t play again during the regular season but might resume baseball activity later this week.

After a dismal 2024 season in which he hit .225/.277/.322 (70 wRC+) and was limited to 81 games due to a right calf strain and a fractured right middle finger (a season-ender sustained a day after his return from a two-month IL stint), Bichette has hit a robust .311/.357/.483 (133 wRC+) with 18 homers and 3.7 WAR. He’s a pending free agent, and while this will be the fourth time in the past six seasons in which he’s helped Blue Jays reach the playoffs, they have yet to win a single postseason game on his watch.

With Bichette out, the Blue Jays have shifted Ernie Clement and Andrés Giménez — both strong defenders at second base — to shortstop, sometimes pairing the two and other times using Isiah Kiner-Falefa or Davis Schneider at second. They’re willing to consider using Bichette as their designated hitter before he’s ready to play defense; based on this year’s metrics at least (-12 DRS, -10 FRV), that’s no great loss. Such a configuration would shift the stress on the defense by pushing George Springer back to the outfield; he’s started 32 games in right, nine in left, and eight in center, compared to 79 at DH. His defensive metrics have not been good (a combined -8 DRS, -7 FRV), particularly in right, but he at least gives the Blue Jays a variety of options.

“In a perfect world, if [Bichette] can come back and play short, great,” Schneider said earlier this week. “With how he’s moving, it seems to me that hitting will be a little bit in front of everything else…. if we can get his bat back, hell yeah, I’ll take that.” The manager believes Bichette’s athleticism will help him adapt his swing, as Matheson summarized:

Bichette is known for the big, athletic leg kick, but he also has a simpler approach where that front toe stays on the ground. Bichette’s swing is as versatile as anyone’s in baseball, so if the power isn’t going to come from his lead leg, it could come from the torque of his body and quick hands. If nothing else, it’s worth a try.

While the Astros remain in a dogfight for a playoff spot, the Blue Jays have comparatively smooth sailing for the rest of the regular season. At 89-63, they have four-game leads over the Yankees (85-67) in the AL East and the Tigers (85-67) for the league’s top seed; they won their season series against both teams (8-5 against the Yankees, 4-3 against the Tigers), giving them an extra cushion if things start to go sideways. The extra few days produced by winning a bye can only help Bichette.

As the playoffs approach, it’s particularly unsettling when star players go down. We want to see teams compete for the championship at full strength instead of having their chances significantly affected by injuries. Unfortunately, bodies don’t always cooperate toward that end, and while both the Astros and Blue Jays are putting brave faces on these injuries, with short series looming, it’s entirely possible we won’t get to see much more of what Alvarez and Bichette can do.