First, Edwin Díaz closed out Puerto Rico’s win over the Dominican Republic, striking out three to seal a team berth in the next round of the World Baseball Classic. Then, everything stopped.
Surrounded by joyous teammates, Díaz crumpled to the ground amid Puerto Rico’s infield celebration. What seemed at first like perhaps a mild injury soon looked much worse. Díaz was helped into a wheelchair and taken down the tunnel. Left behind were stunned teammates, some of them now in tears, including Díaz’s brother, Alexis.
The Mets—Díaz’s MLB team—announced Thursday that the pitcher will need surgery for a torn patellar tendon in his right knee. With a typical recovery of eight months, he will likely miss the entire season. It represents a nightmare scenario for Díaz himself, of course; for Team Puerto Rico, set to play on without a beloved teammate; for the Mets, figuring out their bullpen anew in a season with championship aspirations. And for the WBC—taking place for the first time in six years, an example of what happens when the biggest stars in the game share one tournament and now an example of what happens when those stars get hurt, too.
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The fear of potential injury has haunted the event from the start. For pitchers, especially, this is often a limitation or a reason not to participate in the first place. The WBC has tried to counter this with certain guardrails: There are mandatory pitch count limits, for instance, and MLB clubs have imposed other specific restrictions on their players’ usage. (For what it’s worth: A study after the last WBC did not find strong evidence of added injury risk by participating in the tournament.) But the worst fear was still precisely this—a star player going down with a potentially devastating injury.
To see Díaz hurt was brutal. There is always a special misery in seeing an injury to a player like this, a talented, dynamic flamethrower whose every outing is not just a master class in pitching but a grand performance unto itself. In the aftermath, there can be a thirst for an explanation. But sometimes there simply is none. Some injuries are just flukes—inexplicable freak accidents—and there’s no exception for the WBC.
The Mets will now likely turn to one of their offseason acquisitions, David Robertson, to close out games. Some other bullpen options also remain available. (Former Yankees reliever Zack Britton is still unsigned and throwing a showcase this week.) For a team as talented as the Mets, this is not an existential blow, but it’s certainly a tough one. And it’s precisely why MLB teams have been hesitant to see their players compete in the WBC—if there’s a long, fraught history of clubs watching their players get injured during international competition in sports like basketball and soccer, here it is in baseball. (MLB teams seek insurance for players who participate for just this reason.) There are fair questions about risk here and who shoulders it. Yet players have the ability to choose to play for their country—whatever might happen in the process.
There can be a natural impulse to search for meaning in sports injuries. To pin down why a player got hurt is to suggest there might be some kind of orderly logic in play here, a foundational sense of fairness, a key to preventing it from happening again. Yet that kind of clarity is rare. Instead, we’re usually left with something far less satisfying, with no one and nothing to blame. The Díaz injury is no different.
Terrible injuries can happen in spring training. They can happen in the World Baseball Classic or in the World Series. They can happen on Opening Day, in the empty innings of a blowout or in an otherwise meaningless game on a getaway day. The history of the sport is littered with strange calamities. A star can blow out his ACL while arguing with an umpire, tear his meniscus trying to throw a pie or injure his leg in the automated tarp machine. (To limit it to Mets players, specifically, is to see that someone can be hurt by a sidewalk curb or a wild boar or a taxi.) A terrible injury can happen in a celebration—see Morales, Kendrys, or Bellinger, Cody. There are some reasonable measures that can be taken to prevent certain injuries. But there is nothing that can be done to stop them entirely. (They could stop playing baseball altogether, of course, but even then players would still be sneezing and separating frozen burgers.) It can be awful. Yet it’s not so much the way of sports as it is just the way of life.
The WBC has largely been a joy so far. The tournament has offered a spirited competition that’s normally unavailable at this time of year—not just in quality of play but in sheer fun. Rosters are shared by brothers and old friends and clusters of All-Stars. There have been upsets and pairings unlike anything we might see in MLB. We’ve seen Czech electrician Ondrej Satoria strike out Shohei Ohtani and 19-year-old complex league pitcher Jacob Steinmetz sit down Manny Machado and Jeremy Peña. The crowds and celebrations have been electric: It’s all been an incredible display of how rich baseball culture is beyond the United States. The WBC is not MLB. It’s something more textured and expansive. And it’s better for it.
The tournament carries as much risk as does any version of baseball—or any version of life—and Díaz’s injury captured that unfortunately well. But it’s worth remembering the moments immediately before the injury, too: Díaz, visibly excited to pitch for his homeland, sharing a roster with his brother for the first time in his life, striking out the side with triple-digit heat and his fearsome slider in front of a sold-out crowd. He’d reportedly said earlier in the week that this win-or-go-home contest against the Dominican Republic would feel “like Game 7 of the World Series.” And for a moment—a second of blissful, frenzied, inchoate joy—it seemed as if it did.
