PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. -- Upon returning to Mets camp Sunday morning, Francisco Lindor spent his time bouncing amongst the back fields, the batting cage, the weight room and the clubhouse. With a left hand still heavily bandaged following surgery to repair a stress reaction in his hamate bone, Lindor could not participate in baseball drills.
He wanted to be involved with team activities anyway, even if that meant nothing more than loitering while others worked.
“It is very important, because we have a lot of new faces that I want to get to know and I wanted to interact with them,” Lindor said. “It just makes me feel good to be outside … with the guys, hanging out with them and being a player. It sucks that I can’t be out there doing everything they do, but just to be around the guys, it definitely feels good. We spend four months in the offseason wishing for this day to show up, and here we are.”
For Lindor, a more important date is Opening Day, scheduled for March 26 against the Pirates. While it’s far too early to know with any degree of certainty whether Lindor will be ready at that time, his “goal is to be there.”
Lindor can’t do much for the next week or so, until doctors remove his stitches. Even then, he won’t be able to participate in a full slate of baseball activities until much later in camp. But the return-to-play timetable for his operation is six weeks, which would put Lindor on the precipice of Opening Day. So long as he recovers on that expected timeline, he can theoretically toe the line at Citi Field.
“He’s obviously frustrated,” manager Carlos Mendoza said, “but he’s in a good spot as far as attacking the rehab process, which he’s already doing.”
While Lindor has routinely dealt with hamate soreness in the past, it has typically gone away without issue. This year was different, likely the cause of “wear and tear over the years,” as he put it. During a Feb. 6 workout at the team’s complex, Lindor began experiencing enough discomfort to alert team trainers, who sent him for medical testing. Those images were inconclusive, but follow-up tests confirmed a stress reaction.
It was another setback for Lindor, who spent his offseason recovering from a debridement procedure to remove bone spurs from his right elbow. Despite a series of injuries over the past two seasons, including elbow, toe, back and hand issues, Lindor ranks third in the Majors with 633 games played since 2022. Only Matt Olson and Pete Alonso have appeared in more.