LOS ANGELES -- Several hours after taking an 89 mph Tony Gonsolin slider off his right foot Wednesday, breaking his pinky toe, Francisco Lindor sat on the Mets’ team bus back to the hotel and lobbied manager Carlos Mendoza to let him keep playing. When Mendoza said no, Lindor implored him to reconsider the next day.
“OK, I’m going to give you until tomorrow morning,” Mendoza told him. “But the answer’s going to be the same.”
The reality, as Mendoza said later, is that Lindor received “relatively good news” about his toe on Thursday morning. The bone is broken, but not on the joint, which makes it purely a pain tolerance issue. Although Lindor was indeed out of the lineup for the Mets’ series finale against the Dodgers, he avoided the injured list and expects to return within a few days.
“It’s just a matter of tolerating the pain,” Lindor said. “So hopefully, I’m strong enough to play sooner rather than later.”
Immediately upon taking the Gonsolin slider off his foot to lead off Wednesday’s 6-1 win over Los Angeles at Dodger Stadium, Lindor collapsed to the ground. He quickly regained his footing and remained in the game, albeit in a state of clear discomfort. He said he was in “a lot” of pain. Still, by the middle innings, Lindor felt well enough to harbor hope that nothing was broken.
It was not until postgame, when he took off his sock to undergo an X-ray, that Lindor saw the significant bruising and realized something was seriously wrong. The X-ray confirmed the break.
“It hurts,” Lindor said the next morning. “With shoes, it hurts a little bit more [than] barefoot. I woke up, I was like, ‘OK, I don’t feel bad.’ As soon as I put on my shoes, it was not good.”
For as long as Lindor remains sidelined, rookie Luisangel Acuña will start at shortstop. The team will also give Ronny Mauricio practice reps at the position, but Mauricio is recovering from multiple knee surgeries and hasn’t regularly played short since 2023.
Neither of them can fully replace Lindor, the 2024 National League MVP runner-up who was enjoying another steady season as one of the game’s top all-around shortstops. In 61 games, Lindor is batting .279/.353/.490 with 14 home runs and 11 stolen bases.
Lindor hopes the injury proves similar to what he endured in 2022, when he accidentally shut a hotel door on his right middle finger, fracturing the digit. He wound up missing only one game, though Lindor did fall into a slump that lasted several weeks.
“I think it’s going to be a nagging thing,” Lindor said of his toe. “It’s a bone, it’s a broken bone. I think it takes six weeks for a bone to be fully healed. Three years ago, I did my finger here, and it still hurts at times. It’s part of relying on your body. As professional athletes, that’s stuff we go through. This is what God wanted this week, and we’ll deal with that. It could have been worse.”
Lindor plans to receive daily treatment on his toe and speak regularly with Mendoza about his condition.
“The thing with Francisco is he knows his body better than everybody,” the manager said. “They’ve got a good feeling about each other -- not only Francisco knowing himself, but the trainers knowing the player, and the player trusting the medical staff. I think there’s a lot of confidence, a lot of trust on both ends, and we’ll take it day by day.”