NEW YORK -- A day after welcoming Juan Soto back to their lineup, the Mets officially said a temporary goodbye to Francisco Lindor.
Lindor landed on the 10-day injured list Thursday after straining his left calf running the bases in the previous night's 3-2 win over the Twins that snapped a 12-game losing streak. The Mets recalled infielder Ronny Mauricio from Triple-A Syracuse to replace him.
The Mets don't have a clear timetable yet on Lindor's injury, but they expect him to miss significant time. It's more serious than the calf issue that just cost Soto 15 games.
It’s poor timing for Lindor, who had shaken off a slow start to go 7-for-17 with a home run, a double, four RBIs and three runs scored in the five games leading up to his injury. Overall this season, Lindor is hitting .226/.314/.355 in 24 games.
“Whenever I have to miss games, it’s super disappointing,” Lindor said. “It sucks to be on the side, but I’ll be there with them, cheering them on and probably just as nervous as every fan out there as well.”
This is just the third IL stint of Lindor’s career and his first since 2021, when a right oblique strain sidelined him for more than five weeks. Yet the past seven months have been difficult for Lindor, a historically durable player who underwent a debridement procedure on his right elbow in October, then a second surgery to remove his left hamate bone in February.
He turned 32 in November.
How long will Lindor be out?
The short answer is, we don’t know. If the Mets have an internal expectation for Lindor’s absence, they aren’t revealing it, which is in stark contrast to the way they operated when Soto injured his calf. Asked multiple times for a timetable, Lindor repeatedly said that he has no interest in knowing.
What we do know is this is a more serious strain than Soto’s, which sidelined him 2 1/2 weeks.
“He’s going to be down quite a bit here,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “I don’t think we’re anticipating something like we knew right away with Juan that it was kind of like the best-case scenario and it was going to be on the short side of things. I don’t think we’re dealing with the same thing here.”
Lindor previously strained his right calf in 2019 with Cleveland and missed three weeks. While he said that he feels better now than he did then, that doesn’t quite jibe with Mendoza’s comments.
Serious calf strains can take months to heal. Dr. Spencer Stein, a specialist in sports orthopedic surgery at NYU Langone, estimated that in a worst-case scenario, most injuries of this nature heal within six weeks. That would take Lindor into early June.
“A lot of this is just time,” Dr. Stein said in a telephone interview.
Asked if he expects to be back before midseason, Lindor responded: “I hope so.” The only timetable question he answered with any level of certainty was whether he expects to return at all this season.
"A hundred percent,” Lindor said. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This kills me not being on the field, but I trust the trainers and I know they have good care here, and I’ll be back. I’ll be back hopefully sooner rather than later.”
Who will replace Lindor at shortstop?
Mauricio, mostly.
One silver lining of Lindor’s injury is that the Mets are going to get a long look at Mauricio, a former top prospect who has received only sporadic playing time in the Majors since undergoing multiple knee surgeries in 2023 and ’24. Overall, Mauricio holds a .653 OPS over 296 big league plate appearances, including a walk-off single earlier this month. He was raking at Triple-A Syracuse prior to his second callup of the season, with a .987 OPS over 15 games. That included a three-homer game on Tuesday.
“We’ve seen it, when he gets everyday at-bats, what he’s capable of doing,” Mendoza said. “So here he is. He’s going to get an opportunity to get playing time, and we need him to step up, obviously. The tools are there. Now he’s just got to go out there and do it.”
While Mauricio split his time at Syracuse between shortstop, second and third base, he’s a natural shortstop with more experience there than at any other position. The Mets don’t plan to play the switch-hitting Mauricio every day, only because he has proven far stronger as a left-handed batter. But he should start most games against righties and receive at least some reps against left-handers as well, according to Mendoza.
What about Bo Bichette?
Though Bichette is also a natural shortstop, Mets officials have mostly been pleased with his performance at third base. For that reason, they will keep Bichette there rather than slide him back to shortstop, only to move him again once Lindor returns.
Bichette may shift over to shortstop on occasion, however, on some of those days when the Mets face a lefty.
How exactly did Lindor hurt himself?
Lindor felt his calf pull when he rounded third base on Francisco Alvarez’s double in the fourth inning Wednesday.
Although he felt pain while continuing home to score, Lindor was initially encouraged by the fact that he could walk back to the dugout under his own power. An MRI taken Thursday revealed the strain.
Prior to Wednesday, Lindor said, he did not feel anything abnormal in his leg.
“Once I passed third base, I felt something,” Lindor said. “And then after that, I knew that I got something in my lower leg.”