Yankees infielder DJ LeMahieu recently underwent an MRI after tweaking a calf muscle during his spring debut and has been diagnosed with a strain, LeMahieu told the Yankees beat Thursday, via Greg Joyce of the New York Post . It’s a Grade 1 or 2 strain, and while there’s no official timetable yet, LeMahieu will go at least a “couple” weeks without any baseball activity at all. That seems likely to rule him out for Opening Day, though the team hasn’t yet formally announced as much.
He’s meeting with the team’s medical staff to map out a timetable. It’s another health setback for the 36-year-old LeMahieu, who appeared in just 67 games last season due to foot and hip injuries. He wasn’t productive when on the field either, batting just .
204/.269/.259 with a pair of homers in 228 trips to the plate.
LeMahieu posted career-low marks in average exit velocity and hard-hit rate, and his 56.4% ground-ball rate was the second-highest mark of his career and sixth-highest in MLB (min. 220 plate appearances).
For a player whose sprint speed checked into the 20th percentile of big league position players, that’s obviously not a good trend. The Yankees originally signed LeMahieu to a two-year, $24M deal in the 2018-19 offseason. It proved to be one of their best free agent pickups in recent memory, as he posted a mammoth .
336/.386/.536 slash over those two years, finishing top-four in MVP voting in both 2019 and 2020.
The Yankees re-signed LeMahieu for $90M the following.