Doctor breaks down Wade’s hamstring injury, reoccurrence data originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
Giants first baseman LaMonte Wade Jr. was placed on the IL this week with a left hamstring strain he sustained after sliding into second base and exiting Monday’s win over the Philadelphia Phillies at Oracle Park.
An MRI on Tuesday revealed Wade has a grade 2 hamstring strain, and the Giants expect to be without one of their top hitters for about a month. While the details are limited, Stanford Medicine’s Marc Safran, M.D., spoke to NBC Sports Bay Area and provided more information on the type of injury Wade sustained.
“A hamstring strain can occur in the back of the mid portion of the thigh,” Dr. Safran said. “We grade these injuries as a grade 1, which is like a mild pull of the muscle and grade 2, there’s actually some tearing of the muscle fibers but overall the integrity of the muscle is intact. Grade 3 is a complete tear. It looks like it happened to his left leg, which was his down leg. That’s a little bit less common as a mechanism because usually, the hamstring muscle is a unique muscle that crosses both the pelvis, or basically at the butt as well as the knee.
“So when your knee is straight and your hip is flexed, that’s when the muscle has its most tension and why it’s more susceptible to getting a strain or a pull. His was the down leg, but my guess is because he had the prior injury to it, this was just an aggregation to the prior injury.”
Wade just had returned to San Francisco‘s lineup Monday after injuring the same left hamstring Friday against the New York Mets.
He pinch hit Saturday and sat out of Sunday’s series finale in New York.
Dr. Safran stated that it’s not uncommon for these types of injuries to come back if not fully healed, but after a few weeks away from any action, he believes Wade should be good to go with little to no worries of reoccurrence in the future.
“Some of the best data that exists with hamstring strains is actually in soccer,” Dr. Safran explained. “And it shows that basically after five to six weeks, the likelihood of reoccurrence drops significantly with hamstring injuries. Again, these injuries have such a high reoccurrence rate that it’s not uncommon to see it reoccur.
“And I think now [the Giants] are taking a more conservative route based on their MRI findings. It’s all difficult with estimate of time, but I think they’re doing the best they can to reduce the likelihood that it’ll happen again this…