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Boston Red Sox left-hander Chris Sale will miss the remainder of the 2022 season after undergoing surgery to repair a broken right wrist sustained in a bicycle accident.
Here is the full statement released by the club on Tuesday:
On Monday, August 8, Boston Red Sox left-hander Chris Sale underwent open reduction and internal fixation of a right distal radius (wrist) fracture. The procedure was developed by Dr. Matthew Leibman at the Newton-Wellesley Ambulatory Surgery Center in Wellesley, MA.
Sale sustained his injury in a bicycle accident on Saturday, August 6th. He will miss the remainder of the 2022 season but is expected to be ready for the start of spring training in 2023.
Red Sox manager Chaim Bloom gave more details to local media on Tuesday morning:
The 33-year-old Sale was already on the injury list with a broken finger sustained in July in just his second start of the season. Sale was previously out with a stress fracture to his right rib, which kept him on the shelf for the first more than three months of this season. Elbow problems, which first emerged in August 2019 and eventually required Tommy John to have surgery, cost Sale the entire 2020 season and limited him to just nine starts in 2021.
Put another way, Sale has only played 48 1/3 innings for Boston since the start of that losing 2020 season. Sale still seems capable of playing at ace level when he’s healthy, but health has obviously been pretty elusive in recent years.
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The sale will be signed in Boston through at least the 2024 season, and his contract includes a vesting option for 2025. He owes at least $55 million after this season.
The Red Sox are qualifying as playoff longshots as of this writing. They enter Tuesday with a 54-56 record, minus 30 runs difference and bottom-ranked American League East status. The SportsLine projection system currently gives Boston a 9.0 percent chance of making the expanded postseason field.