Mohr expects more

Derailed in '05, he has healthy outlook in camp

February 28, 2006|On baseball, Gordon Edes, Globe Staff

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Baseball always has had its share of weird injuries, and so have the Red Sox. Or have you already forgotten Hall of Famer Wade Boggs hurting his back when he lost his balance trying to put on his cowboy boots and fell on his couch?

David Wells, in the summer before he joined the Sox, took stitches in his nonpitching hand when he tripped over a barstool at home while carrying a wine glass. Dustin Hermanson, in his only season with the Sox, slipped on a wet floor while doing the dishes and banged his elbow, which became infected. The Steamer, Bob Stanley, fell down the stairs while taking out the trash, severing tendons in his pitching hand. Vaughn Eshelman sustained second-degree burns on his hands while trying to put out a fire started when his wife tried to heat up a baby bottle with a candle in their hotel room.

And Thomas Boswell, the splendid Washington Post columnist, delights in the tale of a 30-year-old Sox rookie, Clarence Blethen, who put his false teeth in his hip pocket while pitching and on Sept. 21, 1923, after forgetting to put them back in his mouth, bit himself in the backside while sliding into second base to break up a double play.

This is not a list to which you want your name attached, but Dustan Mohr, the most likely player to platoon with Trot Nixon in right field for the Sox this season, sheepishly qualifies for the way he got hurt on Opening Day last season. Mohr, who has a dirt-dog intensity that mirrors Nixon's, put himself on the disabled list while celebrating a walkoff home run by Rockies teammate Clint Barmes. He strained a calf muscle vaulting the low fence in front of the Rockies' dugout.

''I was pumped up," he said. ''It's not a very high fence. It's something I've done a thousand times. I just took the wrong step and the calf just pops. It felt like someone had shot me in the back of the leg with a paintball gun. I turned around to see who it was. I thought somebody was trying to give me five. Nobody was even close. I took one step and went down."

So much for what was supposed to be the best season of Mohr's career, one in which he finally got the chance to play every day, an opportunity he was never able to seize in previous tours with the Twins and Giants. Instead, it became the worst. Mohr missed the first month of the season, played miserably thereafter, lost his regular gig, failed to hit his weight (.214 average, 215 pounds), and struck out more than once every three at-bats.

(In a strange twist, Barmes's terrific rookie season was short-circuited by another freak injury. He fractured his left collarbone, he said, when he fell while carrying some deer meat he'd been given by teammate Todd Helton.)