Red Sox first baseman Mitch Moreland will wear a knee brace
Boston Red Sox first baseman Mitch Moreland will experiment with wearing a knee brace this season at the advice of his teammate, Dustin Pedroia.
Dustin Pedroia knows a thing or two about recovering from knee injuries. When he offers advice it would be wise to listen, which is why Boston Red Sox first baseman Mitch Moreland will reluctantly test out wearing a knee brace this spring.
According to Masslive’s Christopher Smith, Moreland has tried a couple of different braces in camp. That includes one similar to the brace that Pedroia wears.
“Pedey kept saying, ‘You need to try that one. You need to try that one,’” Moreland said. “All right. I’ll put it on. It’s one of the same ones, I think.”
Moreland clearly isn’t very enthusiastic about wearing the brace and isn’t convinced it will help but it certainly can’t hurt to try. His knee issues aren’t related to the same cartilage restoration surgery that Pedroia underwent but Moreland did have surgery in October 2017 to repair the meniscus in his left knee.
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A hot start to the season earned Moreland his first career All-Star appearance last season but soreness in his surgically repaired knee began to take a toll on his production in the second half. He reportedly dealt with soreness that cost him several games in July, a month in which he hit a meager .186 with a .513 OPS.
The pain worsened when Moreland banged his knee on the ledge near the photographer’s pit chasing a popup in foul territory on August 23. He was hitting .259 with a .799 OPS at the time. Moreland sat out the next day, then went 0-for-9 over his next three games before sitting out the next two and being limited to pinch-hitting duties in two more after that. Moreland was in and out of the lineup throughout the month of September when he hit .196 with a .604 OPS.
“It really just depends,” Moreland said about when he felt the knee soreness during 2018. “You play in a game and you slide into a brick wall and it swells up, yeah, it starts kind of hurting. You make an awkward turn on it or something and it gets inflamed for two days, then that third day it’s completely gone. There’s a lot more that goes into it. And frankly, nobody wants to hear about it. Because it’s the daily— it’s part of the game. So there’s no sense of really bringing it up and talking about it.”
While Moreland is downplaying the extent that the soreness had on his ability to play, it’s clear his ailing knee had an effect on his production. His final slash line of .245/.325/.433 with 15 home runs and 68 RBI was far from the All-Star production we saw early in the season.
Wearing a brace will help stabilize the knee and protect it from getting banged up and bruised in much the same way as it did last August. It presumably isn’t all that comfortable to wear but he has spring training to adjust to it. Plenty of players wear knee braces without being significantly encumbered by it.
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Moreland is expected to serve as the left-handed half of a first base platoon with Steve Pearce. Moreland has historically struggled a bit against southpaws but his .255/.323/.457 career line against right-handed pitching will more than suffice considering the Gold Glove-caliber defense he also provides. Combine that with the bat of the lefty-masher Pearce and the Red Sox should receive solid production from the first base position this year – as long as Moreland’s knee isn’t still holding him back.