While we all bask in the glow of two nice wins over the Cubs, there’s some bad news from the minor league front today. Starling Marte, who’s one of the Pirates most interesting prospects in the low minors, has a hand injury and may need surgery according to Jen Langosch. Rob Biertempfel says it’s a hamate injury and that he’s seeing a specialist on Monday.
If he needs the surgery he could miss the rest of the 2010 season, which would be a pretty rough blow for a 21-year old in just his second year of full-season ball in America. The longer term prognosis is that hamate injuries usually (and this is just me regurgitating my knowledge) sap a hitter’s power for quite some time after the recovery period ends, which was what happened to Pedro Alvarez in his senior year at Vanderbilt. Since Marte’s not much of a power hitter (yet) that might not be a huge deal, but missing 3/4ths of a season is, especially with the start he was off to at Bradenton (even after cooling down in the past couple weeks he’s got a .374 OBP).
