One of baseball's top prospects exits a game after being struck on his left hand
The Houston Astros' top prospect, and a consensus top ten prospect in baseball left the spring training game he was in on Wednesday after getting hit by a Tyler Clippard fastball on his left hand, and will undergo X-rays on Thursday.
While he was never going to break camp with the big league club, his extended run in spring training shows how highly the team thought of him. Correa declared earlier this spring that he wanted to break camp with the Astros Double-A affiliate even though he spent the entirety of 2013 playing with Low-A Quad Cities.
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The former number one overall pick boasted a .320/.405/.467 slash line in Low-A and while Byron Buxton my have passed him as a prospect, the gap isn't as massive as some might think. Correa ranked fourth, fifth, seventh and eighth in top prospect rankings according to ESPN's Keith Law, Baseball Prospectus' Jason Parks, Baseball America, and MLB.com, respectively.
While Correa's exit from Wednesday's game seemed dire at first, he was able to pass the initial strength test according to USA Today's Jorge Ortiz. This doesn't mean he's out of the woods, as he'll have an X-ray tomorrow to determine if the hand is broken, but he stated that his hand felt fine and he was able to swing a bat immediately following the game per Brian McTaggart of MLB.com.
If it is a broken hand, it's not an entirely lost season, as the general timeframe for recovery is set for four-to-six weeks. That being said hand injuries can often affect power production for the full year following the injury - most often seen with a broken hamate bone. The player is back on the field but not necessarily back to 100% in terms of performance.
A broken hand would likely mean that Correa isn't challenged with the assignment to Double-A that he seeks, as skipping a level and returning from injury would be a monumental task to overcome, even for a prospect with his pedigree. There likely wouldn't be any long term repercussions but it would just create questions that there otherwise wouldn't be. If he experiences a power outage would it be because of the hand injury and it's aftereffects or because he was legitimately struggling. It's doesn't negatively impact him so much as it does cloud our ability analyze what exactly it is we're seeing from him if and when he struggles.
The X-ray tomorrow will lift the fog a bit and if he's as healthy as he felt after the game then we'll be able to move on from this fairly easily. If there is a fracture, this has the ability to be a story all season long.