As Luke Voit went down swinging at a Taylor Clarke slider in the third inning of Tuesday’s game, Yankees manager Aaron Boone noticed something might be off.
Maybe it was Voit’s grimace, or the way he walked to first base for the top half of the fourth. Whatever the case, Boone’s instinct proved right.
Voit left the game in the top of the fifth with a core muscle injury, and by the end of the night he was undergoing an MRI exam, the Yankees announced.
This injury didn’t happen at one moment, Boone said, at least not that he could point to.
“Even in talking to Luke during the game when he was coming out, he was having a hard time putting his finger on it,” Boone said. “He just said, ‘I was having a hard time getting loose, before the game and all game.’ Like he didn’t feel like he did anything to it.”
Boone, leaning back in his chair and gesturing to his core to emphasize the point, said Voit indicated something in his core just felt off.
What makes this particularly scary for the Yankees is Voit has already dealt with a core injury this season, missing seven games after experiencing tightness in his abdomen during the Red Sox series in London. He was removed from a game then after running out a double. Though it’s unclear whether this injury is directly related, it’s certainly a red flag.
“It wasn’t the normal, when a guy does something in a course of a game that injures something,” Boone said. “There didn’t seem to be anything like that.”
Tyler Wade replaced Voit in Tuesday’s 4-2 loss to the Diamondbacks, playing third base as Gio Urshela moved to first. Wade, just recalled from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on Monday, accounted for half the Yankees’ offensive output on the night with an eighth-inning solo home run.
