The Roman Anthony injury timeline remains horrifically depressing

Late last August, Roman Anthony stormed into Yankee Stadium for the first time in his career and announced his presence in the most unmistakable manner possible:

The bomb, the bat flip, the body language; all there for the world to witness. In the moment, it felt less like a baseball game and more like a Coronation Day, with Anthony set to take his place as the latest in a long line of kings who have patrolled left field at Fenway Park over the generations. He was here, he was awesome, he was signed to an extension, and Yankee fans were going to have to spend the next decade watching highlights like this every time they faced the Red Sox.

But of course, baseball is never that simple. Since that seemingly momentous moment, the Red Sox have played the Yankees for a trio of three game series (including the playoffs), and Roman Anthony has missed eight of the nine games with three different injures, all sustained while simply swinging a bat.

The oblique injury he suffered on a swing that ended his season last September is well known and documented, so there’s really no need to dig further into that one, but given where we are with his latest injury, it’s probably a good time to review his comments after the upper back tweak that cost him the final two games of the Yankee series in April.

“A weird thing that happened on a swing.”

Here’s the problem: These weird things on a swing have now happened in three consecutive baseball months (September, April and May), and the only reason it might not happen in June is because he hasn’t been on the field yet.

So with the background covered, let’s dive deep into the astronomically frustrating timeline of Roman Anthony’s latest injury, starting on May 5th:

Two days later, he went on the IL:

Also on that day, Roman Anthony clarified the injury was to a ligament below his ring finger, and not to his wrist.

Five days later, the first real signs of the healing process progressing slower than everybody would’ve liked became evident:

But even at this point, they still weren’t ruling out the idea of Anthony coming off the IL in the minimum ten days. They just had to wait for his “grip strength” to get back to normal.

Three days after that, the splint/brace finally came off, and it seemed things were improving.

But it still took another week after that before there was any real improvement reported in his grip strength.

And it was another four days after that when he finally was able to take dry swings (swinging without hitting the ball).

Three days later, and something very bad happened when he was hitting off a tee (actually making contact with the ball).

Well, a few days went by, and he still wasn’t even able to dry swing the bat.

Now, here we are another week after that, and there’s still no real update. So my question is, what the hell happened on May 28th when Roman Anthony swung off a tee?

I see two general possibilities here — One concerning, and the other alarming. The first being he might have reinjured it while swinging and making contact with the ball, and we’re just not being told the details. That could result in a return date being pushed back weeks or even months depending on the extent of the damage.

But as bad as that sounds, it’s actually not the scenario that’s keeping me up at night and poisoning my joy. Instead, that honor goes to the possibility that a downright frightening whisper in the back of my brain could be right. Like a demon from the depths of the Earth I can’t outrun, it keeps telling me that Roman Anthony might just be a guy that breaks easily, recovers slowly, and it’s always going to be that way.

In other words, it’s asking the question: “What if Roman Anthony’s body can’t handle Roman Anthony’s elite, robust and violent swing?” That’s the scenario I fear the most, and I really, really don’t want to have to go down that road.

A bit of this fear slipped out in real time when Tim Healey first reported Anthony was going on the IL a month ago. Here’s my raw, emotional (over?)reaction at that time:

Here we are five weeks and ten series later, and nothing that’s happened since makes me feel any better about this whole thing. In fact, each day the news doesn’t improve, it reminds me more and more of anther player I followed, covered, cherished, and wrote about for years here on SB Nation’s Rockies sister site, Purple Row: Troy Tulowitzki.

Exactly two years ago, I opened up about why baseball, the Rockies, and Troy Tulowitzki were such important figures in my life, and how I was able to let go of the last two. But now, I’m starting to wonder if time really is a flat circle.

Because you see, in all my years of watching this glorious sport, I have never been more confident that two guys I watched from the moment they began to rise through the minors were going to be all time great players. They of course are Roman Anthony and Troy Tulowitzki, and I’m sure you already see where this is going.

Last winter, there was a part of me that wanted to write around a dozen Roman Anthony articles fawning over how good I thought he was going to become based on the underlying metrics, his rapid rise, his make up, his eye at the plate, the quotes he gave me when he was in Worcester, and the general way stars and power develop in the sport.

I mean, when you look at something like the highest hard-hit percentage in the 2025 season (min. 150 batted balls) and see a 21-year-old atop a leaderboard like this, it’s just astounding:

But I really, really didn’t want to feel the smite of the baseball gods again (they got me good when I did it with Tulowitzki all those years ago) so I refrained. Instead, I just happily perused Baseball Savant for hours and figured I’d get to write those things this summer when reality reflected it.

Alas, here we are. Roman Anthony is injured and healing slowly again, the Red Sox are having a historically horrendous season, and just like Troy Tulowitzki and the Colorado Rockies, the Red Sox absolutely need Roman Anthony to be healthy and reach his peak.

Every night, we watch this sorry excuse of a lineup get outgunned by the rest of baseball, and all of New England keeps wondering how the club is going to fix it. Well, unfortunately, it’s much, much harder to repair a bad lineup than it was 20 years ago given the way teams understand value and lock up their young stars. This coupled with performance enhancing drugs being legislated out of the game earlier this century, and we’ve also (rightfully) extinguished the majority of the production and availability of guys in their mid to late 30s that was once commonplace on the free agent market.

This is all to say, if the Red Sox want to have that absolute stud in their lineup the team can build around and the region can adore, their best chance of getting it is still already in their clubhouse. I’m not just talking about getting a good hitter, I’m talking about getting an outstanding hitter. The kind that makes major impacts that ripple through the lineup each trip around.

Roman Anthony has that ceiling, and since the Red Sox (rather foolishly) built the roster as if he’s guaranteed to get there, this has to work. If it doesn’t, and the reason it doesn’t is because the injury bug drags Roman Anthony into its lair, I can’t emphasize enough how much that’s going to suck!

Not only is Roman Anthony’s ceiling rare and unique, but he also seems remarkably aware of it. Take a look at this quote from early May just before his latest injury saga when asked what he thought of his season so far:

“Kind of a letdown, honestly… Short sample size, but I wasn’t where I wanted to be… When I’m at my best, my swing decisions are great… When you’re swinging at good pitches, you have a better chance of hitting the ball in the air, and you have a better chance of doing what you want to do.”

These are the comments of a (at the time) 21-year-old on pace for about 4.0 WAR in 2026. He hadn’t even begun to blossom yet this season, was getting unlucky on balls in play, and yet he was still tracking to be better than about 95 percent of the players in the league at season’s end (yes, even with the low batting average and throwing yips).

Again, the stratosphere is the limit here; and the good news is, that hasn’t changed. Unfortunately, what has changed is we’re increasingly confronted with the possibility that Roman Anthony might have the foundation of a skyscraper and the building material the first two little pigs used.

No matter how good he is, it doesn’t matter if he can’t consistently get out on the field, because much like a hurricane on your wedding day, brake failure at a stoplight, or a raccoon infestation in your attic, repetitive, nagging injuries will ruin everything great you’ve worked for. They are striaght up poison to a professional athlete, and they’re happening to the most important member of the Boston Red Sox.

So with that, I’ll leave you with one final thought: The best thing that can happen to the 2026 Red Sox for the long-term outlook of the franchise isn’t a miracle playoff run or even more people getting fired. Instead, it’s getting consistent, good news on the Roman Anthony injury front and having him close the season looking like the guy he was about to become when he annihilated that pitch in New York last year.

That certainly won’t solve all this team’s problems, but it will solve a bunch of them. And also, from a personal standpoint, I really, really don’t want to do this again.