With his six-week reassessment coming up at the end of the week, Alex Bregman is hurtling toward a return to the Red Sox lineup.
“The way he’s talking about it, he’s close to being 100-percent,” manager Alex Cora said Monday afternoon.
“I feel really good, today was the best I’ve felt during the rehab process, the fastest I’d ran, and resumed full baseball activity,” he said as he sat in the dugout Monday afternoon. “This is a lot of weeks ahead of what we predicted.”
The veteran third baseman last played on May 23, when he exited the top half of a Red Sox/Orioles doubleheader with a quad strain, the same injury that sidelined the former Astros star for 10 weeks during the ‘21 season.
This time around, almost immediately after the injury, Bregman began saying how good he felt and that he was healing faster this time around. According to his latest test over the weekend, how he feels is accurate relative to the state of his body.
“(I) got another ultrasound yesterday that corroborated that,” Bregman said. “It showed that it’s healing exceptionally well.”
Bregman is itching to get back in the game, but he and the Red Sox know they can’t be hasty. He needs to build up his running volume, especially at high speeds.
“We’re kind of taking it day by day,” Bregman said. “Because obviously you don’t want to rush it too much, but we’re very far ahead of where we thought we’d be at this point.”
“We’ve got a lot of running on the agenda this week,” he continued. “The biggest thing with this is just being able to run at high speed without thinking about it and being able to play baseball freely.”
That said, should this week’s work go well, the next step could be a rehab assignment. Or something even better.
“I’m just not sure yet, honestly if it’s gonna entail going on rehab or if it’s gonna be kind of simulating the volume here and getting back to playing in big-league games right away,” Bregman said.
Less than a week ago, Cora said Bregman was likely to return after the All-Star break (the schedule resumes July 18). Asked Monday whether he felt like he could play before the break, Bregman said, “Possibly, we’ll see.”
“He feels great but obviously we have to be smart about it but things are trending in the right direction,” said Cora, joking that Bregman is like legendary Red Sox ‘Dirt Dog’ Dustin Pedroia. “If they say 90-percent, take like 15-percent off.”
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