Washington Nationals Injury Update: Ryan Zimmerman hoping rest helps injured foot

Ryan Zimmerman missed significant time dealing with plantar fasciitis in his left foot back in 2015, but after he went on the 10-Day Injured List (IL) with a plantar fasciitis issue in his right foot last Sunday, the Washington Nationals’ 2005 1st Round pick admitted he couldn’t really remember the details of the previous experience.

“Going through it you kind of know what to expect,” Zimmerman said, “... but everything is different, you never know how one is going to react.

“I think that one, if I remember correctly, was torn pretty good, I don’t remember the exact percentage or anything like that, so I don’t think this one, as of right now, is as bad as that one was, but that doesn’t mean anything.

“We’ve just got to kind of see how this first week goes, and from there we’ll kind of develop a plan.”

“He was dealing with it for a couple days, but yesterday it got really bad,” Nationals’ skipper Davey Martinez said, as quoted by MASN’s Mark Zuckerman, before Sunday’s game.

“He went and got an MRI this morning, and it revealed some inflammation. He’s got plantar fasciitis.”

Zimmerman got off to a slow start this season, putting up a .213/.302/.373 line with three doubles, three homers, 10 walks, and 18 Ks in 22 games and 86 plate appearances before his trip to the IL.

“If it was September, it would be kind of a different story,” Zimmerman said of the decision to shut it down for 10 days and see how it felt.

“You could maybe take some medicine and do something, but to do that for five months is not sustainable. It’s my back leg too, when I was hitting, so I was starting not to use that back leg as much as I normally do, and that could lead to other stuff which would be worse than this, so it’s frustrating, but it is what it is.”

While his manager initially talked about Zimmerman tweaking his foot on a leaping play at first base in Colorado’s Coors Field, the Nationals’ first baseman acknowledged that the play exacerbated what was an existing issue.

“That kind of made it worse,” Zimmerman explained, “but then I took that next day off and then we had that Thursday off, and then we came back here, and then Friday it felt pretty good to that point where I felt that I could play and run at 80-85%, which for me is plenty.

“If I can play at that percentage and treat it while we’re doing it and kind of gradually get better, I would have had no problem with that, and then I played on the Saturday and that Saturday morning it started to feel a little worse again and as the game went on it got worse and then Sunday was bad again, so it was one of those things where if I could take two days off every three days then I could have made it, but that doesn’t really happen too often, so it just made sense to do it this way.”

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For Zimmerman, who has averaged 107* games played over the last six seasons (with a low of 61 in 2014, and a high of 144 in 2017), it’s just the latest in a long line of injuries, but he said he hoped shutting it down when he did was the right decision for the long run this season.

“It was going on for a couple of weeks,” Zimmerman said, “but it was manageable, and just like a number of these guys in this room throughout the years, they’re going to go through something, and it just got to the point that it wasn’t rebounding as quick as it was before, and realized that for five months we weren’t going to be able to do this, so take some time off, get it right, and hopefully — we think we caught it early enough where it won’t take that long, but this first week will be kind of critical to see how it feels and kind of go from there.”

[ed. note - “ * = We originally, mistakenly, included this season’s games played in the total for the average games played over the last six seasons, as opposed to the average games played total from 2013-18.”]