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“Thank you to everyone at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital for the great hospitality and setting me straight,” Austin Voth joked, after the doctors at the hospital in Philadelphia fixed his broken nose.
Voth, 28, was hit in the face with a fastball from Phillies’ starter Vince Velasquez on Sunday afternoon, as he squared to bunt in a third inning plate appearance.
The right-handed reliever, who was starting on a bullpen day in the series finale in Citizens Bank Park, was helped off of the field, though he was able to walk, and he remained in the hospital while the team moved on to Tampa Bay.
“He broke his nose, they got to reset it tonight,” manager Davey Martinez confirmed after a 12-6 loss to the Nationals’ divisional rivals. “He is going spend the night here, and hopefully meet us — he’ll probably just go to Washington, but he got hit pretty hard.”
Before the first of two with the Rays on Tuesday night, Martinez updated reporters on what was going on with Voth.
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“I talked to him yesterday,” Martinez said. “He had his surgery. Obviously, he had a couple breaks in his nose. Everything went well. His left eye is pretty much shut right now. But now it’s just about getting him healed up. He said he’s got a lot of ice on there. But he said he feels fine and he wanted to thank everybody for their concerns. I thought it was awesome that — I talked to [Phillies’ manager] Joe Girardi today, he called me wanting to know how [Voth] was doing as well. I thought that was pretty awesome that he called to check on him. But he’s doing fine, we just got to get the swelling down, and he’s going to be out for some time, until we get the swelling [down], get his eyes back open and then we’ll go from there.”
Velasquez, talking to reporters after the game, said incidents like that are traumatic for the pitcher and the player who gets hit.
“When you see something on TV, guys getting hit in the head, it’s very scary,” Velasquez said, as quoted on NBC Sports Philadelphia:
“And for you to kind of do it in a way where you visually see it first-hand,” he added, “it can be traumatizing.”
“I feel terrible for Voth in that situation,” Velasquez said. “I would hate to be in his shoes.
“No matter the damage or anything, it can be traumatizing on both ends. I hope he recovers and gets back to full speed.”
Martinez, with a somewhat lighthearted answer, talked about getting Voth back and the real difficulty of moving past something like this mentally.
“I won’t ask him to bunt for a while, that’s for sure,” Martinez sort-of joked.
“But the good thing is that it didn’t happen with him getting hit with a line drive. So, hopefully he gets back up on the mound and we’ll see how he does.
“Before he comes back I’d like to either get him in a sim game so he’s feeling comfortable facing hitters again, or if we have to send him out we will send him out.
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“But we’ll see how he reacts once he gets throwing again.”
That could be a while though.
“We’ll see,” the skipper said. “I think after the surgery there’s a certain amount of time that he needs to just kind of not do anything strenuous, but we’ll see how that goes. As you all know, everybody was asking me about Max [Scherzer], when he broke his nose.
“This is a little bit different. [Voth] broke his nose in a few places, so he might miss some time.”
So it’s not going to be a 1-2 week thing? Voth was placed on the 10-Day IL on Tuesday.
“We won’t know until — he’s got another doctor’s appointment next week and we’ll find out more then,” Martinez said.