Three weeks ago almost nobody outside Oakland's front office knew who Joshua Kuroda-Grauer was. Now he's the most talked-about rookie in baseball, and not entirely for reasons you'd want. The Rutgers product and A's No. 9 prospect debuted on June 29 and immediately started hitting like he forgot the minors ever ended, and by this week he'd turned into one of the sport's best stories and one of its most cringe-inducing highlights in the same 9 innings.
The pace he's been on before everything went sideways.
Joshua Kuroda-Grauer has had 25 hits in his first 16 big league games and no Athletic in all of history has had more!
That number is absurd on its own. 25 hits in his first 16 big league games is a franchise record for the Athletics, a club that has employed a few guys who could hit a little. He led all of minor league baseball with 109 hits across Double-A and Triple-A this year before he ever got the call, so the hot start wasn't exactly a fluke — it was the form carrying over.
Then Monday happened. Kuroda-Grauer hit his first career home run against the Diamondbacks, which should've been the highlight of his young career. Instead it got buried by what came next: a foul ball off the bat handle that ricocheted directly into him. He stayed in the game, walked it off, and ripped a single for hit No. 25 — in that exact order, homer, injury, single — before the pain caught up with him.
The foul ball that turned a career night into a medical story.
It wasn't just a wince-and-shake-it-off moment. Reports came out that Kuroda-Grauer suffered a ruptured testicle on the play and needed emergency surgery, which is about as brutal as sports injuries get. He toughed out an at-bat on pure adrenaline before the severity of it set in, which somehow makes the whole sequence more insane in hindsight.
The full, ridiculous sequence of events from Monday's game, laid out in order.
MLB Trade Rumors confirmed Wednesday that the A's placed Kuroda-Grauer on the injured list, and he wasn't going alone — right-hander Mark Leiter Jr. landed there too, his second IL stint of the year after a lingering right hip issue that had already cost him time earlier this summer. For a rebuilding A's roster that's been searching for something to get excited about, losing its breakout rookie to a freak injury this soon is a gut punch, even if the 10-day clock means he could realistically be back well before September call-ups roll around.
The transaction that made it official.
The good news, if there is any, is that a 10-day IL stint for a bat-only injury like this is about as manageable a timeline as MLB medical staffs deal with. Kuroda-Grauer's bat speaks for itself and the A's have no incentive to rush a 23-year-old who's already rewriting the franchise record book. Fantasy managers who scooped him up mid-breakout are stuck stashing him for now, but if the surgery recovery goes as expected, the record pace and the highlight reel should both be back sooner than later.