MLB Trade Rumors dropped the news Friday night that stings for Pirates fans and fantasy managers alike: O'Hearn is headed to the injured list with a quad strain, and the timeline isn't a quick one. Six to eight weeks. That's not a day-to-day thing, that's a see-you-in-mid-September thing, right as the stretch run and any postseason push actually matters.
The injury reportedly happened running down the line on a groundout in the 9th inning, which is about as unglamorous a way to lose your best hitter as there is. No collision, no diving play — just a leg giving out on a routine sprint to first.
What makes this one sting extra is that it's not O'Hearn's first quad issue this year. He already missed a couple weeks back in May with a strain on the other leg, and this new one is reportedly the more serious of the two. Two separate quad strains on two separate legs in one season is not a great trend for a guy who signed in Pittsburgh as a free agent hoping to lock down a middle-of-the-order role.
And he'd earned that role. O'Hearn was having arguably his best offensive year, slashing around.270/.334/.454 with 17 home runs, 15 doubles and 69 RBI before the injury — numbers that made him one of the more reliable bats in a Pirates lineup that needed one. Losing that production for close to two months is a real hit for a team trying to squeeze value out of the summer.
For fantasy managers it's an even more brutal gut punch — O'Hearn was a cheap, steady source of power and average all year, and now he's dead weight on rosters through most of September. The Pirates will have to figure out how to cover first base and the DH spot without him, and O'Hearn will have to hope this is the last quad scare of a season that's already given him two.