Anthony DeSclafani exited Saturday night’s game after just 77 pitches with head trainer Dave Groeschner. He’d grimaced in pain an inning before while covering the first base bag on a grounder and also had to field his position shortly against a bunt before his departure.
But DeSclafani’s particular injury wasn’t immediately clear. After the game, manager Gabe Kapler revealed that a few weeks ago, the veteran starter dropped a piano bench on his right toe, an injury that DeSclafani has been pitching through but flared up against Arizona.
“His toenail took the brunt of it,” Kapler told reporters in Arizona. “That was bothering him. He was able to continue pitching and felt good enough to keep rolling, but we had an eye on him as that nail was coming off and causing him quite a bit of pain. Monitored and monitored and finally went out there with (Groeschner) and decided to pull the plug on him. He was grinding pretty good there.”
DeSclafani explained that he was playing piano with his toddler son when he tried to help him off the bench several weeks ago.
“The thing literally squared my toe up,” DeSclafani said.
In vulgar terms, DeSclafani described the status of his toe nail, saying it’s “hanging on by a thread.”
DeSclafani said the injury hadn’t been bothering him much in his starts leading up to Saturday, but the nail “died” and got worse over the past week as the nail got “looser and looser.”
DeSclafani worked efficiently through five innings against the Diamondbacks, needing just 66 pitches for five scoreless frames. But he left after loading the bases on a double and two singles.
The Giants went on to lose, 7-2, to an Arizona team led by rookie Dominic Fletcher.
DeSclafani has a 3-3 record with a 3.06 ERA in eight starts to begin the season. He missed almost the entire 2022 campaign with a right ankle injury that required surgery.
Kapler said he doesn’t anticipate DeSclafani missing time with the toe injury, but the piano bench incident has already been added to MLB.com’s apparently running list of strangest baseball injuries, right there with punching walls, tattoo infections, celebration gaffes and getting bit by a dog.