Winker back in left field after right knee scare

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – As scared as he was in the moment Friday when his right knee got tweaked and he fell to the ground in pain, Jesse Winker was confident by night’s end he wasn’t seriously injured and hoped he might even feel well enough to rejoin the Nationals lineup Saturday afternoon.

Sure enough, Winker is back in there today, starting in left field and batting third for the Nats against the Rays. His knee was taped up this afternoon as he went to the batting cage, but otherwise he looked no worse for wear.

“I’m thankful it’s not anything worse,” the 30-year-old said. “Because anytime you, as a professional athlete, go down without running into anything, it’s kind of a scary feeling.”

Winker was backtracking to try to catch Isaac Paredes’ first-inning fly ball Friday night when his cleat got caught in the artificial turf at Tropicana Field. He immediately felt his knee twist and was worried it was something bad. But with the ball still in the air, he kept tracking it back to the wall, where he made a circus catch as he fell to the ground.

Manager Davey Martinez and director of athletic training Paul Lessard jogged out from the dugout to check on Winker, who remained on the ground for some time. And even though he was able to get back on his feet and walk himself back to the dugout, he did so at an extremely slow pace and with a noticeable limp.

A quick exam by the Nationals’ medical staff showed no reason to believe there was structural damage, so Winker was able to breathe a sigh of relief. The whole incident reminded him of a play earlier this month when he went down trying to reverse course rounding second base. He wound up missing one game after that.

“I feel like it’s mad similar to what I did a couple weeks ago in D.C. around second,” he said. “I think I literally did the exact same thing, just kind of reaggravated that same little area.”

Winker has dealt with a number of injuries throughout his career, some of them serious in recent seasons with the Mariners and Brewers. He’s managed to keep himself healthy and on the field in his first year with the Nationals, proving to be one of their most consistently productive hitters. (His .789 OPS entering today trails only CJ Abrams’ .833 mark on the roster.)

“He’s got all these bumps and bruises, so you’ve got to be really careful when he does something like running into the wall. You’ve got to make sure he’s OK,” Martinez said. “But he’s a gamer. He loves playing. And if he can play, he wants to post up and play.”

As for the highlight-reel catch at the end of Friday night’s play?

“I wish I could give you some really cool thing to say, but I got so lucky. The ball caught me,” Winker said. “I don’t have any explanation of that. There’s nothing cool I can say, outside of the fact I got really lucky. I’m not a good enough defender to say ‘I did that’ at all. That was luck.”