Gary A. Vasquez-Imagn Images

The Texas Rangers placed second baseman Marcus Semien on the injured list with a broken left foot over the weekend, retroactive to Thursday’s games. The result of a foul ball hitting the top of his foot, Semien was initially diagnosed with a contusion, but after getting multiple additional opinions, that diagnosis was revised to a fracture of the third metatarsal and a Lisfranc sprain. Semien, who turns 35 next month and whose last injury that merited an IL stint was a wrist contusion back in 2017, is having one of his weaker offensive seasons, with a .230/.305/.364 triple slash line, but thanks to his still-solid glove, he’s still amassed 2.1 WAR. The injury likely ends Semien’s regular season, and given where Texas is in the standings, probably his 2025.

I can’t think of many good times to break your foot. Just speaking for myself, I might consider a broken foot preferable to, say, going to a wedding I really don’t want to attend. But Semien is a professional athlete, not an introverted middle-aged baseball analyst who writes from home surrounded by computers and cats, and his team is on the brink. Texas is coming off a sweep of the Cleveland Guardians, but those three wins only got the team back to the .500 mark, with a 9-13 record for August.

Semien noted on Sunday that he doesn’t believe that surgery will be required, and he’s actually a bit more worried about the Lisfranc sprain:

“Hopefully we get back in this race and we’ll see where we’re at by that time,” Semien said. “I’m gonna be watching for a little while here. The lisfranc is what we’re most worried about, just trying to keep it intact by staying off of it. If you tear that, then it could be a year. I’m just trying to keep that intact and let the other fracture heal.”

For those who, like me, get most of their knowledge of human skeletons from the song Dem Bones:

Your phalanges connected to the metatarsals
Your third metatarsal connected to the lateral cuneiform
Your lateral cunieform connected to the navicular bone
Your navicular bone connected to the talus
I hear the word of ElAttrache!

Or, more helpfully, the metatarsals are bones in the middle of the foot that help bridge the toes and the ankle. The lateral cuneiform is one of the “suspension bridges” of the foot, keeping the arch of the foot stable. The Lisfranc ligament is like the suspension cables that give that sort of bridge its name, helping to hold everything together. Picture the inevitable fate of the Golden Gate Bridge in any disaster movie set in California, and you have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in Semien’s foot at the moment.

Semien has a good case for being the most durable player in baseball today, with his 1,145 games since the start of the 2018 season the most, by 21 games, over second-place Freddie Freeman. In baseball, present health is broadly predictive of future health, even for hitters, and whether or not we call it a skill, Semien’s endurance is something that has brought a lot of value to his team, even in his lesser seasons.

Semien’s bat isn’t what it once was, but it was still welcome to the Rangers, who, outside of a six-week period or so in midsummer, have struggled immensely to consistently score runs. Texas has scored two or fewer runs in 49 games this season, the fifth-most in baseball, behind only the Royals and three of the worst teams in the league (the White Sox, Rockies, and Pirates). Semien had an especially brutal April, with a .182/.258/.245 line, but while he still hasn’t matched his preseason projections since then, hitting .244/.320/.400 is more than respectable. This isn’t me arbitrarily taking an optimistic stretch of performance from Semien’s season; the projection systems all have him maintaining a roughly .720 OPS over the rest of the season if not for the foot.

Even more importantly, Semien likely offered better offense than anyone else Texas has to play second base for the rest of the year. We project Ezequiel Duran to get the vast majority of the playing time down the stretch, and while he’s had an excellent August, even Steamer, which is our most bullish projection system as it concerns Duran, still just predicts a .676 OPS from him. Forty points of OPS is a significant downgrade, and that’s the weakest part of Semien’s game. Elsewhere on the roster, Josh Smith’s services have been needed in the outfield, and ZiPS doesn’t project Cody Freeman to be better than Duran, with a .242/.288/.384 projection. A year ago, I might have suggested the Rangers just roll the dice and throw Justin Foscue into the spot for six weeks, but he has only a 105 wRC+ in Triple-A this year, and his bat would have to be what carries him.

As of Monday morning, ZiPS projects the Semien-less Rangers with a 9.1% chance of making the playoffs, down from a 12.8% probability with a healthy Semien, meaning that this injury knocked out just over a quarter of the Texas’ playoff scenarios. At 4 1/2 games behind the last Wild Card team, the Seattle Mariners, with 30 games to go, every additional loss has a significant impact on the Rangers’ fate.

The Rangers could still very well make the playoffs — baseball can be weird sometimes, and there’s only so much any one player can do — but midnight ticked a little closer for them this weekend.