Dodgers News: Miguel Rojas Talks About Injury That Contributed to Down Year in 2022

New Dodgers acquisition Miguel Rojas injured his right wrist in July and had surgery in October, but he expects to be healthy and ready for spring training.

Miguel Rojas had a rough year in 2022, posting a .605 OPS and 72 OPS+, both among the worst marks of his career. He had surgery on his right wrist in October after injuring the wrist on a slide in July.

Through July 8, Rojas had a .692 OPS, which was much more respectable than his final number. From July 9 through the end of the season, though, his OPS was just .511. It wasn't just the wrist, of course — Rojas went 3-for-33 in the 10 games immediately preceding the injury to drop his OPS to .636 — but trying to break out of a slump with a wrist injury is certainly not ideal.

After news of the trade broke on Wednesday, Craig Mish of the Miami Herald reported that Rojas had a "minor issue" in his recovery from surgery and would need "a procedure" to help his recovery, but that neither of those things were holdups in the trade. Rojas was on local Los Angeles radio on Wednesday evening and he talked about the wrist.

"I've been progressing. I feel like there's a ways to go for spring training and for all the things in front of me (Rojas will be playing for Venezuela in the World Baseball Classic). But I just want everybody to know that my first objective is to help the team win during the season. I'm not going to force anything before that. I'm always going to put my team first and I'm going to do everything that is in my power to be 100% in spring training and play games over there 100%.

"It was really hard for me to play through the injury last year for the second half of the year because this happened in July. But now I feel so much better. There's still a couple more things that I need to figure out with the wrist but at the end of the day I'm going to be ready for spring training if everything goes well."

Rojas is well-respected throughout the league as a hard worker and a team leader. Realistically, he probably should have had surgery earlier than he did last year, but he powered through and hopefully won't miss any time with the injury. His powering through probably even lowered the Marlins' asking price in a trade for him, so he was already being a team player for the Dodgers without even knowing it!