Rangers’ Jack Leiter Gets Medical Education Thanks to His First Surgery

Texas Rangers pitcher Jack Leiter said his recent ankle surgery was the first of his life and it was for something that only affects a small number of people.

Texas Rangers starting pitcher Jack Leiter. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

ARLINGTON — As it turns out, Texas Rangers starting pitcher Jack Leiter was going to have ankle surgery at some point. It was only a matter of when.

As Leiter stood in front of his locker on Saturday, having started his rehab from the surgery, he used the name of a bone he had never known about before a doctor told him that was the cause of the pain in his left ankle since April.

Or, is the os trigonum a common bone?

“It’s just kind of an extra bone that I was born with, and I think that fall [in the on-deck circle against Pittsburgh] kind of jarred it loose and sped up what I think was probably inevitable, that I was going to have it removed at some point,” Leiter said.

Jack Leiter’s Surgery and Recovery

Texas Rangers starting pitcher Jack Leiter. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

That fall in the on-deck circle was on April 22 at Globe Life Field. But he said that he’d felt pain in the ankle two weeks prior to that, but it was not so difficult to pitch through. After the fall, it became gradually worse. So Leiter compensated his mechanics to work through the pain. It explains the step back in his numbers — a 3-7 record with a 5.29 ERA a season after going 10-10 with a 3.86 ERA.

“It just made it tougher to get into the position that I wanted to get into pushing off the mound, and then you start compensating and pushing off a little bit differently,” Leiter said.

What was causing the pain was a surprise to everyone. Aside from sounding like a spell in a Harry Potter book, the os trigonum is a bone that sometimes develops behind the ankle bone. Only 10 to 15 percent of people end up with it. An ankle sprain usually triggers it. Repeated downward motion of the foot, such as using your foot to plant for power while pitching, exacerbates it. Surgery is the only way to fix it.

Leiter went to a specialist. He described the procedure as one needle entering one side of his heel and the doctor then pulling out the excess bone through the skin on the other side.

Manager Skip Schumaker had never heard of it. President of baseball operations Chris Young, who pitched in the Majors, had only vaguely heard about it. But, he said the cause of Leiter’s pain and the procedure to correct it had a positive effect — It makes it more likely Leiter could pitch this season.

“Anytime you have to go in and surgically repair something the timeline is significantly longer,” Young said. “When they're going in and just removing something without repairing anything then it's all about letting the wound heal, letting the edema to go down, letting it calm down and then build back up.”

As for how long that will take, it's not clear. Both Leiter and Young said that there is “no blueprint” for recovery from this sort of surgery. Leiter said he Googled it and found recovery times of anywhere from three weeks to six-to-eight months. He only had the procedure recently, but Schumaker said Leiter was already throwing lightly in the outfield and able to turn the left ankle to plant. So that's progress.

“I feel very hopeful that I'll be pitching by the end of the season and what the exact timeline looks like, it's hard to say with these kinds of things,” Leiter said. But I want to be more on the aggressive side with what that will allow.”