Ryan Howard told Todd Zolecki of MLB.com that the ankle injury which caused him to miss three weeks last August and sapped his production down the stretch still isn’t 100 percent healed.
More importantly, in doing so he said:
I still get a little bit of stiffness every once in a while. I’ll take it now and see what happens in spring training. I’ll just continue to look after it and take care of it. Those kinds of things linger, like The Cranberries.
He is, of course, referring to the song “Linger” by the Irish band The Cranberries, who were pretty big for a while in the early 1990s. Howard was 14 years old when the song came out, although baseball-playing jocks from Missouri probably weren’t Dolores O’Riordan’s target demographic.
As for the ankle injury, Howard said it’s about 90-95 percent healthy and “a lot better than it was” when he played through it in August and September, hitting just .231 with a modest .786 OPS in 39 games following a disabled list stint.
