Injury not severe for Rays' Navarro

The jokes came easily Sunday morning.

"It must be the skim milk," Tampa Bay Rays bullpen coach Bobby Ramos said.

"Got to put him in a bubble," bench coach Dave Martinez said.

And from the man himself: "Maybe we move (spring training) to Arizona," Dioner Navarro said as he used crutches to move through the clubhouse. "We'd be better."

This after Navarro announced to his teammates, "I got a bad wheel."

Fortunately, that's all he has. Medically, the Rays' catcher has a nerve contusion in his left shin. He suffered the injury during the fourth inning Saturday when he blocked the plate against Twins outfielder Jacque Jones.

Navarro fell forward and remained motionless while attended to by the Rays training staff. Six minutes later, he was carted off the field. His wife, Sherley, drove him to a nearby medical facility where X-rays revealed nothing more than the bruised nerve.

Navarro will miss at least a week and expects to be ready for Opening Day.

He was prepared to miss much more.

Navarro said his leg went numb immediately after the collision. He couldn't tell anyone what hurt because he couldn't feel his leg.

"I saw my whole season passing through my mind in that moment right there," Navarro said.

Rays manager Joe Maddon bent over Navarro and offered his opinion from a similar experience during Maddon's brief minor-league playing career.

"I was telling him I got hit by a pitch in my back part of my arm and I was ready to throw up, but all it was was a nerve," Maddon said. "So you get it in the nerve, even if it's in the leg, it's like getting hit in the funny bone, it causes all kinds of weird sensations."

Turns out, Maddon was right.

"Dr. Joe," Navarro said.

Navarro was injured because he blocked the plate during an exhibition game. He also did it in the second inning against Jones.

"I'm just working on my thing, working blocking the plate," Navarro said. "They work on sliding hard. It was a good, hard baseball play. Unfortunately, I came out with the worst of it."

On both occasions Navarro employed the deke technique, where he stands motionless at the plate and pretends there will not be a play, then catches the ball at the last moment and tags the unsuspecting runner.

"He's really good at it," Ramos said. "He always holds the ball. He takes his knees right to the runner. It's a contact play. It's like playing football on a baseball field. The runner is coming at full speed and you're there."

For Navarro, this is another in a long list of injuries that looked serious at first but proved to be minor.

He pulled a hamstring running the bases during a spring game at McKechnie Field in Bradenton in 2007, was struck in the neck by a baseball in Miami that summer, sliced his right hand on the mesh in front of the visiting dugout at Yankee Stadium in 2008, was struck on the tip of his left thumb avoiding an errant pickoff throw at McKechnie earlier this spring. Now this.

"Weird stuff," Navarro said.

Part of being a catcher is playing in pain, Navarro said.

"That's just part of my life, that's just being a catcher," he said. "I signed up for that, been paying the price year by year but that's what it takes."

Navarro wondered if moving the Rays' spring training site to Arizona might change his luck.

Ramos, who survived 15 minor-league seasons as a catcher, offered his opinion on Navarro's strange injuries.

"I guess it's the milk," he said. "They drink the low fat milk, the skim milk. That's the only thing I can think of. Back in my day, nobody knew about skin milk or anything like that. We drink vitamin D straight through with fat and all that. Maybe it's that, I don't know. It must be the skim milk."

Ramos said he had one serious injury during his career. You want to know why?

"I drank milk straight from the cow," he said.