What's an oblique? Explaining the pesky strain that's keeping baseball players down

Chase Anderson felt a sharp pain in his side, as if someone had stabbed him while he swung his bat. Boom! The right-hander was out for seven weeks.

Christian Yelich noticed progressive discomfort and some limited range of motion, but he’s not sure exactly when or how it started. Almost two weeks later, after several false starts while feeling out his progress, Yelich was reactivated from the disabled list last week.

For Zach Davies, the sensation was more akin to a cramp. It wasn’t, Davies knew, but he also recognized it as a red flag. Davies left the mound, missed a single spring training start and wasn’t bothered again.

RELATED:Lorenzo Cain has been exactly what the Brewers needed

RELATED:Davey Nelson, analyst for Brewers television crew, dies at 73

MLB:Live scoreboard, box scores, standings, statistics

Even with the different experiences and outcomes of these three Milwaukee Brewers, they collectively serve as an example of an injury that on a given day might affect half the teams in the major leagues, the oblique strain. The injury, like athletes themselves, comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.

But what, exactly, is an oblique?

Everyone actually has four – a pair on each side – that run diagonally across a person’s trunk, making up part of the abdominal wall. The externals extend upward from the hipbone to the ribs and spine, and the internals rise forward from the hip to ribs. An internal oblique is the more likely of the two to be strained.

“Both of them do rotation of the spine or the trunk and side-bend of the trunk,” said David Leigh, a clinical associate professor of exercise science at Marquette.  “So think if you’re going to go over here to reach for something, those muscles are going to work.”

Or think about someone swinging a bat well over a hundred times a day in the cage and on the field. Or whipping his arm diagonally while swiveling his hips as a pitcher. Or reaching over his shoulder or across his body to make a catch.

“Anything rotational,” said Yelich, 26, a left-handed hitter who suffered the strain on his right side. “Swinging, throwing, all that stuff is basically tough when you’ve got one of these things. It’s a tough injury.”

A six-year veteran and one of the Brewers’ prized off-season outfield acquisitions, Yelich hadn’t suffered an oblique strain before this season but was familiar with them from other players.

“I didn’t do mine super-bad,” he said.

Oblique strains are most prevalent in baseball and golf, and maybe tennis, said Leigh, who has spent more than 40 years in the field of sports medicine. He also has seen one such injury suffered by a decathlete throwing the javelin.

But it’s also possible for someone to hurt an oblique by reaching awkwardly to open a door or pick something up or by twisting to get out of a car.

“A strain is a stretch, an over-stretch of the muscle. Muscles expand and contract all the time,” said Leigh, who has not worked with any of the injured Brewers. “Sometimes if you do something sudden (and muscle fibers are injured instantly) … and then we have overuse injuries, where it’s like the Yelich thing, where it’s little tiny strains that kind of build up to, ‘I can’t play anymore.’ ”

Anderson’s strain last summer was instantaneous.

A right-handed hitter, Anderson suffered his injury on his left side. It’s most common for a player to be hurt on the side toward which his body rotates.

“Very different feeling than I’ve ever had in my life,” said Anderson, 30.

Anderson theorizes his muscles were too tight and attributes oblique injuries in part to players working to be more powerful and explosive in the field and at the plate. After the injury, he changed his workout routine between starts to reduce the amount of rotational exercises he does and to concentrate more on stability.

Although Anderson was out for what “felt like an eternity,” he said, he was able to throw lightly to keep up the strength in his pitching arm without rotating his midsection.

“As you get older in this game, as you play longer in this game, you have to figure out what your body needs and what your body doesn’t need, when to work and when to not work,” Anderson said. “I’m still trying to find a happy medium, because I like to work.”

Davies, 25, barely missed any work this March, skipping a turn but feeling fine in a subsequent bullpen session. The right-hander is the rare case of a player who suffered a minor oblique strain.

“That’s just Zach knowing himself really well, his body, because when he felt something, ‘OK, I need to back off,’ ” Anderson said. “That was really smart, and kudos to him for really feeling that.”

Other Brewers players to miss time due to an oblique strain in the past couple of years include pitcher Corey Knebel, who opened 2016 on the disabled list and was out for more than two months; infielder Scooter Gennett, who missed 15 games that April and May; and outfielder Brett Phillips, who lost most of spring training last season.

At the start of last week – when Yelich was still out – major-league injury reports included 15 players out with oblique injuries, third-most behind elbows (37) and shoulders (30).

Because the obliques come into play to some extent in almost everything a person does, even breathing, injuries tend to linger. They’re pesky, as are injuries to the muscles between the ribs – the intercostals – and to the back, and treatment options are limited.

“You hurt your shoulder, you can put it in a sling for a while. You rest it,” Leigh said. “There’s really no way to splint your trunk.”

So about all  that could be done by someone such as Yelich – or another eight or 10 or 15 players around the league at any given time – would be to bide his time, listen to his body and try to be patient.

“They’re better when they’re better,” Yelich said. “They take a while. There’s the potential to make them worse if you come back too soon; you pull it again. … It’s something you’ve got to be careful with.”