Red Sox’s Justin Turner Reveals Extent Of Lingering Injury

It has been a shuffle in and out of the Boston Red Sox lineup for Justin Turner ever since he suffered a heel injury on July 31 against the Seattle Mariners.

Turner sat out the remaining games of Boston’s West Coast road trip and also missed the first game back at Fenway Park with a bruised right heel. The veteran infielder returned to play the next three games, but the Red Sox will be without Turner for a second straight contest Wednesday when they take on the Kansas City Royals.

What seemed like a minor injury initially for Turner has proven to be more of a nuisance, as he tries to find a way at a critical point in the season to play through the nagging ailment.

“It’s an interesting one,” Turner told The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier. “It’s a bone bruise. There’s no real remedy for a bone bruise. You ask a medical person, they’ll tell you 4-6 weeks avoiding impact.

“Obviously I don’t have that luxury. So, trying to calm it down and get it as under control as I can and then try to go again and not piss it off. You don’t really have a lot of options.”

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Turner, who is batting .284 with 17 home runs and 71 RBIs in his first season with Boston, is one of the most important bats in the Red Sox lineup, but looked clearly impacted by the injury when trying to push through it.

Turner went 2-for-10 at the plate in his last three games and the 38-year-old admitted that trying to be cautious of his heel caused him to tweak other parts of his body.

But Turner is cognizant that there’s no time for him to get the requisite rest needed to subside his symptoms, especially with the Red Sox slipping out of playoff contention. Boston entered Wednesday five games back of the Toronto Blue Jays for the third and final American League wild card spot.

“When you have something going on, subconsciously, you guard that thing, and in doing that you put other areas at risk,” Turner said, per Speier. “I had a little bit of that going on. It wasn’t so much just the heel yesterday and today. There was some other (stuff) that was flaring up because of it.

“I’m trying to just be smart. I don’t know what the answer is at this point in the season. The right thing to do versus what you have to do are two different things. You just have to duct tape it and put some WD-40 on it, go out there, and try to help us win games.”