Brewers’ Brandon Lockridge is relieved his right knee injury isn’t worse after he crashed into wall

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Brandon Lockridge was feeling relieved, even as he stood on crutches and wore a knee brace one day after crashing into a side wall.

The injury that led to him getting carted off the field could have been much worse.

“To be honest, I thought my knee was going to be in 100 pieces,” Lockridge said Saturday after getting placed on the 10-day injured list. “To find out there was no fracture was a relief.”

Lockridge suffered a major laceration and contusion to his right knee after sliding into foul territory in the fourth inning of the Brewers’ 6-0 victory over the New York Yankees as he tried to catch a fly ball hit by Cody Bellinger. Lockridge’s right knee hit the concrete on the bottom section of the wall, below the padding.

“I thought I had more space,” Lockridge said. “I think if it had been a couple of feet to the left of that corner, I felt I would have had a little bit more space to slide. By the time I peeked back and was going into my slide, I realized, ‘That’s not good.’ It just caught the concrete flush.”

The Brewers called up outfielder Blake Perkins from Triple-A Nashville to fill Lockridge’s spot on the roster.

Brewers manager Pat Murphy said it’s too early to give a firm timetable for Lockridge’s return, but he guessed that a best-case scenario would have Lockridge miss a month.

“He took a pretty good hit,” Murphy said. “Being on the scene, that was a kid that was injured, you know what I mean? It wasn’t like, ‘I just cut my leg.’ If you think about it, it was pretty serious, a pretty hard blow.”

Lockridge has not yet had imaging on the knee.

“We’ll wait until Monday to get an MRI just because they said it would light up right now with all the inflammation,” Lockridge said. “We’re trying to get that to go down a little bit, and then we’ll get an MRI just to make sure everything structurally is good to go.”

Lockridge said the portion of his knee that hit the wall was just above the patellar tendon and just beneath the kneecap.

“Honestly, about as good a spot (as it could be),” Lockridge said. “Just a lot of tissue that it tore through. Higher or lower and it would have been much worse. Very thankful for it.”

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The 29-year-old Lockridge, who joined the Brewers at last year’s trade deadline, had just 160 career plate appearances before this season. He has capitalized on more playing time this year by hitting .294 with a .368 on-base percentage, no homers, 12 RBIs and five steals in 28 games.

Perkins, who’s also 29, returns to the big leagues less than a week after he got sent down. He played 242 games for Milwaukee from 2023-25 while helping the Brewers win three straight NL Central times, but he’s been slumping this season.

Perkins entered Saturday hitting .109 with a .212 on-base percentage in 19 games.

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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb