Howard Had Muscle Removed During Second Surgery

If you’ll think back to spring training, we all learned that Ryan Howard had developed an infection in the wound that resulted from off-season surgery to repair the Achilles tendon he ruptured on the last play of a disappointing 2011 NLDS. Before the second surgery, Phillies GM Ruben Amaro Jr. was adamant about the fact that “setback” was not an apt term to describe the infection. Yesterday, Amaro was on 94 WIP and talked about Howard’s recovery saying, “When he had that infection, that had to debride quite a bit of it out of that area. And when they did that, they had to take actual meat, and muscle out of that area, which obviously made this rehab much, much longer than it should be.” [CBS 3]