Chipper Struggles With Foot Pain

Chipper Jones, The Atlanta Braves third baseman, remains one of baseball's most feared hitters, but his career is hindered by a set of bad feet. There's nothing he can do about it, other than those frequent injections he's taken over the years to deaden the pain. So, he'll play it out while fretting about the next step, wondering how bad it's going to hurt.

"Every time I start running, it's on my mind," Jones conceded Friday. "Every time I push off, every time I accelerate, it's there."

Jones was an ironman through his first nine years in the majors, playing an average of 155 games and winning the NL MVP award in 1999. But the past three seasons were marred by a litany of ailments, along with the overriding concern that something he's had since birth will shorten or certainly cramp the rest of his career.

"My feet were killing me at the end of last year," Jones conceded.

Coming up on his 35th birthday, he decided to take a different tack during the offseason. He basically took three months off, hoping to get over all the aches and pains that allowed him to play just 110 games in 2006.

Jones went out in April with a sprained right knee. Then he strained his oblique muscle, a nagging pain in his side that made it difficult to swing, put him on the disabled list and was a problem through most of the second half.

Despite the injuries, Jones managed to hit .324 with 26 homers and 86 RBIs in just 110 games. Over a full year, those power numbers project to 38 homers and 127 RBIs -- comparable to his MVP season. He also had a .409 on-base percentage and a .596 slugging average.

"From the time I got off the DL, I came out swinging," Jones said. "I was a tough out all year."

Surgery is not an option. It's just too risky.

"There's not a foot doctor in America who will touch me right now," Jones said. "There's all these horror stories about breaking the feet and resetting them. No one is going to take a professional athlete and take a chance on ending his career. To be honest with you, I'd much rather just play my way through it. I'll look at it down the road when I'm done playing."

For now, he's got to learn to play with some degree of pain and try not to worry about what might have been.
Source: AP

Advice: Chipper still has the ability to post solid numbers, but don't draft him too high because of the lingering foot problems that most likely will cause him to miss time.