Baseball Players Enduring The Weirdest Injuries Part 428 - Dodgers Pitcher Dustin May Reveals That His Season Ended Last Year After A Freak Accident When A Piece Of Lettuce Tore His Esophagus Leading To Emergency Surgery

Ronald Martinez. Getty Images.

Baseball players are no strangers to bizarre injuries. You have the Sammy Sosa sneeze incident, Marty Cordova falling asleep in a tanning bed, Joel Zumaya hurting his arm playing Guitar Hero, just all around weird injuries. Dodgers pitcher Dustin May now joins that club with a weird, but very serious injury that happened to him last season. 

May is a disgusting pitcher who throws pitches that dance and dive all over the strike zone, He is gross, but he can't seem to escape the injury bug. He hasn't pitched in the bigs since the middle of 2023 due to an issue with his flexor tendon and his second Tommy John revision surgery, but while he was thisssss close to making his comeback last year he suffered a freak injury which caused him to not only be out for the rest of the 2024 season, it almost cost him his life.

He was about a week away from starting a rehab stint in the minors last June when he was out to eat and ordered a salad. Took a bite and somehow got a piece of lettuce stuck in his throat. Scary situation we've all had, a piece of food gets lodged there and you start to internally panic and try to figure out what to do. May took a drink of water in hopes it would wash it down but that didn't work. He knew something was up but had no clue that he just suffered a serious tear in his esophagus and would have to be rushed into emergency surgery. May talked about the night with the L.A. Times in a very dramatic piece that kind of shakes you to your core, he almost died because he took a bite of a salad, no one thinks something like that could happen? He mentioned in the piece that if he just ignored it that night and tried to fight through it he probably would have died that night, terrifying to think about. His wife, Millie, made him go to the hospital which eventually saved his life, this is why you always listen to the ladies in your life, folks. Us guys are too stubborn and just blow stuff like this off, his wife basically forcing him to go to the ER saved him.

When May arrived, doctors performed a CT scan using contrast fluid that revealed the severity of his tear. Immediately they ushered him into surgery. In a matter of hours, he went from being on the verge of a long-awaited comeback to facing the most unexpected of setbacks.

“It was extremely frustrating,” May said. “You can’t plan for it. You can’t try to prevent it. It just happened.”

With a shake of his head, he continued: “It wasn’t on my bingo card for 2024.”

To repair the rupture, May required what he described as “basically a full abdominal surgery” — lifting his shirt in front of his locker Friday to reveal a long vertical scar from his lower chest to his stomach.

Instead of completing the final stages of his elbow rehab, May embarked on a new six-month recovery in which he was barred from lifting any weights heavier than 10 pounds. Though he began light throwing activities in November, it wasn’t until around New Year’s that he was back to full strength.

The whole thing sounds like such a terrifying ordeal, again something as normal as eating a salad almost killed a pro athlete. People will make fun of him and clown him about his most likely but it's a very serious situation that he is lucky to have escaped. A freak injury that he had 0 control over almost ended his baseball career and his life, that is not what you expect to happen when you're working your way back to the bigs over a nice meal. He described it as a "mega-painful" sensation in his throat and stomach for about 15 minutes, that right there is enough to scare the hell out of you. No way for him to possibly know what was going on or how bad the tear in his throat was, he was very, very close to a terrible ending simply because he ordered a salad. 

He's perfectly fine now and expected to compete for a role in that crowded Dodgers rotation, but just the fact that he's healthy is the good part. Again this guy has gone through a ton of different elbow injures and then was almost killed by a salad, safe to say he deserves something good in his life in 2025. Hope to see him back out on the mound in 2025 and hope he stays fully health this year, just get the steak and avoid the salads on road trips. This story alone is another perfect example of why it's perfectly okay to avoid salads at all costs too. 

Ps. That's 2 pro athletes who saw their lives flash before their eyes after ordering a salad while in Arizona. I need Biz and May to come together and tell the world the dangers of ordering salads out there, could tear your throat up or have a pack of Irish travelers come after you.