Carter has optimistic outlook on back injury

This story was excerpted from Kennedi Landry's Rangers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

ARLINGTON -- Evan Carter admits he’s been pretty miserable this season. The 22-year-old rookie has been on the injured list since May 28 with a stress reaction in his back, cutting short an electric start to his big league career.

Carter entered the season as one of MLB Pipeline’s top five overall prospects after making his big league debut late last season. He hit .306 with a 1.058 OPS in 23 regular-season games, then appeared in all 17 games during the Rangers’ World Series run, hitting .300 with a .917 OPS in the postseason.

Then Carter fell back down to earth. When he landed on the IL in May, he was riding a nine-game hitless streak (0-for-20) with seven strikeouts and just one walk. Additionally, he had an .053/.100/.053 slash line over his last 14 games.

Overall in 2024, he slashed .188/.272/.361 in 45 games.

“Yeah, it's been miserable, to be completely honest,” Carter said during the Rangers’ final homestand. “You go from the coolest thing that you can do in baseball to missing your entire rookie season. Then what little bit I did get to play, I felt terrible. It just sucks, you know?”

Carter said it was even more difficult for him because of the constant start and stop he’s dealt with throughout the process. The training staff has tried to ramp him up multiple times by taking live batting practice and doing defensive drills, to no avail. That led to the official shutdown after visiting Dr. Robert Watkins, a prominent spinal surgeon, in August.

Carter admits that he’s somebody who will play through injuries whenever possible. That definitely did more harm than good in the long run for him this season. He acknowledged that he needs to be more self-aware about his body going forward.

“A whole lot goes into that, though,” Carter said. “Me lying to myself, me lying in general. I just needed to take a step back, and I did, and here we are now. … Again, it's been miserable here. But I mean, it has been for everyone. Gosh, everybody wants to win, and we didn’t. There are a lot of guys that want to have better years, and a lot of guys that want to redo it, and I'm one of them. I’m excited to redo it next year for sure.”

But Carter also believes that good news is coming his way. While he declined to go into more detail, Carter said they’ve found some underlying issues that needed correcting beyond “just swinging a bat and hurting my back.”

He has not restarted baseball activities just yet, but better things appear to be on the horizon.

“I'm excited,” Carter said. “It's been one of those things where you do everything that you're supposed to do. You do everything right, you bust your butt, and then there's no results. So it's like, why are there no results? Why are we not seeing what we want to see? On one side, it sucks that this is going to be me for the rest of my life. But on the other hand, I can take care of that hopefully, and kind of put it on the back burner for a while. So I'm excited about what we've got going forward. We’ll see how it goes.”

It’s worth noting that Carter has had one other major back injury in his professional career. He played just 32 games with Single-A Down East during his pro debut in 2021 due to a stress fracture in his back, though he slashed .236/.438/.387 in that small sample that season.

But after his recent findings, he doesn’t think that it’ll be a problem going forward.

“My hope is that once we get everything going that needs to in the next week or two, that I should never have to think about this until I’m 50,” Carter said.