A few days before Max Muncy strained his oblique in May, the Dodgers infielder noticed a bruise on his chest.
At first, he didn’t pay it much mind.
“You look in the mirror and you’re like, ‘Oh I’ve got some weird bruises there. Maybe I took a weird hop on a ground ball in practice or something,’” Muncy recalled recently. “You really don’t even think about it.”
As it turned out, the contusion actually was an early clue in what became a three-month odyssey for Muncy, who languished on the injured list for most of the summer with perhaps the most confounding ailment of any Dodger this season.