Marcelo Mayer will not make the trip with the San Francisco Giants to Boston after a rehab setback with his foot injury stopped his push toward a debut. The 23-year-old aggravated a bone bruise after getting back into game action, and the discomfort returned before he could get on the field in Boston.
That leaves the Giants without the possibility of introducing Mayer in a series that already carried extra weight because of his path out of Boston. The Boston Red Sox selected Mayer with the fourth overall pick in the 2021 MLB Draft, then traded him to San Francisco at the beginning of August for Erik Miller, making this week the kind of return that would have drawn attention beyond the standings.
Before the setback, Mayer had played four rehab games with Triple-A Sacramento and looked close to clearing the final step before a Giants debut. Instead, the bone bruise flared again after he returned to game action, forcing the club to slow everything down. Tony Vitello said Mayer had “just aggravated it a little bit from being back out there every day,” which is the kind of line that tells you the rehab was no longer moving forward cleanly.
The timing matters because Mayer’s career has already been marked by stops and starts. He has not appeared in at least 100 games in any professional season, and his latest pause comes after a season in which he posted a.631 OPS over 73 plate appearances with the Red Sox before landing on the injured list with a hairline fracture in his forearm after his final appearance on June 25. He has never played a professional game later than Aug. 3, another small but telling marker of how little uninterrupted time he has been able to bank.
Vitello said Mayer will take the weekend off and then reassess things later, which pushes the question from whether he would debut in Boston to when he can simply resume rehab games at all. The Giants still see a player with obvious pedigree and a track record that made Boston’s trade surprising, but for now the immediate story is more basic than that: Mayer has been stopped again, and the trip to Fenway Park will go on without him.
