Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Alex Dickerson wants to settle the masses.
“It could be media, it could be family, it could be anybody,” the Giants left fielder said Monday. “There’s always that, ‘Oh no, here it comes again.’”
But Dickerson is confident the back issues he’s dealing with right now are not related to the back surgery he underwent in 2017, the first major setback in a career that was flagging until he wound up with the Giants. He said he expected to be in the lineup Tuesday.
“That’s always the hard part of anytime I am dealing with this — the anxiety that I go through,” Dickerson said before the Giants hosted the Cubs. “I personally know it’s not the same thing, but trying to explain that to everybody else a lot of times is a little more of a task.”
According to Dickerson, who was out of the lineup and has started twice since Wednesday, he’s been having right oblique tightness, whereas his back problems historically have been on the left side. He and the training staff have been working on tweaking his preparation, and he was confident it was not serious.
“Maybe a little bit of an overcompensation thing,” Dickerson said
He said the tightness had been “creeping up” for the past few weeks, but has gotten worse recently. He attributed it to not playing for two seasons — he missed 2018 after Tommy John surgery — and the same stretching preparation he had employed for years now needing some adjusting.
“I actually feel it more in batting practice than I’ve felt in games,” he said. “So it’s something that once I get looser, it’s going to clear up pretty quick.”