Before this season, Spencer Steer had never been on the injured list. Now, he’s out with a wrist injury that has sidelined him since July and still he doesn’t know how long it will be before he swings a bat again.
“I try to stay busy,” Steer said. “I feel like my situation is different because I don’t really have a timeline. It’s wait and see, wait for it to heal. I’ve tried to keep busy. Keep my legs in shape. Run around if I can. Watch the game, try to pick up on stuff. I’m seeing the game through a different lens than I have before.”
Steer has a follow-up scheduled for this week. In late July, he suffered a partial tear to the sheath that protects a tendon in his right wrist. Surgery hasn’t been ruled out yet. Steer is trying to stay optimistic.
“The big thing is the stability of the tendon,” Steer said. “It’s the whole reason I’m injured. The tendon isn’t stable. That’s why I didn’t get out of the brace the last time I saw him. He didn’t feel like the tendon was stable enough. Hopefully, I get the green light to keep progressing.”
Steer said that if it’s determined that he needs surgery, an “artificial sheath” would be created and tied down to the tendon. He said that the timeline for that surgery would be three months minimum. Staying optimistic, Steer hasn’t asked whether that would be three months until he’d be back full-go or three months until he could start swinging a bat again.
Steer’s right arm has been in a splint since he suffered the injury, and his wrist has been “immobilized.” If he gets the best case scenario news in his follow-up this week, he’s still not sure yet what the timeline to swing a bat would be.
“If you don’t use your wrist for six weeks, the tendons and muscles get stiff and get weak,” Steer said. “It’s a process, getting that range of motion and strength back. This time was spent to let it heal and not bother it. The main thing is don’t rush just because I feel good. There’s a chance I could reinjure it if I swing a bat too early. I’m leaning on the experts. It’s not like I’m rushing back to play a game this year. I’m trying to take my time.”
The Reds have really missed him on the field, and his absence has impacted every single player on the roster. Guys have had to play out of position — positions that the versatile Steer would have had to fill. Days off were harder to create at specific positions because they didn’t have a backup at multiple infield positions for a while. Terry Francona hasn’t been able to use the bench in the same way because he didn’t have a chess piece like Steer who could bounce around positions. The Reds also miss Steer’s leadership.
“I miss being out there in the fight,” Steer said. “I’m just not in the fight with the guys. That kills me the most. Not being able to compete is the worst part.”
For the 2026 season, he has a .238 average, a .739 OPS, 16 homers, 14 doubles and 40 RBI in 98 games. While the numbers don’t pop off the page, Steer feels good about how he performed when he was healthy.
“It was probably the best I’ve hit the ball in terms of quality of contact,” Steer said. “I was hitting the ball with power to all fields, which I think I’ve failed to do the last couple of years. I was pretty happy with where I was at. The results weren’t great. The process of it and how I was hitting the ball, it was better than it was in 2023.”
Before this season, Steer’s best barrel rate was 7.6% in 2025. This year, his barrel rate was 12.4%, which ranked in the top-20% in MLB.
“I was squaring the ball up more than I ever have,” Steer said. “My lower half was as consistent as it’s ever been. I was on time a lot. There were very few times I felt like I wasn’t doing the right things with my lower half. I had one bad stretch, really bad. Other than that, I was swinging it good.”
Reflecting on his season, Steer struck a similar tone to what Sal Stewart said recently.
Stewart is having a fantastic season, but he said that ““I feel like I could have done more things this year to help the team win. That falls on me.”
While Steer sees a lot of positives in his own individual season, he stresses that he needs to do more for the Reds to win more in 2027.
“We’ve got to get better,” Steer said. “I’ve got to get better. The guy next to me has to get better and so on. What we’ve been doing isn’t good enough. If we’re just going to go into the offseason, coast and have another regular offseason, then we’re going to have the same results next year. We’ve got to find ways to get better. We’ve got to find out ways to find out who we are over this last month.”
As Steer says this, sitting in the Reds’ dugout on Saturday, the Milwaukee Brewers are taking batting practice at Great American Ball Park.
“That’s the reason (the Brewers) are good,” Steer said. “They’re consistent. They play the same style of game every night. You know what you’re going to get out of them.”
The 2026 Reds haven’t been a consistent team.
“We let it snowball on us,” Steer said. “We had that one road trip (in early May) where we couldn’t win a game. It snowballed on us a little too much. Sometimes, that’s all it takes. A bad two-week stretch that you let get away from you, and it’s too deep of a whole to dig out of. Then it felt like every time we strung a couple of wins together, we’d find a way to lose a couple.”
The Reds ended April with a 20-11 record. They went 10-17 in May, 9-17 in June and 4-7 in July leading up to the All-Star break. The Reds played better leading up to the trade deadline in the second half of July, but by then it was too little too late.
“It’s just been a frustrating year,” Steer said. “A lot of guys would admit that they’re underperforming their own expectations. That’s a part of the game. We had high hopes entering the year. We felt like we had a really good team. The talent level currently on this team and the talent level for the entire year, we just underperformed. We could have been a lot better. It’s easy to say a team looks good on paper. You’ve got to go out and execute.”
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