WASHINGTON — Less than two hours before the New York Mets’ game Monday evening against the Washington Nationals, outfielder Brandon Nimmo showed up at the field wearing a bandage on his forehead and a hospital bracelet on his wrist.
Nimmo woke up confused and scared early Monday morning after fainting and hitting his forehead in a hotel bathroom. He doesn’t remember much from the incident. He doesn’t even know exactly what he made contact with. Nor does he know how long he was out for.
By Monday afternoon, however, Nimmo said he avoided any serious injury, and for that, he’s grateful. After his trip to an emergency room, Nimmo said he passed all tests — “CT scan, EKG and all the tests we can think of,” he said — and may return to the Mets’ lineup at his usual spot in left field as early as Tuesday. But he was out of the lineup Monday after an alarming experience.
Nimmo woke up around 5:15 a.m. His stomach wasn’t feeling great. So he decided to go to the bathroom. While in the bathroom, he caught a cramp in his leg. He said when he cramped up, he then got up really fast, went to get water and returned to the toilet — after that, he cannot recall what happened. His first memories from there: Waking up on the floor confused about how he ended up there. When he pushed himself up off the ground, blood gushed from his face.
Brandon Nimmo is OK now, per Carlos Mendoza, but he’s out of the lineup because he slipped in his hotel room last night and got a cut on his head. He could return to the lineup tomorrow.
— Will Sammon (@WillSammon) July 1, 2024
“I never had anything like this happen where I blacked out and I literally cannot tell you what happened,” Nimmo said. “I had all kinds of guys with me yesterday who can vouch that I didn’t have any alcohol. I didn’t drink at all. I’m not really sure why this happened.”
Nimmo immediately called Mets head athletic trainer Joseph Golia at 5:37 a.m. Golia rushed to Nimmo’s hotel room. From there, they quickly went to the emergency room. Nimmo didn’t leave the hospital until Monday afternoon.
Nimmo said he never fainted before.
“It scared me,” Nimmo said. “That’s why I called Joe right away. I was trying to figure out, OK, you don’t just faint. What happened? Is there something bigger? An underlying issue? That’s why we needed to check all the boxes.”
Nimmo said that doctors told him that what most likely happened was that the cramp spiked his blood pressure and got his heart rate up quickly. He also had a tingling in his hands and felt hot just before fainting.
“I asked them if there was anything I could do to prevent this from happening again, and they said, no — sometimes a perfect storm happens,” Nimmo said. “From what I understood, your brain, when you go back and your blood pressure drops, your brain just loses the blood for one second, and you’re out.”
Last month, Nimmo was hit on the helmet flap by a pitch but passed all concussion tests. He said there was no correlation between the incidents. Nimmo slumped at the plate immediately after getting hit by the pitch, and he attributed some of those struggles to being “gun shy.” But he said, “medically, there was no correlation to a concussion.” In June, Nimmo posted a 1.004 OPS as one of a handful of hot hitters in the Mets lineup. After not even requiring stitches Monday, Nimmo said he’s grateful that he can soon return to play — even though the club will continue to monitor him.
Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said, “I think we got lucky there.”
(Photo of Brandon Nimmo from May 19: Rich Storry / Getty Images)
