Former Mets catcher Paul Lo Duca revealed that he was in a “bad accident” traveling from the Oaklawn Hot Springs racing track in Arkansas that resulted in “multiple fractures” and left him unable to eat “for the first couple weeks,” he wrote in an X post Wednesday.
“I want to thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers,” Lo Duca, who last played in 2008 and now works as a horse racing analyst for the New York Racing Association, wrote. “I was involved in a bad accident coming back home to New York from Oaklawn. … but I’m getting stronger!”
He added a flexed biceps emoji at the end of his post.
The details and exact date of Lo Duca’s accident remain unclear.
Lo Duca, 52, spent two seasons with the Mets in 2006 and 2007.
He made the All-Star Game during his first year with the team en route to a season where he hit .318 with a .783 OPS across 124 games as the Amazin’s won the NL East.
He opened his career by playing with the Dodgers for six-plus seasons, and he also spent parts of three seasons with the Marlins and 46 games with the Nationals to start the 2008 season.
His final All-Star Game appearance in 2006 also doubled as his fourth consecutive appearance in the Midsummer Classic.
After retiring, Lo Duca, who played collegiately at Arizona State before the Dodgers selected him in the 25th round of the 1993 MLB Draft, worked as a horse racing analyst — making the shift into media first with TVG, a horse racing platform, in 2009 before eventually leaving for the New York Racing Association, according to ESPN.
“It’s like figuring out a puzzle,” he told ESPN in 2015. “You’re trying to figure out which guy is going to be in front, which horse is going to be behind him. This horse might be able to come from behind. When [Albert] Pujols would come up third in an inning, we’d plan to go after him with two outs and nobody on, but if there’s a guy on second, who’s up in the bullpen [who can get him out]?
“Figuring out a horse race is similar to that.”
