By Sam Bush
Matt Imhof, a Phillies Class A Clearwater pitcher, lost his right eye after a freak accident last week in Florida.
Imhof, 22, was engaged in a post-game workout last Friday at Brevard County’s Space Coast Stadium. A resistance band anchored to the wall broke loose. Imhof said that a piece of metal hit him in the head and eye, fracturing his nose and two orbital bones and also destroying his right eye.
“Doctors informed me that the damage to my eye was extreme and essentially that my eye had been crushed like a grape,” Imhof said.
Imhof was transferred to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami. Doctors informed him that he likely would permanently lose vision in the eye. And while a first surgery proved somewhat successful, Imhof said, he and his family and doctors agreed that his best chance to live a normal life was removing the eye and replacing it with a prosthetic one.
