Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
San Francisco Giants outfield Harrison Bader next to a fire truck
Harrison Bader’s first season with the Giants did not pan out as he or the team hoped due to the injuries that limited him to just 30 games. Now, it’s come to a premature end thanks to a strange incident involving a fire truck that ran him over after he crashed into the back of it.
Professional athletes have plenty of resources at their disposal when it comes to keeping their bodies in top shape, but there’s also so much you can do to avoid the wear and tear your body endures when you’re in that particular line of work.
Injuries are less of a matter of “if” and more of a matter of “when,” as you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who’s managed to make it through their career without being sidelined by a setback they suffered while training or playing in a game.
There are also plenty of people who’ve been forced to miss time over an ailment that had nothing to do with their job, and we can now add Harrison Bader to that list due to an unfortunate development that brought his season to an end.
Harrison Bader is done for the year after being run over by a fire truck he crashed into while riding a scooter
The 2026 MLB season marked Bader’s 10th in the league and his first as a member of the Giants, who signed the journeyman outfielder to a two-year contract worth $20.5 million in January.
He only played 15 games before he was sidelined with a hamstring injury midway through April that kept him on the bench for a month, and his return was derailed by a case of plantar fasciitis that had kept him inactive since the end of May.
According to SFist, Bader was scheduled to be evaluated by a specialist in Indianapolis on Monday, but those plans were seemingly derailed by what transpired in San Francisco before he was slated to fly there.
On Tuesday, the team announced the 32-year-old outfielder was slated to undergo an MRI to evaluate the damage he suffered to the foot he was already having issues with after he was involved in what was simply described as a “scooter accident,” but those two words certainly don’t tell the entire story.
The accident in question reportedly unfolded in the Cow Hollow neighborhood in San Francisco just before 2 A.M. on Sunday morning, as an eyewitness said Bader was seen riding on a scooter that he “crashed into the back of a San Francisco Fire Department fire engine, the wheel of which then rolled over his foot, causing major injury.”
Matt Lively of KPIX reports he spoke with multiple people who saw him “drinking at bars in San Francisco hours before the accident,” which unfolded outside Balboa Cafe, the watering hole he was seen leaving right before it transpired.
The San Francisco Police Department confirmed some of the details of that account while saying he suffered “non-life-threatening injuries,” but it appears they are severe enough to prevent him from playing for the remainder of the season based on the initial diagnosis.