A Major League baseball player is lucky to be alive after suffering a horror injury at the weekend.

Juan Nicasio of the Colorado Rockies was hurt during the second inning of the Rockies game when a driver off the bat of his opponent, Washington’s Ian Desmond, came back to hit the right side of his head.

Stunned players looked on as Nicasio fell to the mound and lay there for five minutes as he was tended to by team medical staff.

The 25-year-old has undergone neck surgery to stabilize a broken vertebra in his neck, which involved inserting two screws into the damaged vertebra and a metal plate in the back of his head.