Under The Knife 8/14/24

Raleigh Return

After a weekend spent on the road to see my dad on his birthday, let’s get back to the injury grind and dive right in to the injuries:

RIVER RYAN, SP LAD (sprained elbow)

When I wrote about young pitchers a couple weeks ago, there were many across baseball who worried that what happened to River Ryan and Emmet Sheehan before him would be the consequence. But look above and several older pitchers with injury issues, or even some of the Dodgers’ own older pitchers. Age doesn’t really appear to have anything to do with this, nor can anyone say that experience does either. Workload management? Much more likely.

There was some confusion in the initial reporting. First described as forearm tightness, later reporting had Dave Roberts calling it a “UCL strain.” We know that’s not the case and with further descriptions pointing to the forearm, this could be a flexor tendon issue or a UCL sprain, or both. My sources tend to say it’s the elbow ligament and confirmation came on Tuesday afternoon. Ryan will have elbow reconstruction surgery and likely miss most or all of 2025 as well as the rest of this season. While most reports say “Tommy John surgery,” it could be an augmented technique. Technicalities.

So where does this leave the Dodgers? They have three solid starters, though all three have had health issues. Walker Buehler will come off the IL and start on Wednesday despite struggles in the minors. Behind them is Gavin Stone, who has workload issues, and the hope that Yoshinobu Yamamoto comes back from his shoulder problems before long, after a good pen session this week. There’s also Justin Wrobleski, sent down to manage his workload in favor of River Ryan staying. There’s plenty of possibilities, but absolutely no certainty.

Where does this leave baseball? Ryan went down in the same game where he went head to head with Paul Skenes and looked good, even in comparison. It’s not good for baseball to lose this kind of talent for a year or more, over and over. Justin Orenduff from DVS, a former pitcher, had an interesting post about the status of injury and the inaction of baseball to fix it. Well worth a read, even if I can’t confirm some of his specific numbers.

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