Mike Elias revealed injuries being dealt with by a number of players, including Kyle Bradish
In spring training, no news is good news because news is usually bad. This year’s Orioles spring experience has already demonstrated this, with general manager Mike Elias making a series of announcements about injuries to players that haven’t been publicly revealed until now. The names mentioned in Elias’s update: Kyle Bradish, Gunnar Henderson, John Means, and Samuel Basallo. It’s not great!
This is pretty much the one thing you want to have your favorite baseball team avoid: A crucial player turning up to camp and the first thing that’s said about them is that they’re hurt. In this case, it’s three critical players and one prospect who’s played his way up into the top 10 of many league-wide lists. This sucks.
Most concerning and most immediately impactful is Bradish’s injury. Elias told reporters that Bradish suffered a UCL sprain when he began throwing last month. He has already received a PRP injection into his elbow and will restart a throwing program tomorrow. Elias said that “everything is pointing in the right direction,” though he did acknowledge that Bradish will open the season on the injured list.
Hearing about UCL-related injuries for pitchers is grim because if the UCL is injured enough, that’s the condition that requires Tommy John surgery. It is a specter that looms over every injured elbow. Sometimes it’s not a tear that’s bad enough to require the surgery. Now, we can only hope that Bradish and the Orioles have gotten lucky. Elias’s initial remarks certainly aren’t sounding concerned about this, but until Bradish gets through the throwing program without setbacks, I’ll be nervous.
Another anticipated member of the Opening Day Orioles rotation could be out of that picture. Elias also said that John Means is about a month behind the other starting pitchers. This was intentionally-planned by the team to give Means some extra rest in the offseason after he was unable to pitch in the postseason due to elbow soreness. It’s not clear when exactly Means will be ready for full action. Missing at least a month of the regular season seems like a reasonable assumption. Or at least that’s the one I’m making.
I wish that was the end of the bad news. It is not. Elias also indicated that Henderson suffered some oblique soreness about two weeks ago. The timeline for recovery is currently 2-3 weeks, which will keep him out of some of the early spring training games but is not expected to remove him from the Opening Day picture. At least that’s something.
Oblique soreness isn’t quite as scary as the UCL stuff for pitchers, but it’s a little scary for me because “This guy hurt his oblique and he spends the rest of the year looking not quite right” is not exactly a rare occurrence. Let’s hope the early optimism about Henderson is not squashed by later developments.
Last but certainly not least, Basallo, who we were all excited to see in the big league camp this year, is dealing with a stress fracture in his throwing elbow, according to Elias. If there’s a silver lining to this, it’s that he will still be able to bat during spring training games, so he can serve as the designated hitter. Elias said Basallo won’t be catching until at least April. I expect this will have a currently-unknowable ripple effect on his eventual big league debut, which, like all of this other stuff, sucks.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?