Surgery shelves Lance McCullers Jr. for season
Lance McCullers Jr. will not pitch at all this season after having surgery on his right forearm Tuesday night.
The operation was to repair the flexor tendon and remove a bone spur in McCullers’ forearm, which he injured in the first few days of spring training in February.
Astros general manager Dana Brown said McCullers is expected to return during the 2024 season but that it's too early to project an exact timeline. McCullers will begin throwing again in November, and the Astros will assess him in January, Brown said.
“Lance is a grinder, and he tried to, with grit, pure grit, tried to fight through the injury and come back,” Brown said. “And so that happened in ’21, and in ’22, he ended up coming back some, so you could give him cheers for his grit to come back. And then starting out this year, he felt like he was going to be fine and continued to press through it, and it continued to bother him. So with this surgery, we feel good, because at the end of the day, it was just the flexor tendon and also the bone spur, which gives him a chance to come back sometime in ’24.”
McCullers spent the past several months rehabbing what the team initially described as a small muscle strain, but he suffered a setback in May and was shut down again after experiencing discomfort while throwing.
Brown said the bone spur McCullers had removed was “the size of a lima bean,” which was bigger than the Astros initially thought and proved to be the source of his discomfort. Brown said McCullers’ ulnar collateral ligament, or UCL, which the pitcher had repaired via Tommy John surgery in 2018, is “in good shape.”
McCullers is the second Astros starter to have season-ending surgery this year. Righthander Luis Garcia underwent Tommy John surgery on his elbow in May and is also looking at a 2024 return date.
The injuries to McCullers and Garcia, as well as to righthander José Urquidy — who Brown said is expected back from a shoulder injury around the All-Star break — opened the door for a handful of young arms to crack the Astros’ starting rotation.
Following the addition of Brandon Bielak, J.P. France and Ronel Blanco, the latter of whom was moved back to the bullpen last weekend, Houston’s pitching staff entered Wednesday with the lowest team ERA (3.28) and fewest runs allowed (244) in the majors.
Brown mentioned righthander Spencer Arrighetti (Class AA Corpus Christi) and righthander Shawn Dubin (Class AAA Sugar Land) as two pitching prospects who could be called up should the Astros need another starter in the future, but the general manager said he doesn’t currently feel urgency to add a starter either from the minor league system or via a trade.
“Our young guys are stepping up right now, and then we're expecting them to gain some more experience,” Brown said. “It's going to give our young pitchers an opportunity to step it up, and then adding guys like Blanco into the rotation is going to be helpful. And so at some point we will get McCullers back, and the beauty of it is we feel like we're gonna get a completely healthy McCullers that could post throughout the rest of his time. But I think we're in good shape in terms of depth.”
This is McCullers’ third significant injury in the last five years. After he underwent Tommy John surgery in 2018, he missed the entire 2019 season. McCullers signed a five-year, $85 million contract extension in March 2021, then made a career-high 28 starts that season. However, a flexor strain suffered in the 2021 American League Division Series knocked him out of the postseason and forced him to miss five months last season before he returned in August.
In eight starts made during the 2022 regular season, McCullers posted a 2.27 ERA in 47⅔ innings. He made three postseason starts and last pitched in Game 3 of the World Series, when he allowed seven earned runs and five home runs in 4⅓ innings.
McCullers’ latest surgery continued a troubling trend of Astros players suffering major setbacks while rehabbing injuries. Last month, outfielder Michael Brantley appeared on the brink of making his season debut but was shut down abruptly because of inflammation in his surgically repaired right shoulder.
And last season, Brown’s predecessor, former GM James Click, brought up reviewing the Astros’ return-to-play procedure after outfielder Jake Meyers was rushed back too soon from his shoulder surgery.
On Wednesday, Brown said the review is something he will initiate.
“Yeah, but I think if you look all throughout the industry and all throughout sports, you'll see guys trying to fight back to come around and to get back earlier. I don't think that's a surprise at all,” Brown said. “The player plays a big role in when they come back, because sometimes they start to feel a little better and they start feeling like it's 100 percent, and their gauging isn't quite 100 percent. … But I think the procedure is going to be to communicate with the player, communicate with the trainer, communicate with the doctor and try to figure out, ‘Hey, where are you really?’ and then test them, do some strength testing. I think probably the biggest tell is when you say, ‘Hey, you're 100 percent, and yet your strength level is a little bit down.’ So I think that's probably where we could maybe do a little bit better job.”
Source: Houston Chronicle
