June 21: Milwaukee indeed reinstated Junis from the 60-day IL this evening. The Brewers optioned Bradley Blalock to Triple-A Nashville to open a spot on the active roster. Their 40-man roster is at capacity.
June 20: Brewers rookie left-hander Robert Gasser will undergo surgery to fix the UCL in his throwing elbow, he told reporters this evening (X link via Todd Rosiak of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel). It won’t be clear until the operation whether he requires a full Tommy John reconstruction or a modified ligament repair. Even in the better scenario of a slightly less significant procedure like the internal brace surgery, Gasser said he expects to miss at least a full calendar year.
The 25-year-old southpaw made his major league debut last month. Gasser found immediate success, working 28 innings of 2.57 ERA ball through his first five starts. The University of Houston product only walked one of the 114 hitters he faced. While he certainly wouldn’t have maintained that level of control, Gasser has been a solid strike-thrower whom most scouts expect to stick in the rotation. Baseball America ranked him the #5 prospect in the Milwaukee system and slotted him among the sport’s top 100 minor league talents entering the season.
Gasser’s initial MLB success might have increased his stock a little bit, even though his 14% strikeout percentage was well below the swing-and-miss rates he’d shown in the minor leagues. He’d certainly performed well enough to continue taking the ball every fifth day in a patchwork Milwaukee rotation. Freddy Peralta and Colin Rea have been the constants. Peralta is the unquestioned staff ace, while Rea has stepped up with a 3.29 ERA over 76 2/3 innings despite a modest 16.7% strikeout rate.
Milwaukee has otherwise cycled through a number of starters as they’ve navigated various injuries. They have lost an entire rotation to extended absences. Wade Miley underwent Tommy John surgery after two starts. Jakob Junis has pitched once all season. DL Hall has been sidelined since April. Joe Ross went down in May with a lower back strain; he suffered a setback a couple weeks ago. Gasser is now also out for the season. That’s not even counting Brandon Woodruff, whom the Brewers knew would miss all of 2024 after he underwent shoulder surgery last October.
Bryse Wilson and Tobias Myers have stepped into the third and fourth rotation spots. While they’ve each managed decent run prevention numbers, neither pitcher is without question marks. Wilson opened the season as a reliever and has an unimpressive strikeout and walk profile as a starter. Myers is a former minor league signee on the sixth organization of his professional career. His 21.7% strikeout rate and 8.7% walk percentage are fine, but he’s had to work around an elevated home run rate.
The fifth rotation spot has recently fallen to Carlos Rodriguez, a rookie who has allowed seven runs in 8 1/3 innings over his first two starts. Junis is nearing a return from the 60-day injured list — MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy tweets that he could be reinstated as soon as tomorrow — but he isn’t expected to immediately step back into a rotation spot. Junis has only made two abbreviated rehab appearances for Triple-A Nashville. The Brewers have suggested he’s likely to work out of the bullpen initially as they try to expedite his return to the major league staff.
In that context, it’s remarkable that the Brewers have managed a 44-30 record and pulled out to a fairly comfortable 7.5 game lead in the NL Central. They’ll almost certainly bring in at least one starting pitcher before the July 30 trade deadline. There’s a reasonable argument for GM Matt Arnold and his staff to land multiple rotation pickups. Losing Gasser should only add to the urgency to address what was the team’s biggest question mark well before their last couple months of terrible injury news.
Gasser is on the MLB injured list and will collect service time and be paid at the league minimum rate for whatever time he spends on the IL. Milwaukee can move him to the 60-day IL to open a 40-man roster spot whenever that need arises. (They already have a vacancy for Junis’ reinstatement after designating Elieser Hernández for assignment last night.) Gasser will not get to a full service year and remains controllable for six seasons beyond this one.
Let’s start listing the healthy players, the list will be much shorter than those on the IL
Especially on the brewers
Pitchers
Starters
What a snake bit position on that team…..
It’s happening to a lot of teams not just the Brewers
Wow, typed in a whole post and …poof…it was gone. I’m at a loss
Now it’s back WTF…
You probably need TJ surgery.
If it’s an internal brace, then he has a good chance of pitching in the latter half of 2025, but if not then see you in 2026.
no, arm injuries did not mow down this % of starting pitchers in the 60s. This is getting ridiculous.
I see two general explanations. First, you had far more pitchers whose careers fell off a cliff, performance-wise. with no explanation or the generic “arm trouble.” Go through the wins leaders, ERA leaders, or innings-pitched leaders for years in the 60s, find a bunch who had short peaks with sudden drop-offs in performance and durability, and check their Wikipedia page for mention of arm or elbow problems. The greatest pitcher of the decade, Sandy Koufax, retired at age 30 because of an arthritic pitching elbow. He probably had UCL damage that caused elbow instability and arthritis because he continued to throw 300+ inning a year.
Second, I believe that hitters have gained more with availability of vast information about themselves and about opposing pitchers, than pitches have. This has lead many (most?) pitchers needing to use maximum-effort–spin rate and velocity–and use their full arsenal of pitches from the first inning, leading to more stress on their arms. It is possible that the pitch clock has exacerbated this, though this is hard to prove or disprove at this point.
In the 80’s, pitchers threw 88-90 MPH. Now every reliever throws at least 97-98 as they have trained since 14 to throw heat to make it to The Show. So there are more elbow injuries due to so many pitchers throwing so much harder, overall, than decades past.
Trevor is waiting.
And that is all he will do.
Which comes first, HoF for Pete or Trevor back to the Show?
sigh
What’s the difference before TJS and UCL surgery?
Depends on if it’s repair or replacement.
If it’s stitching two ligaments together, it’s a repair.
If ligaments are sourced from a different location on your body (e.g., leg ligaments) and re-attached to your arm usually (thru holes drilled in your bones), that’s Tommy John Surgery (TJS).
Right now, they’re thinking they can save the original ligaments, so it’s a repair.
None, realistically. But, I think the implication with the term “UCL surgery” is that it could be the internal brace procedure, not the full TJS.
At least, that’s all I could discern.
UCL surgery is the more general term that covers both TJS and the internal brace procedure.
How many former Padres prospects are now hurt? Is that two in two days announcing they are going under the knife?
Finally Gasser has listened to the fans, and doing what’s best for THEM, instead of concerning himself with silly opinions like..his own..on what to do.
Tough news for Gasser but I think we all anticipated this was the outcome. In other pitching news, does anybody else wish the crew would sign Greinke for the remainder of the year? The fans would love it and he’s literally 21 Ks away from 3000 in his career. The days of pitchers hitting that milestone are quickly coming to an end, would be nice to see him get it.
The package for Flaherty from Detroit starts with Tyler Black! Tick, tock, tick, tock.
MLB knows the reason for the pitching injuries. Even if they came out and said which pitch is causing the problem, the risk reward is too much on the reward side for the pitcher to not throw that pitch.
Any person that ever pitched knows not to throw on the side of the ball. We all know some kid who threw a curve by turning his wrist being on the side of the ball, So if you change the tilt and do the same thing you get a better result with the pitch but the same result what that kid got throwing the bad curve. A dead arm.
BAD TILTS kill arms, yea kid here’s how to throw a cutter and I have a great idea, I’m calling this a morphed cutter, it breaks closer to the certain kind of slider nobody want’s to talk about.
The kid should say, just tell me how to throw that certain slider that changed the MLB landscape in 2018.