The Los Angeles Angels are being sold, which is a sentence Angels fans have spent several years trying to manifest into existence, usually by yelling it from the not-so-cheap seats. The surprise is that Arte Moreno is actually doing it, and the bigger surprise is who’s buying. Kroenke Sports & Entertainment announced Tuesday that it has reached an agreement to acquire a controlling interest in the Angels, with the transaction expected to close in the first quarter of 2027 pending Major League Baseball approval. The reported price is $4.5 billion, almost exactly 25 times the $180 million Moreno paid Disney for the franchise in 2003. If you see another asset out there compounding at 15 percent year over year, take it and please call me to invest. Stan Kroenke, already owner of the Rams, Nuggets, Avalanche, Arsenal and assorted other sporting properties, has apparently decided he needs baseball to complete the set. (To match Moreno’s return, Kroenke would have to sell the Angels for roughly $112 billion in 2049. Good luck, Stan.)

The announcement was legitimately surprising. Moreno had put the Angels up for sale once before, reconsidered in early 2023 and spent the next three years giving every indication that the franchise would remain his. Even John Mozeliak, brought in after Perry Minasian was fired in June, said this summer that a sale had never come up in his conversations with Moreno. Perhaps it hadn’t. Four and a half billion dollars has been known to accelerate a conversation and the Lakers deal came together quickly, albeit with far different circumstances. Still, there are now a few decisions from the last year that look at least a little different in retrospect, beginning with the curious temporary status of almost everyone who matters.

Mozeliak wasn’t really hired to be the general manager. He was brought in as a baseball operations consultant who happened to be serving as interim GM, with a contract that expires in December and an explicit assignment to audit the organization and help determine what should come next. Kurt Suzuki, meanwhile, was hired by Minasian on a one-year contract after the 2025 season, an unusual vote of confidence for a first-time manager mostly because it contained almost no confidence at all. Minasian is already gone, Suzuki has only been guaranteed the rest of this season, and the Angels somehow entered September with the baseball equivalent of a month-to-month lease.

There’s no evidence that Kroenke was secretly choosing the Angels’ organizational chart in May and it would be silly to reverse-engineer every unusual decision into proof that negotiations had been underway for months. Sale discussions also have a way of remaining very small until they don’t. But if conversations were serious before Tuesday’s announcement, the transitional structure makes a great deal of sense. You don’t necessarily hire a five-year president of baseball operations or commit to a manager while negotiating to sell a $4.5 billion franchise. You might, however, hire one of baseball’s most experienced executives, tell him to open every closet and look under every rug, and ask him to leave a report for whoever eventually owns the building.

If that’s what happened, John Mozeliak may have accidentally landed the perfect job because the Angels have spent most of the Moreno era demonstrating that money and organizational competence are entirely separate resources. Moreno wasn’t cheap in any conventional baseball sense. He gave Albert Pujols $240 million, Josh Hamilton $125 million, and Anthony Rendon $245 million. He extended Mike Trout for $426.5 million and employed Trout and Shohei Ohtani simultaneously, a sentence that sounds considerably more successful than the actual baseball was. The Angels reached the postseason exactly zero times with Ohtani and haven’t played a playoff game since 2014. Moreno repeatedly spent as though spending were a substitute for building, then seemed surprised when the expensive parts didn’t make the inexpensive parts function better.

That’s the part of the Angels that should interest Kroenke, because his curious run of success across sports suggests he understands the distinction. The Rams won Super Bowl LVI in February 2022. The Avalanche won the Stanley Cup four months later. The Nuggets won the NBA championship the following season. Arsenal won the Premier League in 2025-26. Add championships from some of KSE’s smaller properties and the portfolio starts looking less like an investment collection than somebody discovered the franchise-mode difficulty setting and quietly turned it down.

There isn’t an obvious tactical connection among any of them, which is precisely why the success is interesting. Sean McVay doesn’t coach football like Mikel Arteta manages Arsenal. The Nuggets didn’t build around Nikola Jokic because somebody in the Avalanche offices suggested that unusually gifted Serbian centers were undervalued. KSE hasn’t invented a universal style of play that can be dropped into whatever sport Stan happens to buy next. What does appear transferable is organizational behavior, something less sexy than tactics but considerably more useful to a baseball franchise that hasn’t figured out how to turn two generational players into one postseason appearance.

Kroenke has repeatedly been willing to hire people before everyone else has agreed they’re stars. McVay was 30 when the Rams hired him. Arteta was 37 and had never managed a first team. Jared Bednar had never been an NHL head coach when Colorado hired him. David Adelman, KSE’s most recent hire, is a second generation coach who had been a long time assistant in Denver when he took over as interim head coach, his first time in the NBA. There’s a temptation to reduce this to Kroenke liking young or unconventional candidates, but that misses the important part. Kurt Suzuki is inexperienced too and nobody should be confusing him with Sean McVay simply because both were young enough to have room left on the resume.

Inexperience isn’t innovation and youth isn’t some secret market inefficiency. McVay wasn’t a great hire because he was 30. He was a great hire because he was Sean McVay at 30 and Kroenke’s organization recognized what he might become before the rest of the league had the evidence necessary to make the decision comfortable. Arteta provides the even better example because Arsenal then had to survive the uncomfortable part. He finished eighth, eighth and fifth in his first three league seasons. In European soccer, that’s normally enough time for a manager to be fired, rehired somewhere else and fired again. (Chelsea, owned by part of Dodgers ownership, has had NINE managers while Arteta has been in charge!) Arsenal stayed with him, continued building the club around the same ideas, and became increasingly aggressive in the transfer market once the foundation was worth spending upon.

The Rams provide another version of the same philosophy. Kroenke moved the franchise from St. Louis, spent billions developing SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park, retained Les Snead through years when plenty of owners would have decided that changing general managers constituted progress, and paired him with McVay. Then, when the Rams got close enough that patience stopped being the virtue they needed, they traded for Matthew Stafford and began saying “Bleep Them Picks” out loud. The Nuggets developed Jokic and Jamal Murray before adding around them. Colorado built around Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar. Arsenal accumulated its young core, then wrote increasingly large checks once there was something worth finishing.

There may be a Kroenke formula after all: build patiently and spend impatiently when the window opens. He seems less interested in proving he won Tuesday’s transaction than making sure his team wins something that fills the trophy case, which should translate nicely to baseball if Kroenke accepts one important thing immediately. He doesn’t know baseball, as far as we know, and that’s probably fine. The Angels don’t need Stan or Josh* developing opinions about middle-infield defense or asking why everyone suddenly throws a sweeper. They need him to do what KSE has done elsewhere: identify the people capable of building the organization, give them resources and resist the billionaire’s natural instinct to wander downstairs and help.

*I should have mentioned Josh Kroenke earlier, given Stan’s in his age-80 season. Josh Kroenke has been involved but not intrusive in KSE, following the pattern of his father.

Mozeliak becomes enormously useful in that context precisely because he does know baseball. Whatever anyone thinks about the final years of his Cardinals tenure, he spent three decades in St. Louis and 18 years running baseball operations. His teams produced 15 consecutive winning seasons from 2008 through 2022, ten postseason appearances and the 2011 World Series championship. His assignment with the Angels wasn’t simply to sit in Minasian’s chair until December. He was asked to examine what was underneath the major-league club and establish a structure for whatever came next, which sounds considerably more important now than it did when he was hired.

He’s already been doing it. Mozeliak elevated Matt Swanson to oversee amateur, professional and international scouting, put Joey Prebynski over player development, Michael Lord over research and development and David Haynes over major-league personnel, then asked each of them to evaluate what they had underneath them. He’s changed the Angels’ draft philosophy, begun restructuring the development operation and made it clear that having technology somewhere in the building isn’t particularly useful if coaches and players aren’t actually using it. That’s transition work, and fairly good transition work at that, but I’d be careful about turning the transition guy into another layer of permanent management just because he did the transition well.

Use Mozeliak as Kroenke’s translator. Let him explain to Stan and Josh why one impressive resume is actually impressive and another belongs to someone who learned how to say “process” during an interview. Let him tell them where Tampa, Cleveland, Baltimore and the Dodgers are doing things the Angels aren’t. Let him help construct the search and sit in the interviews, because KSE knows what organizational leadership looks like while Mozeliak knows which baseball people are actually capable of providing it. Then pick someone, give that person real authority, and let Mozeliak decide whether he wants another role that doesn’t require sitting above the new executive approving the ideas he was hired to find. In my opinion that should be the GM/PBO or whatever title you want to give it and not the manager and yes, I have opinions.

If Kroenke follows his own history, James Click would be my first phone call. Click spent 15 years with Tampa Bay**, eventually became Houston’s general manager and won the World Series in 2022 before Jim Crane offered him only a one-year contract. Click declined, landed in Toronto and has spent the last few seasons as vice president of baseball strategy. There are worse ways to prepare for another GM job than learning how Tampa does more with less, winning a championship in Houston and then having a few years outside the chair to think about what you’d do differently if somebody handed you another organization. Kroenke’s sales pitch is almost comically simple: you know what it’s like working for an owner who wants into baseball operations; how would you like to work for one whose reputation is largely built on staying out?

**I have a picture somewhere from an event at Tampa Bay. Joe Sheehan and I spoke, but in the back of the room are Click, Chaim Bloom, Andrew Friedman, and several others now distributed around baseball. There was a lot of talent in the room.

Will Cousins is the version that makes me even more curious. Cousins has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and was studying ocean waves at MIT before somehow ending up in Tampa, presumably because baseball finally presented a problem stranger than fluid dynamics. He worked his way from analyst to senior data scientist to R&D director and eventually assistant general manager, but the appeal isn’t that he’s another smart guy capable of finding a number nobody else sees. Baseball has plenty of those now. Cousins is interesting because his work is about systems, and the next great competitive advantage may be less about acquiring information than figuring out what to do with the information everyone already has.

Hawkeye isn’t proprietary. TrackMan isn’t proprietary. Force plates aren’t proprietary. Motion capture isn’t proprietary. Even high-level biomechanics is becoming increasingly accessible as markerless systems improve. The Angels can buy all of that tomorrow, and perhaps already own much of it, which Mozeliak’s comments about actually using the technology suggest. The useful question is whether the information moves rapidly enough through an organization to affect what a player does. Take someone trained to optimize Tampa Bay under severe constraints, remove most of the financial constraints and ask what he would build. I have no idea whether Cousins is ready to run the Angels, but that’s precisely why you interview him rather than waiting until somebody else proves it.

Eve Rosenbaum and Sky Andrecheck belong in the same conversation for slightly different reasons. Rosenbaum is an Orioles assistant GM who works across roster management, transactions, financial planning, player evaluation and acquisition, and earlier helped create processes intended to connect scouting, development and R&D. Before baseball, she worked for the NFL, which should immediately interest an organization whose entire success story rests partly on the idea that smart organizations can learn across sports. Andrecheck came through Cleveland’s research and development operation and now works across scouting, player development, personnel and strategy as an assistant GM. If I were entering baseball in 2026, I’d want somebody from Cleveland in the room simply to ask how the Guardians keep producing functional baseball organizations without Los Angeles resources. Then I’d ask Andrecheck what happens if you give a Cleveland systems thinker Los Angeles money.

Gavin Dickey interests me from the opposite direction. His baseball education is almost charmingly traditional until suddenly it isn’t. He was a highly recruited quarterback, played football and baseball at Florida, spent six seasons in the minor leagues, became an area scout, then a crosschecker, then a national crosschecker, and moved through personnel into an assistant GM job in Houston. He now works across player development, personnel, minor-league operations and advanced scouting, and maybe more with Dana Brown out of the big chair. That’s a useful combination in a sport where the central information problem has changed. The challenge isn’t getting enough data. Sometimes the challenge is that 14 people can explain why a pitcher’s movement profile is suboptimal and nobody can tell the pitcher what to do with his hand tomorrow afternoon.

Josh Byrnes and Billy Gasparino are the Dodgers calls, and I’d make both without overcomplicating why. Byrnes has already run Arizona and San Diego, but his more interesting experience may be spending the Andrew Friedman era overseeing scouting and player development while the Dodgers became baseball’s Death Star. Gasparino comes at it more directly from scouting. Everyone notices the Dodgers’ money because $700 million contracts have a way of drawing the eye, but the remarkable trick is that the money hasn’t replaced the infrastructure underneath it. They can sign Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Freddie Freeman and whatever expensive object catches Friedman’s eye while continuing to draft and develop major-league players. Moreno too often used free agency as a shortcut around the boring work. The Dodgers use money as leverage on top of the boring work. Kroenke should want to know how much of that can be imported from the other side of town.

Carlos Rodriguez would get a call despite having just moved to the White Sox after 15 years in Tampa Bay, where he worked across international operations, player development, performance science and major-league support. Chanda Lawdermilk, another Rays assistant GM and Aggie, would get an interview for an entirely different reason: much of her expertise is in organizational talent, recruiting, employee development and culture alongside broader baseball operations. If the thesis here is really that Kroenke wins by identifying and empowering people rather than personally understanding each sport, Lawdermilk is the candidate who tests whether KSE actually believes its own theory. Why automatically assume the person making roster decisions also has to be the person designing the entire baseball institution? Maybe that’s the best structure. Maybe baseball does it that way because baseball has always done it that way, which remains the sport’s most durable argument for almost anything.

Rob Cerfolio would have been near the top of my list if Chaim Bloom hadn’t just given him almost exactly the job he needs. Cerfolio is 34, has a medical background, pitched himself and spent a decade in Cleveland before St. Louis hired him to rebuild player development and performance. He’s sitting almost perfectly at the intersection of medicine, biomechanics, analytics and development that baseball is increasingly trying to reach. I don’t think he’s leaving, and more importantly, I’m not sure he should. Running the Angels would be a massive promotion, but promotions aren’t always developmental progress. Cerfolio has the runway in St. Louis to build something under Bloom, make mistakes without becoming the person blamed for every loss in Anaheim and find out how much of his philosophy survives contact with an entire organization. Kroenke should know his name. He can call later.

That leaves Click, Cousins, Rosenbaum and Andrecheck as my most interesting group, with Dickey close enough that I’d make sure his interview ran long. Byrnes offers experience if KSE decides it wants someone who’s already sat in the chair, while Gasparino, Rodriguez and Lawdermilk test different theories about what the Angels’ actual problem is. I wouldn’t bring them through Anaheim for the usual performative search where everyone says “collaboration” four times and ownership hires the person it decided upon two weeks earlier. Kroenke has never owned a baseball team. He should exploit that ignorance rather than conceal it and ask a group of unusually smart baseball people to tell him what they think a modern organization should look like.

The question I’d ask every candidate is simple enough to take five seconds and complicated enough to fill an afternoon. The Angels have resources, a major market, a stadium situation that could eventually become another enormous Kroenke real-estate play, a badly underperforming baseball operation and almost none of the institutional inertia that comes with taking over a successful organization. If you could build the baseball side almost from scratch, what would you build, and why? Then I’d spend considerably more time listening than talking, because Stan Kroenke just spent $4.5 billion for the privilege of not needing to know the answer himself.

That’s also why the stadium and surrounding property should remain somewhere in the background of all of this. Kroenke isn’t merely a sports owner. He’s a real-estate developer who built SoFi Stadium as the centerpiece of Hollywood Park, a nearly 300-acre development rather than simply a place for the Rams to play football eight or nine times a year. Angel Stadium sits amid exactly the sort of acreage that makes developers begin seeing things invisible to normal humans. KSE didn’t spend $4.5 billion because the 2026 Angels are a compelling baseball product and nobody should be surprised if the eventual vision extends well beyond the foul poles. That’s something Moreno - who made his billions in billboards, not land - couldn’t get done.

The baseball has to be fixed first, or at least fixed enough that the rest becomes fun. The Angels aren’t one starting pitcher away, one $300 million free agent away, or one clever trade deadline away. They’re a culture away and that’s a much slower acquisition, though it starts with ownership. Scouting departments, international operations, affiliates, development complexes, medical staffs, biomechanics, strength and conditioning, research and development, coaches, coordinators and analysts all have to work as something resembling one organism rather than a collection of people wearing the same polo shirt.

That’s why Kroenke is such an intriguing buyer. His history suggests he may understand the order of operations better than the owner he’s replacing: find the people, build the structure, develop the talent, give it enough time to work and then, when the organization is close enough that money can actually make the difference, spend like someone who just paid $4.5 billion for a baseball team. There’s no guarantee that what worked with the Rams, Nuggets, Avalanche and Arsenal translates to baseball, which is a sprawling developmental enterprise in ways those sports aren’t. There is no single McVay-type hire who walks through the door and fixes everything, no matter how desperately baseball likes the idea of the genius executive.

What Kroenke has demonstrated across several sports is that he can own successful teams without needing to convince everyone he knows how to coach them. Baseball now gets to find out whether he can extend that trick to a sport he has never operated and the first test won’t be whether Stan Kroenke understands baseball. It will be whether he understands baseball well enough to know that he doesn’t, then hires somebody who does and gives that person enough money, authority and time to make the Angels look like something Arte Moreno spent 23 years and several billion dollars proving they weren’t: champions.

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If George Lombard’s knee is fine, why are the Yankees still talking about ILing him, especially after the rookie has been a boost to the lineup that is still awaiting Aaron Judge’s return. (Labor Day … mark it.)

The answer is probably that “structurally fine” and “functionally fine” are two different standards. Lombard injured the knee on a check swing Saturday and has enough inflammation that the Yankees are considering more than simply giving him Sunday off. The mechanism certainly makes me wonder about the meniscus. A check swing can put the front leg into an awkward combination of flexion, rotation and sudden braking, exactly the sort of movement that can irritate or tear meniscal tissue. That doesn’t mean Lombard has a tear. Synovial irritation, a mild capsular sprain or even fat-pad irritation could produce swelling after the same movement.

What happens after a couple days should tell us more. If the swelling disappears and Lombard can cut, rotate and hit without recurrence, this probably goes away. Recurrent swelling after activity would push me toward imaging and a closer look at the meniscus.

Even a small meniscal tear wouldn’t automatically mean surgery. Stable tears can often be managed symptomatically, especially for the final month. A displaced or mechanically symptomatic tear - catching, locking, repeated effusion - becomes a different discussion, and the Yankees would have to weigh September against Lombard’s future. There’s a lot of fans that would say “win now”, including some in ownership.

That’s what makes this annoying beyond Lombard. The Yankees had finally gotten one answer: Lombard could play shortstop, Ryan McMahon could stay at third, and Judge’s return could lengthen the lineup rather than force another rearrangement. The Yankees have spent most of 2026 waiting for the roster they envisioned to actually exist simultaneously. With Judge nearly back, even a minor Lombard injury feels like the Baseball Gods reaching for another banana peel.

BRAVES STARTERS

The Braves pitching injuries have gone well beyond ridiculous. Spencer Strider is effectively done for 2026 and has been almost all season, Hurston Waldrep is headed for Tommy John surgery, and Spencer Schwellenbach is going back under the knife to repair the elbow fracture that apparently never completely healed. Waldrep and Schwellenbach both had elbow cleanups in February, though technically Waldrep had loose bodies removed while Schwellenbach had bone spurs removed.

There’s a common name in at least part of this chain. Waldrep was sent to Dr. Keith Meister in Dallas before the February decision, though I haven’t been able to confirm publicly that Meister actually performed the cleanup. Meister did the UCL surgeries on Strider and A.J. Smith-Shawver, and he’s part of the James Andrews surgical tree that has dominated baseball orthopedics for decades. That’s context, not blame. These are exactly the pitchers who get sent to someone like Meister because their elbows are already complicated.

The bone-spur part sends me back years to A.J. Burnett and conversations with Andrews about whether we really understood what we were removing with bone spurs and chips. Andrews wondered whether some of the bone pitchers grow around a stressed elbow represented adaptation to throwing rather than simply junk that needed cleaning out.

That question never really went away. In 1995, Andrews and Laura Timmerman reported that a quarter of professional players who had posteromedial olecranon osteophytes removed later required UCL reconstruction, raising the possibility that surgeons were sometimes treating a secondary injury while the underlying ligament problem remained.

Thirty years later, we’re still mapping the adaptation. Akira Kodama and colleagues published a fascinating CT study this May examining 38 symptomatic professional players. They found osteophytes at the medial trochlea and medial olecranon in 97.4 percent of those elbows, with predictable patterns of bony development across the joint. That doesn’t mean bone spurs are protective or that removing them causes ligament failure. It does reinforce Andrews’ old point: the throwing elbow remodels itself under extraordinary stress and distinguishing adaptation from pathology isn’t always simple.

That makes Atlanta’s situation worth watching without throwing Meister, the Braves medical staff, or anyone else under the bus. Schwellenbach already had the fracture before February and Waldrep’s MRI reportedly showed an intact UCL before his cleanup. Still, two young pitchers having elbow procedures in February and requiring major elbow surgery six months later is something you investigate.

Somehow, Atlanta has kept winning through all of this. The Romans would object to our use of “decimated.” Decimation meant killing one soldier in ten. The Braves pitching staff might happily take those odds.

Instead they’ve lost starters in waves and survived through Chris Sale, depth, improvisation and whatever pitching equivalent exists for duct tape. Which reminds me we should re-watch this interview from spring training. Even with Chris Sale not officially speaking for the Braves, it does speak to how well he can communicate the plan. Hard to say it didn’t work and for me, having an organization on the same page is as clear a sign of a great culture as there is:

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As much as I want to, I can’t add much to Jason Snell’s review of the Apple Immersive game. They didn’t make unnecessary cuts, but I could argue the alternating dugout view wasn’t the best if only because it’s not a viewpoint most are used to. The pre-game bullpen view of Cam Schlitter’s pitch movement shows what it could be. Snell makes the point that it felt very much like sitting at Yankee Stadium, which makes me argue “put me in a good seat and leave it there” - it’s my Infinite Stadium idea and yes, I will ride this horse until it’s dead and beaten. I think Apple did a good job using the other angles to show big plays - how Jaren Duran had to play a double and how Cody Bellinger’s throw was so key - but in the moment, they’re caught in the current view, which isn’t always ideal. If anything has to be fixed, it’s the players (and I think Aaron Boone) spitting seeds over the view of the camera, which is realistic, but disorienting. They’re doing it every Friday through the last month of the season, so if you can, I’d highly recommend checking it out. My only other complaint is that as far as I can tell, you have to watch live and there’s no replay, missing a big demo opportunity. Oh and subscribe to Under The Knife.

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The skipped start worked, at least once. Paul Skenes looked much more like Paul Skenes against San Diego, getting through six scoreless innings after five consecutive starts in which something had been missing. The strikeouts still weren’t overwhelming, but the command was better, the stuff held together, and most importantly he didn’t look like a pitcher dragging himself through another turn simply because the schedule said it was Tuesday.

Did three extra days fix him? Of course not. Rest can reduce acute fatigue, allow small areas of inflammation to settle and restore some neuromuscular freshness, but it doesn’t erase 145 major-league innings or everything Skenes did before Opening Day. The Pirates almost certainly did more than give him a long weekend. They had an opportunity to examine his recovery markers, compare current movement and force data with earlier baselines, look for mechanical drift, adjust between-start throwing and probably reduce some of the work that normally surrounds a start. The extra throw day is useful partly because of what you can do with it.

That makes the next start more informative than this one. If the velocity, command and movement hold again this weekend, Pittsburgh can reasonably conclude that fatigue was driving much of the downturn and start designing September accordingly. If the stuff falls away again on normal rest, the Padres outing begins looking like a temporary recharge rather than an answer.

2027 is the real assignment, which makes that stoppage time tougher as they won’t be directly hands-on in what will be a very important period. The Pirates need to learn how much Skenes can carry before his stuff deteriorates, whether scheduled skips should be built in before fatigue appears, and which measurements actually predict that point rather than merely identify it afterward.

That’s conveniently close to what Brittany Dowling and I will be discussing on Injury Territory next week - what actually goes into planning pitcher workloads, which biomechanical and recovery markers can help, and whether baseball can truly predict these downturns at all. One good start is reassuring. Pittsburgh needs to turn what it learned from getting Skenes back into a plan that keeps him there.

ROKI SASAKI, P LAD (blister)
GAVIN STONE, P LAD (strained/torn shoulder)

Roki Sasaki going on the IL with a blister feels less like a Dodgers pitching crisis than somebody removing one piece from a puzzle that already had too many pieces. He’d been pitching well before Wednesday, and a middle-finger blister can absolutely explain a sudden loss of command or feel. That finger is critical to fastball release and spin, and trying to pitch through a compromised surface can turn a two week nuisance into something that repeatedly tears open. Fifteen days is probably useful rather than costly.

The timing helps. Tyler Glasnow is back, Shohei Ohtani is looming as at least an opener, and Gavin Stone suddenly looks like much more than rehab depth. Stone’s four Triple-A outings — 11.2 innings, 18 strikeouts against one walk — are about as clean as the Dodgers could ask for after shoulder surgery and the setback that delayed his season. The 58 pitches Wednesday matter more than the ERA. He’s approaching enough workload to become the obvious bulk pitcher behind Ohtani, which could get Los Angeles five or six innings without asking either pitcher to do something he isn’t ready for.

Eric Lauer gets Sasaki’s spot for now, giving Mark Prior and Dave Roberts another way to avoid rushing Stone. Once Stone is activated, however, the whiteboard gets crowded again. Ohtani needs innings to build toward October. Stone needs workload after essentially two lost seasons. Sasaki needs to return and continue developing. Glasnow needs regular work. Lauer and Justin Wrobleski, once back, are useful precisely because they can provide length, though maintaining them as starter-capable arms makes them less flexible than ordinary relievers.

The Dodgers have plenty of pitching. What they still don’t have is a conventional pitching staff. Sasaki’s blister gives them 15 days to postpone a few decisions, and Stone’s progress gives them another good answer. By September, the problem becomes fitting all those answers onto one October roster.

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Some of you might like the NFL style football. If so, I’m doing one show a week about it (or so — might be a need for an emergency pod on that side) with Injury Territory. Why? Need a bigger audience and NFL is bigger. If I could get 1/10th of you to subscribe, this would be a sustainable endeavor. If I could get another 1/10th of you to watch a free podcast, this would be comfortably sustainable. Your call.

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The Padres have spent much of 2026 looking strangely unlike an A.J. Preller team. There’s still star power and the occasional transaction that feels like it was completed with three phones ringing simultaneously, but this roster has survived because San Diego built something closer to actual depth. That’s being tested now, with three pitchers occupying three very different points on the rehab spectrum while the Wild Card race refuses to provide any breathing room.

Joe Musgrove is the one I’m closest to penciling in. Seventy pitches in his last rehab start puts him one normal progression away from returning in early September, though his first major-league innings since 2024 should come with reasonable workload expectations. Nick Pivetta is further away and carries more medical uncertainty. He’s restarting a rehab assignment after the flexor strain and the subsequent elbow tightness that interrupted his first attempt. Getting back this quickly is encouraging, but after four months away, he needs innings rather than merely proof that he can throw. Lucas Giolito is the real question mark. Moving him to the 60-day IL changes paperwork more than prognosis, but the stalled progression after elbow inflammation makes counting on him for September increasingly optimistic.

That makes Casey Mize and Robbie Ray look less like depth and more like infrastructure. San Diego needs innings now, because even the best bullpen becomes ordinary when it’s asked to cover twelve outs every night. Good trades, both, though new ownership came in too late to really make a difference or even show their hand.

And this is a very good bullpen. Mason Miller deserves more Cy Young discussion than he’s getting, even if voters remain allergic to giving relievers serious consideration. (While we’re fixing things, there absolutely should be a Trevor Hoffman Award for the best reliever in each league. Name the trophy after the guy whose entrance music practically became a pitching statistic. Come at me, Yankees fans.)

Can San Diego survive September? I think so, in part because who’s left to chase them down? Musgrove’s return changes the math considerably and Pivetta could change it again later. October is harder. Short series reward dominant pitching, but they also expose every missing starter because there’s nowhere to hide the innings. Preller has assembled enough pieces to get there. Now Craig Stammen has to keep the pitching staff together long enough to find out what they can do once they arrive.

COLT EMERSON, SS SEA (inflamed wrist)

Even if the Mariners season hasn’t gone to expectations, Colt Emerson did his part. The hot prospect locked himself in at shortstop for a while and with that, one of the hardest parts of team construction is done. “Building up the middle” is cliche, but a lot of shortstops become second basemen, third basemen, corner outfielders, or busts. Emerson could be a star and assuming Cal Raleigh’s ‘26 is the anomaly, this is a team that has more than just the corners.

What they don’t have, for the last month of the season, is Emerson. The wrist surgery ends an ugly statistical debut, but I’m not putting much weight on .190/.246/.335 from a 21-year-old asked to learn major-league pitching while playing shortstop every day. The strikeouts need work; everything else belongs in the developmental bucket.

We don’t know enough about the surgery yet to get cute with the prognosis. The Mariners saying he’ll be 100 percent for spring training suggests something structurally correctable like a tendon sheath rather than a problem expected to linger. Wrist injuries do matter for hitters because the lead wrist has to transfer enormous force through contact. Fernando Tatis Jr.’s scaphoid fracture is the scary comp, though his delayed diagnosis and multiple procedures make it a poor medical match. Corey Seager’s earlier wrist problems are closer to the larger point: young shortstops can lose time without losing trajectory.

Seattle’s trajectory remains interesting too. Raleigh, Julio Rodríguez and Emerson give them premium players at premium up-the-middle positions, with pitching development remaining the organization’s superpower. That’s an enviable foundation despite 2026 going sideways. Emerson’s season ends with lousy numbers and a good answer. Seattle found its shortstop. Now it needs to make sure his wrist lets him become the player they think they found.

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Normally this is where I’d drop the paywall, but I was at a concert last night and maybe I missed some late stuff. So today’s one of those free days because Dogstar killed it and I’m going to choose some nights over you sometimes. There’s a trip coming up in October and in December and … I wish I had a backup plan, but all you’ve got is me, so enjoy this clip of Dogstar from really nice seats. They’re in my top albums of the year and this live show certainly didn’t dissuade me.

PETE FAIRBANKS, RP MIA (inflamed nerve)

Pete Fairbanks has never been durable. He’s always been good and a good story, a geek’s closer, to be sure. The downside of it has been his frequent trips to the IL and the surgeon. This time it’s specifically median nerve irritation and that distinction matters. The median nerve runs from the brachial plexus down the arm and into the hand, carrying both sensation and motor function. Irritate or compress it somewhere along that path and a pitcher can lose sensation, grip strength or fine control of the fingers without tearing anything that lights up an MRI like a UCL. Fairbanks described diminished sensation into his index finger during his earlier episode this season, and he’s right that there are multiple potential entrapment points from neck to fingertip. Finding which one is angry can become neurological Whack-A-Mole.

More concerning, this is recurrence. Fairbanks had a nerve-related IL stint in 2024 and another this April, when treatment and soft-tissue work got him back quickly. Now it’s August and the same general system is complaining again. That makes the specialist visit important. If there’s a reproducible compression site, treatment can be targeted. If there isn’t, they’re back to calming symptoms and seeing whether throwing wakes them up again. I’m not assuming his season is over, but I’m not treating this as random irritation.

There’s a CBA angle here that should scare veteran relievers. Fairbanks turns age-33 next year, has two Tommy Johns, lat and nerve issues, and works in a role teams increasingly believe they can manufacture. Under MLB’s proposed cap-and-floor system, Miami would actually have substantial money it must spend, but that doesn’t guarantee it goes to a fragile closer. Add the league’s proposed limits on free-agent contracts and the squeeze becomes obvious. Fairbanks is precisely the middle-class veteran the union should be watching. Baseball will always pay for young stars. The next economic system may decide that a very good age-33 reliever with an MRI folder deserves one year and a lot of incentives.

WILY ADAMES, SS SFG (sprained elbow)

The Giants have been so bad that no one talks about how bad they are. It went bad quickly, stayed bad, and there’s no sign it’s getting better, or that there’s capability to do so. Ownership is a mess, the front office has made piddling moves, and as much as I like Buster Posey as a person and a player, he’s not a good GM yet. (I asked someone inside baseball if he thought Posey could be AJ Hinch and he didn’t hesitate to say “no, Buster wouldn’t like the media attention of managing.”)

Willy Adames’ elbow adds another problem, though “moderate sprain” still leaves an enormous amount unspecified. For a shortstop, I’m most interested in whether this involves the UCL or one of the supporting structures on the medial side. Position players can tolerate partial UCL damage far better than pitchers because they aren’t repeatedly producing pitching-level valgus stress, but shortstop isn’t exactly a protected assignment. Adames has to make throws from multiple arm slots, often while moving away from first base, and that will expose instability quickly.

Ten days feels optimistic for anything legitimately ‘moderate’. The Giants can rest him, treat the inflammation and then begin a throwing progression. If strength and stability return, surgery probably never enters the conversation. Persistent pain, instability or an inability to make full-effort throws changes the calculus, especially if imaging shows meaningful ligament damage.

The calendar makes that decision more interesting. With San Francisco going nowhere, there’s little value in proving Adames can play through September. If surgery becomes likely, doing it early buys rehabilitation time before the expected labor stoppage complicates access to club facilities and personnel. Waiting until November could strand part of his rehab inside baseball’s labor fight. The Giants need Adames healthy for 2027 considerably more than they need him for the final month of this mess. This is one medical decision where their place in the standings should make the choice easier.

TREVOR STORY, SS BOS (sports hernia)
GARRETT WHITLOCK, RP BOS (inflamed elbow)

Trevor Story looks ready, which makes Boston’s decision to leave him at Worcester for another few days more interesting than the rehab numbers. The 4-for-21 doesn’t bother me much after three months away, and he’s playing shortstop rather than hiding at DH. The Red Sox appear to be using the rehab assignment for timing and repetition while giving themselves another benefit: they don’t have to disturb a lineup that keeps winning.

That matters more than usual. Curtis Mead is down, Marcelo Mayer has been exiled for unexplained reasons, and somehow the unplanned version of the Red Sox has become the successful one. Chad Tracy inherited a roster that looked like it was coming apart and found combinations that worked. Story should make that roster better, but Tracy doesn’t have to hand him six starts a week immediately because his contract and resume say so. Work him back into the ecosystem and see what September tells you.

Garrett Whitlock is an easier call. His elbow inflammation settled quickly, he’s already headed for live hitters, and a clean session Wednesday could put him back in the bullpen without bothering with Worcester. That 49:7 strikeout-to-walk ratio is exactly the kind of late-inning certainty Boston wants back before October, particularly as workloads accumulate elsewhere.

I’ll plant another flag: Tracy is keeping this job. At some point “interim” becomes an administrative detail. Boston has played too well, through too much roster disruption, for Craig Breslow to explain why the guy who stabilized the season should hand his office keys to someone else. Breslow’s own job security has stabilized as well, though his plan didn’t have much to do with a hot month.

September should be about resisting the urge to improve things that aren’t broken. Add Story gradually. Give Whitlock his leverage innings back. Keep managing Garrett Crochet’s return. Boston has spent months accidentally discovering what works. Tracy’s final job is making sure everyone returning from the injured list doesn’t make them forget it.

LEO DE VRIES, SS LVA (inflamed shoulder)

The A’s lost Nick Kurtz and Jacob Wilson this week, so why not add top prospect Leo DeVries to that. While he could probably handle himself in a callup, the looming stoppage makes it better for him to play next year in Vegas than Sacramento now (weird sentence that only makes sense in baseball.)

The four-week shutdown from throwing makes the decision easy. Shoulder soreness in an age-19 shortstop deserves attention, especially with Wilson already providing the organization a current demonstration of why shoulder instability shouldn’t be treated casually. There’s no indication De Vries has anything comparable, and shutting down the arm while allowing the shoulder to settle is exactly what a team with nothing to gain in September should do. If he’s throwing comfortably afterward, Arizona gives Oakland a controlled environment to recover some of the development time.

The interesting comparison is Jackson Chourio, who spent his age-19 season in the upper minors and jumped directly into Milwaukee’s Opening Day lineup at 20. Manny Machado reached Baltimore at 20 after only 109 Double-A games. Juan Soto skipped Triple-A entirely and was hitting major-league pitching at 19, though using Soto as a developmental comp is generally how scouts get themselves into trouble.

De Vries doesn’t need to be any of them. A .287/.376/.453 line with 13 homers and 34 steals in Double-A at 19 already answers most of the developmental questions. If the shoulder is healthy, he should force his way into the Athletics’ 2027 plans quickly.

That’s when this gets fun. Kurtz, Wilson and De Vries could form the inexpensive core of a legitimately dangerous offense, with Shea Langeliers already established behind them. The Sacramento years were supposed to be something the A’s endured on the way to Las Vegas. There’s now a real possibility that the baseball team gets good before the stadium gets ready.

Quick Cuts:

James Wood (oblique) is throwing more and hitting off a tee, but the clock is ticking and the Nats will be ultra-conservative with him, to the point of not making it back this season if it goes that way … Riley Greene (hamstring) is back with the team ahead of what’s expected to be a short rehab assignment. The team is still in the wild card hunt, but no one seems to think Greene is much of a recurrence risk … Jack Flaherty (forearm) progressed to the mound, looked good, and will continue an aggressive progression. Again, the Tigers are still in this and adding Flaherty back into the rotation should help that with depth if not quality … Abner Uribe (forearm) heads north to rehab in Single-A and should be back in the Brewers pen by the weekend … Shea Langeliers is hitting a month post-meniscectomy. That’s a pretty normal modern timeline and he could be back mid-September after his season was thought to be done … Tony Gonsolin is expected to start a rehab assignment in Triple-A after rehabbing with the Royals for the last month. He had elbow revision in August ‘25 … Carson Whisenhunt’s season is over after a UCL sprain. He’ll miss most or all of 2027 as he rehabs … Sebastian Walcott is in a big slump post-concussion and yes, I think those could be related. It likely knocks him out of contention for a late season call up, even with the Rangers in playoff contention … Tyler O’Neill injured his shoulder on a diving catch Saturday. The O’s aren’t giving any specifics past “sore”, though he did head for an MRI Tuesday … Late word that Adley Rutschman was a late scratch with an elbow issue … Byron Buxton grabbed at his hip on a play Tuesday night, getting pulled after that. I’m sure the Twins will be looking at that …

The question that keeps pulling me back isn’t about payroll. It’s about preparation. Which organizations have quietly been operating as though these rules already existed? The easy answer is Milwaukee, with Atlanta sitting just a few exits down the metaphorical interstate. Both organizations arrived there by different roads. The Brewers built their system because they never had another choice. The Braves built theirs because they realized there was a competitive edge hiding in plain sight. If baseball ever adopts anything close to the owners’ proposal, those clubs may discover they’ve been studying for an exam everyone else just learned was on the schedule.

For years we’ve described the Brewers as a small-market success story, but that almost undersells what they’ve actually accomplished and how rich their owners really are. Their payroll is a choice. Milwaukee has spent two decades learning to operate without margin for error. Mark Attanasio doesn’t write off bad contracts. There isn’t another $200 million free agent showing up every December to cover for a draft class that flopped. Every scouting report matters. Every international signing matters more. Every biomechanics hire, every pitching lab upgrade, and every tweak to player development carries outsized importance because that’s where the Brewers have always found value. They didn’t become efficient because efficiency sounded clever at an organizational retreat. They became efficient because inefficiency gets you fired when you don’t have the payroll to survive it.

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Viewed through today’s economic system, that discipline looks like a limitation. Viewed through tomorrow’s, it starts looking like a blueprint. Jackson Chourio is already signed to one of the better contracts in baseball. Jacob Misiorowski is delivering premium upside while making pre-arbitration money. Cooper Pratt and Luis Lara have barely reached Milwaukee, but they’re exactly the type of contracts every front office wants sitting in the pipeline before they become household names. Ask a fan what those players are worth and the answer comes back in dollars. Ask the Brewers and the answer probably comes back in years. Years of control. Years before arbitration. Years before everyone else knows what they’re worth. That’s a much more valuable currency in a capped league than another $30 million sitting unused in the payroll budget.

That’s why I think the conversation around the salary floor has gone slightly sideways. The common assumption is that clubs below the floor will simply race into free agency because they have to spend somewhere. Pittsburgh will throw a mountain of money at Paul Skenes. Milwaukee will do the same with Misiorowski. Cincinnati will sign Chase Burns without looking directly at Hunter Greene, standing there in his elbow brace . Some of that will happen because there are only so many ways to raise payroll. What I don’t think happens is a dozen clubs suddenly deciding the smartest use of mandatory spending is somebody else’s thirty-three-year-old free agent.

Buried inside the proposal is the provision that could reshape roster construction far more than the cap itself. MLB wants to limit free-agent contracts while continuing to allow clubs to sign younger players to long-term extensions before they ever reach free agency. In other words, the restrictions fall on the open market, not on organizations that identify their own stars early enough to keep them from reaching it.

That’s where Atlanta enters the picture. People have spent years praising the Braves’ scouting department, and deservedly so, but scouting was never the entire trick. Plenty of organizations recognize talented players. Atlanta’s real innovation was understanding that timing creates value. Ronald Acuna, Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley, Michael Harris, and Spencer Strider weren’t signed after they became stars. They were signed while there was still uncertainty attached to their futures. The Braves bet on their own evaluations before the market could establish a higher price. Sometimes those bets carried risk. Today they look almost absurdly team-friendly because Atlanta bought certainty before certainty became expensive. Imagine that philosophy under a hard salary cap.

Milwaukee doesn’t look at Misiorowski and wonder what he’ll command after six years of dominance. They look at him after one or two and ask why they’d ever allow the conversation to get that far. (There’s an easy answer to that question that Lee Warner won’t like.) Pratt and Lara are already signed long term, a certainty on the balance sheet before their baseball futures were certain. The proposal doesn’t eliminate the Braves’ strategy. It turns it into the strategy everyone else wants to imitate.

Paul Skenes becomes one of the most fascinating test cases because he sits right at the intersection of all these ideas. Under today’s rules, patience is rewarded. Every season a superstar delays free agency increases the possibility of an even larger contract because the market has no practical ceiling. Juan Soto waited because there wasn’t one. Shohei Ohtani waited because there wasn’t one. The potential reward kept growing with every passing season, albeit with the risk that an elbow or shoulder injury derails everything. A world with shorter maximum contract lengths changes that calculation. There is still enough money to alter the course of a family forever, but the difference between signing today and signing six years from now becomes much smaller than it is under the current system. Scott Boras will still have a thriving business, but convincing elite players to reject nine figures today in pursuit of an unrestricted market tomorrow becomes a more complicated conversation.

The same logic applies to the clubs themselves. Everyone says the salary floor will force teams to spend more and that’s certainly true in the broadest accounting sense. What often gets skipped is the obvious follow-up question: Spend on who?

Free agency isn’t an endlessly replenished warehouse. Every winter offers a handful of stars, a respectable collection of quality regulars and then a long list of players who suddenly become much more attractive because demand exceeds supply. Force a dozen clubs to add more than $600 million in payroll and you don’t create more impact players. You create more bidders chasing the same inventory. The league-average starter becomes surprisingly expensive. The dependable reliever suddenly has six suitors instead of two. The competent corner outfielder discovers he has accidentally become a luxury item.

The smartest organizations won’t want to spend much time in that marketplace because they’ve spent years building systems designed to avoid it. If you’ve already identified your next ace, your next shortstop and your next center fielder, why pay inflated prices for someone else’s declining veteran? Why not redirect those dollars toward extensions that lock up your own talent before everyone else can assign a market value? The Brewers have been forced into that mindset for years. The Braves embraced it voluntarily. Cleveland, Tampa Bay and a few others have lived there as well. Their greatest competitive advantage may not be scouting or development individually. It may be understanding exactly when a player becomes worth more than the rest of the league realizes.

Then there’s the grandfather clause, which may shape the first five years of any new system more than the cap itself and in fact, if the CBA is of similar length, we’ll never escape the shadow of the current system until the next next one. Existing contracts remain protected by law, meaning the Dodgers don’t suddenly lose Shohei Ohtani and the Yankees don’t wave goodbye to Aaron Judge. Those organizations keep the talent they’ve accumulated. What changes is their ability to solve the next problem with another nine-figure signing. Competitive advantages don’t vanish because a new CBA gets ratified. They erode gradually as contracts expire and new rules begin influencing new decisions.

That’s why I think we’ve all been looking at the proposal through the wrong end of the telescope. Everyone sees a fight over payroll. I see a fight over leverage and timing. The organizations that discover value earliest, trust their evaluations enough to act aggressively and convince young stars to exchange a little theoretical upside for immediate security may become the clubs that define the next decade. Baseball has always rewarded teams that recognized tomorrow’s market before everyone else arrived. Moneyball wasn’t really about on-base percentage. It was about buying an undervalued asset before the rest of the sport understood its price. The Astros weren’t really about technology. They were about building a development machine before everyone appreciated what one could produce. The Dodgers weren’t really about payroll. They were about combining financial strength with the best baseball operations department in the game.

If a salary cap ever becomes reality, the next great inefficiency may already exist. It just happens to be wearing a Brewers jersey, carrying a Braves playbook, and waiting for the rest of baseball to catch up. Bud Selig will enjoy the irony.

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Giancarlo Stanton is done for 2026. Aaron Boone all but said it and I’m hardly out on a limb, but there’s one narrow exception I’ll allow: a Yankees run deep enough into October that the calendar gives him several extra weeks. Even then, inserting Stanton into an ALCS or World Series lineup after essentially losing the season would require a lot of faith in timing, legs and a 36-year-old body that just failed another test.

The mechanism makes this one more concerning. Stanton has spent four months rehabbing a right calf strain, then fell while running the bases and strained the left calf. This comes after hamstring strains, Achilles trouble, quad problems and the accumulated lower-body issues that have gradually turned him into a full-time DH. One doesn’t have to look too hard at his injury history to see how long that list has become. At some point, recurrent soft-tissue injuries on alternating sides stop looking like individual accidents and start raising questions about how much explosive movement the entire kinetic chain can still tolerate.

There’s a financial wrinkle here too. I can find no public evidence that Stanton’s contract carries meaningful disability insurance for the Yankees. That makes sense. Disability coverage on long-term athlete contracts can exclude previously injured body parts and those exclusions can make coverage progressively less useful as the medical file grows. Stanton’s history would make comprehensive coverage extraordinarily expensive, assuming anyone wanted to underwrite it without exclusions that gutted much of its value.

The Yankees still owe Stanton $25 million in 2027, followed by a $25 million club option for 2028 with a $10 million buyout. Miami’s contribution softens the bill, but the Yankees are overwhelmingly likely to decline that option.

Meanwhile, Cody Bellinger returned Sunday and looked as expected, while Aaron Judge is hitting off a tee. That’s the October lineup now, assuming they stay healthy. Stanton would be a bonus, but the team is locked in to the playoffs having played without him most of the season. They might just be used to it enough to not change things and Stanton will only have sim games and Trajekt sessions to convince the Yankees he would be worth a roster slot. As well, his absence does open the DH slot, which makes things a bit more flexible on Boone, especially if he’s juggling lineups and trying to make sure a rookie shortstop isn’t overworked.

The darker question is whether we’ve already seen the last productive version of him. If 2027 becomes substantially disrupted by baseball’s labor fight, Stanton could enter his age-38 season having barely played for two years, with no guaranteed contract beyond it. At that point, retirement becomes a very reasonable possibility rather than some dramatic hypothetical.

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There’s more Yankees and more Dodgers, plus all the other teams are in Quick Cuts. Yeah, it’s pretty focused, just like it was on this weekend’s Injury Territory.

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A year ago, Cal Raleigh looked like he had broken baseball. Sixty home runs from a catcher isn’t supposed to happen. Catchers are the guys whose knees sound like bubble wrap by the All-Star break, who spend their afternoons studying scouting reports instead of launch angles, who trade offensive upside for the privilege of getting baseballs ricocheted off every available body part. Raleigh ignored all of that, mashed 60, finished second in the MVP voting, and had people wondering whether the position itself had changed forever.

Now he’s hitting like a pitcher from the 1970s. As August winds down, Raleigh is sitting on barely fifty hits for the season, with a batting average that would make Mario Mendoza offer a sympathetic hug. His August line looks like a typo. His OPS has fallen off a cliff. His hard contact has evaporated. The same hitter who punished mistakes in 2025 now seems unable to square up the ones he used to deposit in the second deck. The underlying metrics tell the same story. His hard-hit rate has cratered, his barrel rate has been cut roughly in half, and every trip to the plate feels more like an archaeological dig than a power display.

The obvious question is why. The frustrating answer is that we don’t know.

Yes, Raleigh dealt with an oblique injury earlier this season. Those can sap power, linger longer than anyone admits, and force hitters into ugly compensations. They are miserable injuries because every swing reminds you they’re there. The problem is timing. Raleigh’s collapse began before the injury became the convenient explanation and there simply isn’t any medical evidence available that connects what we’re seeing now to one nagging physical issue. Even behind the scenes, Mariners sources say there’s nothing physically wrong with Raleigh. That’s unsatisfying, but it’s honest.

Baseball history is littered with seasons that seemed to arrive from another dimension. Brady Anderson’s 50 homer explosion in 1996 remains the patron saint of statistical double takes. Rich Aurilia suddenly became Barry Bonds for a summer. Luis Gonzalez hit 57. Norm Cash supposedly claimed he’d never find the lucky piece of lumber that produced his .361 season. Then there are the less famous examples, players who discovered lightning for exactly one bottle before returning to earth as though gravity had finally noticed them.

The difference is that Raleigh isn’t simply regressing. Regression is going from extraordinary back to very good. This is more like the news stories about some poor sap driving off a cliff because someone’s GPS confused the Grand Canyon with a rest stop.

Whenever something like this happens, somebody inevitably mutters that “the drugs wore off.” It’s lazy analysis disguised as cynical wisdom. Here’s the problem with that theory. If performance-enhancing drugs worked well enough to produce sixty home runs and the player never tested positive, why exactly would he stop? Baseball’s testing program only has value if we accept that it works. We don’t get to invoke it when it’s convenient and ignore it when it isn’t. Either the tests identify violations or they don’t. You can’t simultaneously argue that the system is needed while assuming every unexplained performance swing must be evidence that someone slipped through it. That’s conspiracy thinking wearing a Fangraphs hoodie.

Besides, baseball has always produced seasons that refuse to make sense. The sport runs on tiny margins. Lose a couple miles per hour of bat speed or miss the barrel by half an inch and you’re a bum. Start cheating toward velocity because you’re chasing the version of yourself that hit 60 bombs last year and suddenly every hanging slider becomes a routine fly ball instead of an insurance run.

There may also be something more psychological at work. Imagine spending an entire offseason being introduced as “the guy who hit sixty.” Every opposing pitcher has a fresh scouting report. Every meeting starts with your name. Every mistake they made last year has been cataloged, categorized and deleted from future plans. They aren’t surprising anyone anymore. They’re the syllabus. That’s the hidden cost of a historic season. Baseball doesn’t let someone defend a title. It lets twenty-nine pitching coaches and front offices spend six months figuring out how to dismantle it.

The Mariners have remained remarkably patient because the alternatives are worse. You don’t bench a catcher who has already shown he can be an MVP-caliber player. You keep waiting for one loud week to become two, then a month, then the hitter you remember. There have been flashes - a home run here, a grand slam there - just enough to remind everyone that the power hasn’t been legally declared dead. Maybe that’s the cruelest part. We know the player still exists because we see him in brief cameos before he disappears again.

History will eventually decide whether 2025 was the outlier or 2026 was the collapse. Right now, it feels impossible to know which season is lying to us. Baseball has a remarkable ability to humble certainty. Just when you think you’ve identified the next generational slugger, the game quietly reminds you that it has been making fools of experts for 150 years. Sometimes the answer isn’t hidden in biomechanics, medicine, or pharmacology. Sometimes baseball simply shrugs, points toward the batter’s box, and says, “Explain this.” Good luck.

JACOB WILSON, SS LVA (separated/strained/torn shoulder)

Jacob Wilson’s shoulder has reached the point where the Athletics are talking about ending his season, and that’s probably the right decision whether surgery happens or not. A sore shoulder in August is one thing. A shoulder that’s already dislocated once this season and still hasn’t settled down is something else entirely. The A’s expect him to miss the rest of the season while he returns to Sacramento for another evaluation and surgery remains very much on the table.

The obvious comparison is Fernando Tatis Jr. Tatis tried to avoid surgery after repeated shoulder instability, hoping strengthening and rest would be enough. Eventually the shoulder kept reminding him who was in charge and he underwent stabilization surgery. The suspension he was serving gave him something athletes almost never get: free (unpaid) rehab time. By the time he returned, he’d also moved off shortstop full time. That’s the path Wilson and the Athletics have to at least discuss.

Wilson is a defensive wizard, every bit the son of Jack Wilson in the field. The glove absolutely plays. The question is whether it plays enough. Shoulder instability changes how infielders attack the baseball. It changes throws from the hole, awkward arm slots, and the subconscious confidence that lets elite defenders do things other players won’t even attempt. If those become recurring issues, Leo De Vries suddenly isn’t just the shortstop of the future. He becomes the shortstop of the present rather than second or third, with Wilson’s bat finding another home if it continues to develop.

That’s where the Athletics become fascinating. Look at the young core. Nick Kurtz looks like a middle of the order anchor. Shea Langeliers remains under control. Wilson should still hit enough to be an everyday player. De Vries is coming fast. There are pieces here. More than people realize. That said, you could append “when healthy” to everyone there besides DeVries.

Which is why I’ve never understood the rush to move on from David Forst. In fact, I think finding someone better would be remarkably difficult. You’re asking candidates to spend another couple seasons in Sacramento under an owner who still hasn’t convinced baseball he wants to compete, is obviously cash-short, and all while waiting for Las Vegas to become reality. That’s not the dream job people imagine.

Squint a little, though. The stadium is rising. The AL West remains a remarkably crappy division. A healthy Wilson, Kurtz, Langeliers, and eventually De Vries is a core worth building around. For the first time in several years, the Athletics don’t need another teardown. They need health, patience, and a front office good enough to recognize the difference.

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Some of you don’t watch/listen to Injury Territory. I get it. There’s a lot of podcasts. This is one where I’m asking please, watch/listen. If you don’t do video, there’s a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Or just click. I think you can tell, this one means a lot to me. Thanks to Dr. Neal ElAttrache for taking the time.

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The easiest way to start a financial panic is to place two large numbers next to each other and let social media perform the audit. Mark Walter has reportedly been looking for cash. The Dodgers have more than $1 billion in deferred compensation on their books. Put those facts on consecutive Instagram slides, add a grimacing emoji, and the conclusion arrives before anyone has to make the case: Walter needs money because the bill for all those Dodgers is coming due.

There may be a real story in Walter’s search for liquidity. According to the report cited in the post, Walter approached Charter Communications (who DBA as Spectrum and inherited the Dodgers deal in a series of acquisitions) about ending the Dodgers’ and Lakers’ local television agreements several years early in exchange for a lump-sum payment. The Dodgers’ deal runs 25 years for $8.35 billion, an average of $334 million annually, all untouched by revenue sharing due to the Dodgers’ McCourt-fueled bankruptcy. which remains one of the most valuable local television contracts in sports even as the regional sports network model collapses around it. Offering to exchange that river of future revenue for a smaller lake of cash today raises reasonable questions about Walter’s priorities, his other investments, and whatever financing needs exist across a sports portfolio that stretches well beyond Chavez Ravine.

The Instagram post skips those questions and moves directly to the deferred money. Shohei Ohtani has $680 million deferred. Mookie Betts has $115 million, Blake Snell $65 million, and you can read the rest of the list in the original post above. That particular list totals just over $1 billion, with payments reaching well into the 2040s. The numbers are accurate enough to produce alarm and arranged carefully enough to suggest a connection the post never demonstrates.

That distinction matters because the Dodgers’ deferred salaries are not a pile of unfunded promises waiting for the next owner. Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement requires clubs to fund deferred compensation as it is earned. For contracts executed since September 30, 2002, a club must fund an amount equal to the present value of the deferred obligation by the second July 1 following the championship season in which the compensation was earned. The club must then maintain funding equal to the current present value of the outstanding payments, using a 5 percent annual discount rate. Baseball has encountered owners before and built some supervision into the arrangement.

The correction circulating in the comments is closer, although several versions also simplify the rule beyond usefulness. The Dodgers have not deposited the entire nominal billion dollars into an escrow account. They fund the present value of each deferred payment after the corresponding salary is earned. The club may choose the method of funding unless the individual player contract requires something more specific, and the assets generally remain subject to claims by the club’s creditors. Calling it an escrow account communicates the broad idea that money must be set aside, but it implies a sealed, player-controlled account that Article XVI does not automatically provide. Of note here, Walter and Guggenheim are well versed in annuities and understand how similar vehicles could be most advantageously used to get things like extra growth, tax benefits, and more, all while paying off to the player as promised.

Ohtani’s contract offers the cleanest example because its structure repeats annually. He earns $70 million for each of the ten playing seasons, receives $2 million currently and defers $68 million until ten years after the season in which he earned it. The $68 million from 2024 is due in 2034. By July 1, 2026, the Dodgers had to have funded the current present value of that payment and there’s no evidence they did not. With eight years remaining and the CBA’s 5 percent discount rate, the required amount is approximately $46 million.

That $46 million is expected to grow into the $68 million Ohtani will receive. If the supporting investments earn 5 percent, the calculation works as designed. If they earn more, the Dodgers retain the excess. If they underperform and the account falls below the current present value of the liability, the club must add assets to remain fully funded. Another funding obligation follows for the $68 million earned in 2025 and payable in 2035, then another for 2026 and 2036, continuing through the final payment in 2043. The Dodgers receive time and investment opportunity, which are valuable, but they are already converting Ohtani’s future salary into a current financial obligation. Ohtani can be in a tax-haven residence by the time it starts paying off, rather than California.

The two-year funding window adds some short-term flexibility. Los Angeles does not have to fund the 2024 deferral until July 1, 2026, allowing the club to retain and use that cash in the interim, which they clearly did. Waiting also raises the amount eventually required because the future payment is two years closer. At the end of 2024, the present value of a $68 million payment ten years away was roughly $41.7 million at the CBA’s 5 percent rate. By that July 2026 date, with about eight years remaining, it is approximately $46 million. Deferral creates room to maneuver, though the room comes with walls. Note this is how they could do it and uses the “latest possible” dates. The Dodgers may well have fully funded it in some vehicle and could be watching it grow. Imagine they put it in a nice mutual fund or bought some Apple stock for Ohtani.

The funding obligation also changes the meaning of that billion-dollar total. The Instagram number adds nominal payments due across many years as though they were payable at once. No buyer would evaluate them that way. A prospective owner would examine the payment schedule, calculate the liabilities at present value, inspect the assets supporting them and assess whether the club has complied with the CBA. The future obligations would reduce the franchise’s value, while the assets already reserved to meet them would offset part of that reduction. Leaving the assets out of the calculation turns financial analysis into the sort of exercise where every mortgage is counted and every house is ignored.

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There is still risk here and dismissing the entire subject because the contracts are funded would be as lazy as declaring the Dodgers insolvent from an Instagram carousel. The supporting assets must exist, retain sufficient value, and remain properly funded. Because those assets generally remain available to the club’s creditors, a genuine financial collapse could create complications for players. A buyer would want detailed records of every account and investment, every contractual protection that goes beyond the CBA, and every obligation approaching payment. Walter’s reported interest in raising cash deserves scrutiny within that larger picture. It simply cannot be used as proof of a deferred-compensation crisis without evidence connecting the two.

The Competitive Balance Tax creates a second calculation that is routinely mashed together with the first. Funding under Article XVI uses the 5 percent discount rate. CBT accounting applies the agreement’s separate present-value rules, including the imputed loan interest rate tied to the applicable federal mid-term rate. That calculation reduces Ohtani’s CBT value from the advertised $70 million per season to roughly $46 million. The Dodgers gain about $24 million of annual CBT room compared with a contract containing no deferral, although the money owed to Ohtani continues to exist and the club still must fund it.

This is where complaints about “fake money” lose contact with the ledger. Ohtani accepted $680 million without interest over a payment schedule extending ten years beyond his playing contract. The present economic value of that package was therefore far below $700 million when he signed it. Los Angeles received payroll flexibility because Ohtani agreed to receive less economic value than the headline number suggests, in exchange for whatever competitive, financial and tax benefits he saw in the structure. Anyone may dislike the result, especially anyone watching the Dodgers add another expensive player, but the mechanism is neither hidden nor free.

The real Dodgers advantage appears once the accounting tricks are cleared away. Every team can use deferred compensation under the current CBA. Every team can offer a future payment, fund its present value and receive the corresponding cash-flow and CBT effects. The Dodgers can do it repeatedly while maintaining one of baseball’s largest current payrolls, paying substantial tax penalties and continuing to operate at the top of the market. Their ownership group has enormous resources, the franchise produces extraordinary revenue, and the television agreement supplies $334 million annually before the first ticket, beer or Japanese advertising package is sold.

That difference in capacity explains why the rule feels more offensive when Los Angeles uses it. A smaller-revenue club can employ deferrals to stretch for a player or retain one it might otherwise lose. The Dodgers can place deferrals inside a much larger financial machine, fund future salaries with current assets and keep spending around them. The CBA provides the same hammer to every club, but Los Angeles owns more nails, a larger construction budget, and apparently no interest in taking lunch. Fans of teams whose owners treat the CBT threshold like an electric fence are understandably unimpressed when told that everyone has access to the same financial tools.

Baseball’s owners understand this frustration and are now using it in the labor negotiations. MLB’s most recent proposal for the next CBA would eliminate deferred compensation from new contracts while preserving existing obligations. The Dodgers’ billion-dollar total makes the proposal easy to sell as competitive-balance reform, although restricting deferrals also removes a negotiating tool from players and agents. Deferrals have been used by rich clubs, poor clubs and plenty in between, sometimes to lower current payroll and sometimes to bridge a gap that allows a deal to happen. Turning the entire practice into the ‘Ohtani Rule’ makes for good politics and incomplete economics, which means it should fit comfortably into the next CBA fight.

The question surrounding Walter remains legitimate. Why would someone controlling one of sports’ best long-term media assets consider surrendering years of revenue for cash today? Perhaps the answer involves debt, another business opportunity, the Lakers, Chelsea, Cadillac’s Formula 1 team or the simple preference for immediate capital over distant payments. Maybe he does need the cash now to stave off some bubble payment or to settle something. The time value of money works for owners, too. Until reporting connects that decision to the Dodgers’ funding accounts, placing it beside the deferred salary total provides atmosphere rather than evidence.

If Walter or Guggenheim has a broader liquidity problem, the story will eventually produce harder facts: debt covenants, collateral, financing terms, asset sales, missed funding requirements or pressure from creditors. Heck we just learned today (August 19th, as I write this) that Walter owns a big chunk of Carvana, a publicly traded entity most of us know and that is subject to public reporting and scrutiny. The Dodgers’ deferred contracts would then become one relevant part of a much larger balance sheet. For now, the CBA requires the club to fund those obligations years before the players receive them and there has been no report that Los Angeles has failed to do so. The billion dollars is real. The suggestion that Walter suddenly needs to find all of it is not.

The Dodgers’ edge comes from their ability to carry these obligations while continuing to spend, an advantage rooted in wealth, revenue and access to capital rather than a loophole that makes salaries vanish. They are paying Ohtani $2 million in cash this season, counting roughly $46 million for CBT purposes and committing tens of millions more to fund the future payment he has already earned. Those are three different numbers serving three different purposes, which is inconvenient for an Instagram post and essential to understanding the contract. Los Angeles has built a roster around that distinction, and baseball may decide to close the option in the next agreement. Until then, the Dodgers are exploiting their balance sheet more than the rulebook and there is no collective-bargaining provision requiring every owner to have the same balance sheet.

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Special thanks to friends at MLB and MLBPA who read through this, as well as Friend of the Newsletter Barry Bloom, a true expert in the field. All errors remain my own.

One more quick note - earlier this year, I suggested that the Dodgers’ local TV deal wouldn’t be an impediment to a collective rights deal where all 30 teams gave up their local rights. This one doesn’t purely prove me right, but pretty close. As I suggested, the Dodgers had a price, as do the other teams.

MAX FRIED, SP NYY (bruised elbow)

The good news for the Yankees is that Max Fried’s elbow bruise appears much less significant than the one that sidelined him for most of the summer. Aaron Boone’s willingness to talk about a return immediately after the minimum stay tells you this isn’t being viewed as a restart of the entire rehab process. Fried is already playing catch, and unless something changes over the next week, he may not even need a rehab assignment before stepping back into the rotation.

That’s the short-term view. The longer-term question is much harder, because bone bruises don’t simply appear out of nowhere. They’re evidence that the joint has absorbed enough force to injure the bone beneath the cartilage. The Yankees clearly understand how to manage this injury now. They recognized the symptoms quickly, shut him down before it became something larger, and avoided the temptation to let a contender’s urgency override common sense. What they haven’t done, because they probably can’t, is eliminate whatever mechanical or anatomical factor keeps producing that stress in the first place.

That’s why recurrence matters. One bone bruise can be dismissed as bad luck. Two starts to look like a pattern. Bone generally heals well, but repeatedly loading the same area raises uncomfortable questions about the cartilage sitting above it and whether the elbow is distributing force the way it should. This isn’t Tommy John territory, nor does it suggest Fried is headed toward surgery. It does suggest the Yankees will have to manage him carefully for the rest of the season, because another flare-up in October becomes much more difficult to dismiss.

That management will probably require some creativity. The Dodgers can hide an abbreviated outing behind a seemingly endless supply of starting pitchers. The Braves have spent years accumulating arms they can shuffle between roles. The Yankees don’t have quite that luxury. They may need to piggyback Fried with one of their younger starters, shorten his outings, or simply build extra rest into the schedule whenever possible. That’s not ideal for a club chasing the Rays, but it’s preferable to asking Fried for seven innings every fifth day and discovering in October that the bruise was trying to tell them something they didn’t want to hear.

DANSBY SWANSON, SS CHC (strained oblique)

Yes, Dansby Swanson plays for the Cubs. On Monday, I added a note about Swanson’s injury at the last second and for some reason, the lack of caffeine and my brain decided to go back in time and think that Swanson’s injury would hurt the Braves rotation. Maybe it was just how deep I had to dig on that Braves rotation, but it’s still an embarrassing error. It doesn’t help the CUBS rotation, which has plenty of it’s own problems. Blame an editor? Nope, I don’t have one, unless the AI spellcheck counts. All the errors are my own. E1.

However, not every injury needs a mystery attached to it. Swanson has a Grade II oblique strain, the Cubs have a four-to-six-week timetable, and that’s about as straightforward as baseball injuries get. The diagnosis fits the mechanism, the recovery window fits the diagnosis, and barring a setback, the Cubs have a pretty good idea of when they’ll see him again. That doesn’t make the timing any less painful.

Oblique strains remain one of the more frustrating injuries because baseball asks those muscles to do everything. They’re responsible for creating and controlling rotation during the swing, but a shortstop also relies on them while throwing across the diamond, changing directions on a ground ball, and making awkward off-balance plays in the hole. Even after the pain fades, players often need another week or two before they’re comfortable producing maximum rotational force. That’s why teams are generally conservative, particularly with Grade II injuries, where the recurrence rate climbs quickly if a player returns before the tissue has fully healed.

The Cubs can survive the offense. Nico Hoerner is more than capable of handling shortstop defensively and Chicago has enough lineup depth to piece together the at-bats. What they’re really missing is stability. Swanson is the everyday presence who allows everyone else to stay in their natural roles, and that’s harder to replace than a few home runs.

The silver lining is the calendar. If the Cubs can get him back near the four-week end of the projection, he’ll have enough regular-season games to knock the rust off before October. That’s the goal now. Nobody in Chicago should be thinking about shaving a week off the rehab. They should be thinking about making sure their shortstop is healthy enough to make every throw and every swing that matters once the postseason begins.

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PAUL SKENES, SP PIT (fatigue)

Paul Skenes is getting what amounts to an extra throw day. The Pirates will skip his scheduled start, push him back to Wednesday, and hope that a little more recovery time restores a pitcher who has looked increasingly mortal over the last month. If my sources are right, that’s exactly the thinking. This isn’t a shutdown. It isn’t even a reset. It’s a chance to give his arm and body another 72 hours before asking them to do something extraordinary again.

The encouraging part is what the Pirates aren’t saying. Velocity has dipped, the fastball has lost a bit of life, the secondary pitches haven’t had quite the same bite, and the results have followed. Those are all classic signs of fatigue, and fatigue is very different from structural injury. Fatigue accumulates quietly. One outing looks normal, the next is a tick slower, then the slider doesn’t finish quite as sharply. Before long, the pitcher looks like himself in silhouette but not in execution. Pittsburgh appears to believe that’s where Skenes is and that’s a much better place to start than wondering whether Dr. Neal ElAttrache needs to clear his calendar.

Three extra days, however, aren’t a magic wand. If Skenes has accumulated four months of workload, thousands of high-effort pitches, and all the stress that comes from living at the upper edge of the velocity spectrum, one skipped start doesn’t erase that ledger. It may freshen him enough to recover some of the missing stuff, but if the underlying issue is cumulative fatigue, the answer is probably found in the weeks ahead rather than this week.

That’s why the more interesting question comes after Wednesday. At what point do the Pirates decide enough is enough?

They’re in a very different position than clubs chasing a pennant. Skenes isn’t just their ace - he’s the centerpiece of the next few seasons and what looks like a wide-open window for winning. If the stuff continues to lag through the rest of August, I could absolutely see Pittsburgh shutting him down with a month left. That sounds dramatic until you remember the alternative: asking a tired 24-year-old to throw another 30 or 40 innings because the calendar says September.

The complication is the offseason. This isn’t likely to be a normal winter if labor negotiations continue down their current path. A lockout changes throwing programs, access to team staff, communication, and the carefully controlled buildup that organizations spend months constructing. The Pirates have to weigh today’s fatigue against an offseason that could be far less predictable than usual.

Skenes is off. I’m comfortable planting that flag. I’m equally comfortable saying I don’t think he’s broken. Those are two very different diagnoses, and the Pirates seem to agree. The next few weeks will tell us whether rest is enough, or whether the tank has simply run lower than anyone expected after asking one of the most electric arms in baseball to live at 99 mph every fifth day.

BRYCE HARPER, OF PHI (bruised knee)

Bryce Harper’s knee is becoming one of those injuries that’s more annoying than alarming, which doesn’t make it any less important. The key detail is the mechanism. He fouled a ball directly off the knee before the ASB, the soreness has lingered, and moving back to right field has made it worse. That’s a very different picture than the gradual onset of a degenerative meniscus tear or the swelling pattern you’d expect from an arthritic knee. This still looks and sounds like a deep bone bruise or significant soft tissue contusion that simply hasn’t had a chance to settle down.

The problem is that baseball doesn’t give bruises much time to heal. Every stride in the outfield, every deceleration into a fly ball, every awkward plant while throwing asks the knee to absorb force directly through the area that was hit. First base is easier. Designated hitter is easier still. Right field is probably the worst place Harper could be playing if the goal is to calm the knee down, yet that’s exactly where the Phillies need him because their roster construction leaves very few clean alternatives.

That’s where the dominos begin. Putting Harper at DH pushes Kyle Schwarber into the field or onto the bench. Neither is an especially attractive option for a club with October ambitions. Sending Harper to the injured list would probably solve the medical problem, but it creates a baseball problem that Philadelphia clearly doesn’t want to face unless the knee forces the decision, not to mention Harper is a vocal player who isn’t the happiest with the front office. I wouldn’t want to be in the meeting where they suggest he needs 15 days off.

In fact, I’ll bet Harper never sees the IL for this. He’ll receive treatment every day, likely continue using anti-inflammatory modalities, limit his outfield workload whenever possible, and grab as many DH days as Don Mattingly can manufacture. Bone bruises improve with time, but time is exactly what contenders never seem to have.

The one thing I’d watch carefully is whether the Phillies quietly stop talking about soreness and start talking about swelling or mechanical symptoms. That would change the conversation quickly. Right now, nothing about the history points toward a meniscus or ligament injury and there’s little reason to chase an MRI looking for trouble. The diagnosis appears straightforward. The treatment is straightforward too. Good time for a Hyperice deal for Harper?

The problem is that the best treatment is rest and the Phillies are trying to get into the playoffs with Bryce Harper in the middle of the lineup. Those two goals don’t coexist particularly well, so expect Philadelphia to keep threading the needle rather than cutting it.

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Maybe only me and Jason Snell care about this, but live immersive baseball on Vision Pro? Made me wait long enough, Apple, but I’m in! It worked very well on NBA games, largely because they figured out the camera — just three, really, and slow cuts. The same would be true of soccer, even with the bigger field of play, so I expect to see that next. I am hoping for similarly limited shots in baseball. Infinite Stadium, MLB - one camera! Oh and please consider subscribing to UTK.

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It’s a strange kind of immortality because it threatens to erase the person behind it.

Tommy John won 288 major league games, more than many Hall of Famers. He threw more than 4,700 innings across twenty-six seasons, a career so long it stretched from the final years of Sandy Koufax to the arrival of Ken Griffey Jr. He finished second in the Cy Young voting twice, pitched in three World Series, made four All-Star teams, and kept taking the ball long after most pitchers from his era had become old-timers themselves. Those numbers deserve to stand on their own, yet they almost never do. Every conversation about Tommy John eventually circles back to the operation that bears his name.

That wasn’t how he drew it up. When something tore inside his left elbow in July of 1974, the diagnosis sounded less like an injury than a sentence. Pitchers didn’t come back from damaged ulnar collateral ligaments. They retired. Dodgers physician Dr. Frank Jobe offered something no one had ever attempted on a major league pitcher, reconstructing the ligament with a tendon taken from somewhere else in John’s body. Jobe famously estimated the odds of success at perhaps one percent. John looked at the alternative, realized he was probably headed home to find another career anyway, and decided impossible was better than finished. (⁠Baseball Hall of Fame)

The surgery worked, although that simple word hardly captures what happened next. Tommy John didn’t merely return to the mound. He built an entirely new career. He won 164 games after the operation, more than he had before it. He became the dependable veteran atop Yankee rotations, won twenty games twice in New York, and pitched until he was forty-six years old. Every surgeon, therapist, athletic trainer, biomechanist, and pitching coach who has shepherded an athlete through elbow reconstruction since has followed a path that Frank Jobe imagined and Tommy John was willing to walk first.

Sports medicine rarely changes because of a single afternoon. It advances through careful research, failed experiments, small improvements, and decades of persistence. Every once in a while, though, one patient becomes the hinge on which an entire field turns. Tommy John was that patient. He wasn’t the inventor of the procedure, and he never claimed to be. His gift was something medicine can never manufacture in a laboratory. He was willing to become the first human being to bet his career on an idea that had never worked before.

The irony, of course, is that Tommy John sometimes disappeared beneath the procedure that carried his name. He joked for years that younger fans assumed he was the doctor. He laughed because there wasn’t much else to do. His identity had become inseparable from an operation that has extended hundreds of professional careers and countless more in college, high school, and youth baseball. Entire generations have grown up assuming elbow reconstruction was simply another stop along the road for elite pitchers. They never experienced the era when a torn ligament meant the end of a career, a dream. You can dig through Baseball-Reference and find hundreds of shortened careers, the Moonlight Graham’s that might have been helped. One of them, Jobe said only half-jokingly, was Sandy Koufax.

His legacy, though, reaches beyond medicine because Tommy John embodied the very qualities that made the operation possible. He wasn’t overpowering. He wasn’t flashy. He was durable, stubborn, relentlessly competitive, and endlessly curious about how to keep pitching. Rehabilitation in 1975 wasn’t guided by evidence-based protocols or return-to-throw programs. Every milestone was an educated guess. Every bullpen session was unexplored territory. Tommy John accepted that uncertainty because there was no alternative, and in doing so he quietly handed every pitcher who followed him a map.

Which brings us to Cooperstown. The Baseball Hall of Fame has made plenty of controversial decisions over the years. It has welcomed players whose character remains deeply debated while leaving out others whose statistical cases were stronger than voters cared to admit. Few omissions, however, are as difficult to defend as Tommy John and Dr. Frank Jobe. John’s baseball resume stands comfortably within Hall territory even before you account for history: 288 wins, more than 4,700 innings, and one of the longest, most productive careers any pitcher has assembled. Jobe changed the sport every bit as profoundly, pioneering a procedure that transformed careers once thought unsalvageable. The Hall has recognized them, honored them, displayed the instruments from the surgery, and celebrated the story. It has simply never given either man a plaque.

That distinction matters. Museums preserve artifacts. Halls of Fame recognize people.

No pitcher since 1974 has taken the mound without living, in some small way, in the world Tommy John and Frank Jobe created. Some have needed the surgery. All have benefited from the knowledge that an elbow injury no longer carries the certainty it once did. Their work altered front offices, player development, rehabilitation, biomechanics, contract negotiations, and the very economics of pitching. There are few individuals who have changed baseball more profoundly.

Long after the final box scores fade, Tommy John’s greatest victory won’t be found in the standings or on the back of a baseball card. It will live every time a frightened pitcher hears that his ligament can be repaired, every time a surgeon walks into an operating room carrying techniques descended from Frank Jobe’s original vision, and every time someone gets another chance because one pitcher was willing to risk everything on a one-percent idea.

Some legacies are measured in championships. Tommy John’s is measured in careers. Alongside Frank Jobe, he gave baseball thousands of them, and the story of the game was changed by them in ways no mere player could do. Today, we remember two great men who led amazing baseball lives as the last of them passed.

Whenever expansion comes up, the conversation immediately gravitates toward geography. Nashville. Salt Lake City. Orlando. Portland. Perhaps Oakland gets another turn. The debate becomes a familiar exercise in television households, corporate sponsorships, public financing, and whether a particular market can sustain eighty-one home dates. Baseball people naturally think about growth in terms of adding teams because that’s how the sport has always grown. The more interesting question might not be where MLB should put two new franchises. It might be whether MLB needs two new franchises at all.

If prospective owners are willing to pay something in the neighborhood of $2 billion per franchise, the existing ownership group is looking at a windfall approaching $4 billion. Given what happened with the Lakers, where potential expansion owners Bob Iger and Josh Kushner looked at the bill and said “maybe we should just buy the Lakers" the expansion ask might be significantly north. That’s real money, even in a business where franchise values have climbed so dramatically that franchise valuations look like you might have the wrong currency set. Like Zimbabwe. The challenge is that expansion creates a permanent tradeoff. The owners receive a large one-time payment, but from that moment forward every national revenue stream is divided by thirty-two instead of thirty. Every future media agreement, every national sponsorship, and every central-fund dollar becomes slightly more diluted. Expansion creates value on the front end and dilution on the back end, which is why the economics are not quite as straightforward as they first appear.

That thought led me down a different path. What if MLB decided that the best use of its growth capital wasn’t another franchise at all? What if, instead of collecting expansion fees, the league purchased and scaled Banana Ball into a national property? Not as a touring act and not as a novelty sideshow, but as a true second business operating alongside Major League Baseball. The immediate reaction from many baseball people would be to laugh, which is usually a good sign that an idea deserves a second look. The most disruptive opportunities almost always sound ridiculous when viewed through the assumptions of the current business.

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Seriously, you’re going to want to read the rest of this. While I’m on the road, this will give you something to think about. Oh and hi to Eric, a very cool subscriber I ran into at the Pope Hat game!

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We still don’t know exactly what type of surgery Hunter Greene had late last week, but we know enough to know he’s done for this season and much of next season as well. Dr. Neal ElAttrache did some form of revision on Greene’s 2019 Tommy John surgery, though we don’t know which variant. The timelines are close enough that it doesn’t matter, though a 12 month return would be preferable to a 18 month rehab. The problem is that 13 months wipes out all of ‘27, assuming the CBA doesn’t do that for everyone.

The revision itself is the headline. First-time Tommy John surgery has become so common that people forget it’s still a reconstruction. Revision surgery is different. The anatomy has already been altered once, the tunnels in the bone may need to be revised, tissue has to be navigated, and every decision becomes more dependent on what the surgeon finds after opening the joint. That’s why ElAttrache went in with options rather than a script.

Greene’s profile magnifies every concern. Pitchers have thrown 100 mph before. Very few have lived there. His fastball isn’t an occasional showpiece - it’s his operating system. Every pitch creates extraordinary stress across the medial elbow and while modern biomechanics have made velocity more attainable, they haven’t repealed biology. Ligaments fatigue. Bone remodels. Cartilage wears. Those forces accumulate over thousands of pitches, not one dramatic moment.

The bone-chip surgery in March reads differently now as well. At the time it looked like an isolated cleanup. In hindsight, it may have been one chapter in a larger story about an elbow struggling to keep pace with the demands being placed on it. While it was visualized and intact then, we know now that the ligament didn’t survive the return.

There are success stories. Nathan Eovaldi returned from revision surgery and reinvented himself. Others have come back throwing as hard as ever. Those pitchers generally earned their second act by adapting - better pitch usage, smarter workload management, cleaner recovery between starts. Greene has enough talent to do the same, but this surgery closes the book on the version of Hunter Greene who could simply overpower baseball every fifth day and assume his elbow would keep cashing the checks. Whatever comes next has to be built around durability as much as dominance, because the Reds can’t afford to spend another decade wondering what might have been.

CODY BELLINGER, OF NYY (strained hamstring)
GIANCARLO STANTON, DH NYY (strained calf)

“Started the introduction to some bases” is one of those quotes that only Aaron Boone could get away with. It’s not the cleanest sentence, but there’s nothing wrong there as Giancarlo Stanton continues what could best be called a measured rehab schedule.

The key word is “measured.” Stanton has already progressed through live batting practice and outfield running. Adding the bases means the Yankees are beginning to trust the calf under the exact type of loading that caused the problem in the first place. Straight-line jogging is easy. Exploding out of the box, rounding first, decelerating into second, then waking up the next morning without the calf tightening is the real examination. The fact that they’re finally checking those boxes tells me the rehab is moving in the right direction rather than simply moving forward on the calendar.

Cody Bellinger is on a very similar path, just several weeks ahead. Grade II hamstring strains can look deceptively good before they’re actually ready. Players can hit, throw, and even run close to full speed before that last five percent of explosiveness returns. That’s why live batting practice matters. Swinging at game velocity while continuing to run, throw, and recover between workouts is much closer to baseball than another afternoon in the training room.

The Yankees need both bats back and they need them before Aaron Judge. Judge’s rib continues to dictate its own schedule, leaving Brian Cashman to build an offense that doesn’t assume the captain suddenly walks through the clubhouse door. Heliot Ramos and Luis Garcia Jr. have stabilized the lineup, but neither was acquired to replace Judge’s production.

If Bellinger returns near the front end of his timeline and Stanton follows before September, the Yankees become a much more dangerous club overnight. One deep lineup card changes the way opponents deploy bullpens, changes the pitches everyone else sees, and changes the pressure on a rotation that’s already carried more than its share of the load. The Rays aren’t going to hand New York the division, and Boston has made the race uncomfortable. The Yankees’ biggest deadline additions may end up being two players who never left the organization, only the injured list.

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It’s no secret what’s behind the paywall, or below it. More information. More context. Today, there’s a long essay about what comes after the sweeper and if pitchers and hitters are building a cat and mouse game more than a functional baseball game. It’s five bucks, which is as low as I can price it so that more people can read it while still making a living. Again, reminder of travel this week that might alter the schedule a little bit.

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We did Judge with Wednesday’s UTK Flash (which was free, as usual) and there’s no new information so I’m going to leave it there. I’ll update it as needed, as normal.

HUNTER GREENE, SP CIN (inflamed elbow)

Hunter Greene’s season is hanging by a thread, and the timing is what makes this feel so ominous. Terry Francona saying there’s only a “slim chance” Greene pitches again isn’t simply conceding the calendar. It’s acknowledging that whatever happens next has to prioritize 2027 over squeezing a couple September starts into a lost year.

The second opinion with Dr. Neal ElAttrache is the next key step and it happened Thursday, so the Reds probably know, but we don’t just yet. Greene has already been through Tommy John surgery, and he underwent arthroscopic surgery in March to remove loose bodies from the elbow. If this somehow turns out to be another crop of loose bodies or inflammation from scar tissue, that’s still bad news. Loose bodies don’t typically recur four months after surgery unless there’s an underlying process creating them. The chips are the symptom. The question becomes what’s making the chips.

The NanoNeedle is at least part of the conversation. If imaging shows a focal area of cartilage damage or uncertainty about the health of the joint surface, it could provide valuable diagnostic information and potentially offer a treatment option. It’s far less likely to help if the problem is ligamentous or if the joint has developed more diffuse degeneration. That’s what Dr. ElAttrache will be trying to sort out.

The calendar works against every conservative option. Even a two week shutdown would push Greene into September before he could begin building back up, and no team is asking a pitcher with this history to go from flat-ground throwing to meaningful innings in the final weeks of the season. Once you accept that reality, shutting him down becomes the only sensible path.

It’s heartbreaking because Greene has ace-level ability. The velocity is elite, the fastball plays, and when he’s healthy he can dominate anyone in baseball. We’ve seen similar stories with pitchers like Noah Syndergaard and Stephen Strasburg, where repeated interruptions gradually became part of the scouting report. Greene isn’t there yet, but this is exactly why Cincinnati held onto him at the deadline. Right now, the Reds have a pitcher with extraordinary talent and a very uncertain elbow, and those two facts have become impossible to separate.

TREY YESAVAGE, SP TOR (meniscus tear)

When Trey Yesavage walked off the mound describing a “pinch” in his knee, meniscus damage was one of the key possibilities. Now we know why everyone got serious so quickly. The meniscus is the knee’s shock absorber, but it’s also a stabilizer. Pitchers don’t just stride onto a firm front leg they rotate over it while transferring hundreds of pounds of force from the ground into the baseball. When the meniscus isn’t doing its job, the entire kinetic chain gets thrown off.

Whether surgery is necessary becomes the next major question. A small tear in the right location can sometimes be managed without an operation. A displaced tear or one that causes mechanical symptoms usually can’t. If the surgeon can repair the meniscus rather than trim it, that’s generally the better long-term answer for a young pitcher, but it also means a much longer rehabilitation. Given where Toronto sits in the standings, there should be no appetite to rush him back.

What complicates this further is Yesavage’s delivery. His mechanics have always featured a lot of moving parts, significant lower-body rotation, and an unusual amount of stress on the lead leg as he braces and unwinds. Those same mechanics help create deception and stuff, but they also ask more of the knee than a cleaner, quieter delivery. This injury won’t force a wholesale rebuild, though I’d be surprised if the Blue Jays don’t spend the winter looking for ways to reduce some of those loads.

Toronto’s season has become one long exercise in finding new ways to get bad news. Every time the club seems ready to build momentum, another significant injury arrives. Even Shohei Ohtani, whose own knee has become a maintenance project, has shown that elite players can thrive while managing chronic knee issues. The difference is that Ohtani is already an established superstar with years of experience adapting around his body. Yesavage is still trying to establish himself. His talent has never been the question. Keeping him healthy long enough to use it is rapidly becoming one.

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Next week could be a little odd, or not. I’m on the road, first at the White Sox Pope Hat day on Tuesday, then further afield for the rest of the week through the weekend. My guess is the wifi will be fine and you’ll get a Thursday or Friday UTK once the travel settles, along with some other interesting content upcoming. Don’t forget Injury Territory, which is free.

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With news breaking that Aaron Judge is saying “I’ll be back” and that he’s been cleared for “light activity,” let’s avoid the bad Arnold accents and stick to the facts. Judge was re-scanned, as planned if perhaps slightly later than expected, and has been cleared for what he said was “light activity.”

That’s all we know.

The first question is what exactly “light activity” is. Judge answered part of it himself. Running and upper-body resistance work. What it isn’t is “baseball activities.” No swinging. No throwing. That’s a much more informative list than the Yankees probably intended. It tells us the fracture/reaction has progressed enough that his doctors are comfortable increasing the load through the torso, but they are still unwilling to expose the rib to the explosive rotational forces generated by a baseball swing. Judge also volunteered the key point when he said hitting would be the “ultimate test” and he’s right. The rib doesn’t care much about jogging. It cares very much about trying to turn a 97 mph fastball around.

That’s why there will be another scan. CT remains the best way to evaluate whether the fracture/reaction has bridged sufficiently to tolerate baseball activity and at this point, there would have to be questions if it hasn’t. The imaging doesn’t have to show a perfect rib but it has to show enough structural healing that the remaining risk is acceptable. If the next scan reaches that threshold, the progression becomes fairly standard: dry swings, tee work, batting practice, throwing, defensive work, live pitching, rehab games. Judge and Aaron Boone both hinted at something else that deserves more attention. Because he’s been shut down for so long, the baseball ramp-up will probably take as long than the fracture did and that really puts the Yankees up against the calendar.

I still don’t buy anyone putting dates on this. The calendar says there are roughly seven weeks left in the regular season. The medical timeline says the next CT determines everything. Until that scan happens, we’re arguing over a schedule that is purely theoretical. If the rib has healed the way everyone hopes, I think Judge gets back sometime in September, though at that stage, I think the risk case shifts and the team and Judge might be willing to accelerate things.

There’s another question lingering in the background and it’s one the Yankees are understandably avoiding. How did this become a stress fracture in the first place? Judge dove on April 26, played through discomfort for more than a month, and only then landed on the injured list. That’s unusual. Stress fractures are generally the result of repetitive loading, not one dramatic event. My suspicion remains that the dive created the initial injury and continuing to swing every day converted an incomplete fracture into the one we’re discussing now. I have no evidence this is the case beside talking to medical experts and my own experience. It’s simply what the timeline suggests.

Long term, I don’t think this becomes “Aaron Judge’s rib problem.” First-rib stress fractures don’t have a reputation for recurring once they unite completely. The bigger issue is arithmetic. Judge has already lost chunks of seasons to a toe, lower-body issues, and now one of the stranger injuries you’ll see in baseball. Hall of Fame players survive injuries all the time. Inner-circle legends grind out big season after big season with few gaps. Every 50-game absence quietly subtracts another ten homers, another win or two, another handful of opportunities that won’t show up on Baseball Reference because they never happened. Those missing seasons are the difference between “all-time great” and “wait, he only finished with 548?”

The Yankees, meanwhile, are operating with remarkable discipline. Brian Cashman went out and acquired bats because there was no medically responsible way to assume Judge would save the season. That’s the correct read. Hope is not a treatment plan. Neither is Captain America jogging on an AlterG.

So where do I plant my flag? I’ll say Judge plays again in 2026. The imaging has continued to improve, nobody is talking about setbacks, and his own description matches what you’d expect from a fracture progressing normally. I also think the Yankees and Judge will get less conservative, because no one cares what Aaron Judge does in December and let’s face it, the offseason might be longer this year.

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Jake Rogers has become baseball’s answer to the airline elite traveler. New city, new clubhouse, new pitching staff, another hotel key card. He’s useful, professional, and almost certainly wondering if anyone has a permanent address for him. Luckily Bonvoy points don’t count towards the luxury tax.

That should end soon. Adley Rutschman’s wrist has progressed enough that he’s back swinging, with a rehab assignment expected this week. That’s about where you’d expect a non-surgical wrist injury to be. The bone wasn’t the problem. The inflammation was. Now comes the real test: consecutive days of full swings, catching innings, and waking up the next morning without the wrist reminding him it exists. If that goes well, he’ll be in Boston before long.

The wrist is manageable. The trade is another matter. Boston paid contender prices because it played like a contender for three weeks. That’s an awfully small sample on which to reshape an organization. A 23-3 run is intoxicating, but pennants aren’t awarded for June and July heaters. The Red Sox still have questions throughout the infield, still need more pitching than they acquired, and still aren’t appreciably better, now or in the long term. Rutschman solves one problem. He doesn’t solve enough of them.

What makes this deadline so curious is that it feels borrowed from a different point on the organizational timeline. This is the move you make when you’re one player short. Boston is several decisions away from that point. Rutschman may be terrific. I’d bet he is. He could catch 130 games a year, post a .360 OBP, finish in MVP voting, and become exactly the player the Red Sox think they’re acquiring. I’d still question the process.

Craig Breslow bought high because the standings sold him a story the roster didn’t. That’s a dangerous way to run a baseball team, particularly in Boston, where every prospect traded away eventually becomes Ted Williams in the imagination of sports radio. If this group falls short in October - or doesn’t get there at all - the conversation won’t be about Adley Rutschman’s wrist. It’ll be about whether the front office convinced itself that a hot streak was a championship window.

GARRETT CROCHET, SP BOS (strained shoulder)

Everything Craig Breslow did at the deadline comes down to one question: what does he know about Garrett Crochet? Not what he hopes. Not what the medical staff is cautiously optimistic about. What does he know?

Crochet is finally throwing again, out to 50 or 60 feet on flat ground. That’s real progress after the lat tightness shut him down, but let’s not confuse it with being close. Flat-ground throwing is where the baseball clock starts, not where it ends. He still has to progress through long toss, bullpens, live hitters, rehab outings, and, perhaps most importantly, recover from each step without the lat or shoulder barking. This isn’t a sprint to the mound. It’s a series of checkpoints where one bad morning sends you back a square.

That’s why Breslow’s deadline fascinates me. The Red Sox ripped off a remarkable hot streak without Crochet. Good for them in July. October is different. You don’t win playoff series with vibes and a 23-3 stretch. You win them by handing the ball to someone who can beat Freddy Peralta, Gavin Williams, or Gerrit Cole. Right now, Boston doesn’t have that guy available. As much as I like Ranger Suarez, he’s the three starter if he’s still a Phillie.

If Crochet returns healthy and looks like Garrett Crochet immediately, the entire deadline changes complexion. Suddenly Adley Rutschman makes more sense. The bullpen additions become leverage instead of lipstick. Even the Mayer-for-a-lefty-reliever deal, which I still can’t justify on value, becomes easier to swallow because there’s an ace standing at the front of the rotation.

If Crochet doesn’t get back, or gets back diminished, the math becomes ugly in a hurry. That’s the wager Breslow made. Not on Rutschman. Not on the bullpen. On one left arm coming back exactly as advertised. If he’s right, he’ll look bold. If he’s wrong, this deadline will be remembered as the moment Boston mistook momentum for certainty.

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I’m so tempted to open up comments today, just to see the Boston hate. Yeah, it’s done. If you learned something, consider learning more by subscribing and seeing this kind of content all the way down, every time I publish. Oh, and listen to my podcast.

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The Dodgers spent the better part of the last three seasons trying to answer one question: what happens when another starter gets hurt? The answer, apparently, was to keep collecting elite pitchers until they ran out of rotation spots.

Tarik Skubal’s arrival gives Los Angeles the best rotation on paper in baseball, but it also creates an unusual dynamic. Skubal is the reigning back-to-back Cy Young winner, yet don’t expect Dave Roberts to walk into the clubhouse and announce a new pecking order. Yoshinobu Yamamoto has earned enormous credibility within the organization, especially after his postseason performance last October, and Roberts and pitching coach Mark Prior have always valued continuity. Skubal is unquestionably an ace. Whether he’s the ace is a different conversation, and probably one that matters more outside the clubhouse than inside it.

The easy part is penciling in Skubal and Yamamoto. After that, things get interesting. Tyler Glasnow’s rehabilitation has accelerated now that his back has settled down. Blake Snell’s elbow hasn’t really been the issue since two weeks after his nanoscopic cleanup; the calendar has. His roster-juggling placement on the 60-day injured list has simply delayed what has otherwise been a fairly straightforward return. Assuming both come back on schedule, the Dodgers suddenly have four front-line starters before even considering the rest of the pitching, and there’s a lot more.

Behind them sits a fascinating collection of possibilities. Emmett Sheehan has earned opportunities but may find himself squeezed into a hybrid role, making occasional starts while serving as the bridge on bullpen days. Justin Wrobleski has shown enough to deserve innings but is the most likely to get shunted aside for bullpen days and keeping things on turn. Eric Lauer remains the easiest transactional move despite proving he belongs in the majors and I wouldn’t be stunned to see him move before the deadline. In fact, why didn’t the Tigers ask for him as a throw-in, or did the Dodgers know he has more value elsewhere? Roki Sasaki, meanwhile, may have the clearest path. His electric stuff played exceptionally well in relief last postseason, and shifting him back into that role would both simplify the rotation and give the bullpen another devastating weapon. Whether that’s good for his future is another question, as he seems to have corralled his electric stuff in the last month.

There’s even a dream scenario hiding in all of this. With so many quality arms capable of throwing four or five dominant innings, the Dodgers could experiment with a modern piggyback rotation, effectively operating on four primary starters while pairing them with designated followers. It would maximize health, reduce third-time-through-the-order exposure, and keep everyone reasonably fresh for October. It also would require a level of organizational creativity that contenders rarely embrace during a pennant race. Roberts has generally preferred defined roles, so it’s probably more thought experiment than blueprint.

I haven’t even mentioned Shohei Ohtani yet, but his future on the mound suddenly feels even murkier. The club’s priority has quietly shifted toward preserving his bat. His knee hasn’t responded as well as hoped despite the recent injection, and with Skubal now wearing Dodger blue, there is far less urgency to force Ohtani into meaningful innings. If he appears on the mound this season, it may be as an opener, a closer, or simply to satisfy the competitor who desperately wants to contribute both ways. Every side session skipped, however, makes a true postseason starter’s workload increasingly unrealistic.

The irony is that this embarrassment of riches doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. It simply moves it around. Freddie Freeman’s ankle in last year’s playoff is a reminder of how something seemingly small, seemingly random, can throw off everything. Glasnow has rarely made durability feel routine. Snell still has to demonstrate that rehab success translates to regular-season innings. Ohtani’s knee will require careful management every day he remains in the lineup. Even Yamamoto and Skubal will have workloads worth watching after long seasons.

That’s why the Dodgers, for all their financial might, still face the same reality as everyone else. October isn’t won by assembling the most expensive depth chart. It’s won by having the right players healthy at the right time, surviving a handful of coin-flip games, and avoiding the random twists that define every postseason. On paper, this may become one of the best pitching staffs the sport has ever seen. The games, as always, will be played on something far less predictable than paper. The Dodgers may look like baseball’s Avengers, but injuries lurk like Thanos and randomness is his weapon.

ATLANTA BRAVES ROTATION

The Braves have spent most of the season proving they can survive almost anything. They’ve lost Spencer Strider for essentially the entire year, gone stretches without Ronald Acuna, patched together innings from wherever they could find them, and somehow still built a comfortable lead in the division with the Phillies rising mid-season like The Undertaker. That’s a testament to the roster Alex Anthopoulos built and the job Walt Weiss has done managing it. It also means today’s trade deadline carries a different kind of pressure. Atlanta is trying to determine whether the version of this club that reaches October is actually equipped to win there, which seems odd with an 8 game lead.

The biggest question starts with Strider and it has become increasingly difficult to see an optimistic outcome. The official diagnosis remains “elbow inflammation”, but a month of complete shutdown hasn’t changed the picture. The Braves aren’t going to announce that he’s done for the season until they have to, but all signs point that direction. The larger concern is even more sobering. A third elbow reconstruction in rapid succession is almost completely uncharted territory, with precious few examples of pitchers returning anywhere close to their previous level.

That leaves Chris Sale carrying the staff again. At age-37, he’s been brilliant, but even the Braves are acknowledging reality. His most recent start was pushed back simply to buy him additional rest, the kind of workload management every contender employs with an older ace. That’s sensible, but also underscores how little margin exists behind him.

Spencer Schwellenbach has returned from his own elbow reconstruction with a healthy arm, but healthy isn’t the same as fully back. The velocity still isn’t there, the command comes and goes, and he’s searching for the version of himself the Braves expected before surgery. AJ Smith-Shawver finds himself in a similar place. His rehab assignment never quite translated into major league effectiveness, leading Atlanta to send him back to Triple-A rather than force the issue. That’s development, not failure, but that isn’t what a contender needs in August.

Reynaldo López adds another layer of uncertainty. His MRI showed no structural damage in the knee, which is the good news. The bad news is that inflammation usually has a source, whether that’s irritation involving the meniscus, cartilage, or another structure that won’t necessarily appear on imaging. It becomes something to manage rather than something to fix and that’s rarely comforting for a pitcher expected to shoulder meaningful innings.

Martin Perez has admirably filled innings, but asking him to serve as the No. 2 starter on a championship club is asking him to be something he simply isn’t. He’s surviving on experience, sequencing, and guile rather than overpowering stuff. Bryce Elder has value. JR Ritchie has upside. Together they can help cover innings, and perhaps there’s a creative piggyback arrangement that squeezes more value from both. But that’s a solution born of necessity, not strength. It’s a very different proposition from pairing someone like Shohei Ohtani with Roki Sasaki. The difference between Atlanta and LA is show in Eric Lauer - Lauer’s a productive afterthought right now for the Dodgers. In Atlanta, he’d be the #4.

That’s why Atlanta’s deadline matters so much, with rumors of Jacob deGrom, Clay Holmes, Robbie Ray, and more. The Braves have enough pitching to get through the regular season. What they don’t have, at least right now, is a rotation that extends beyond Chris Sale with the kind of October certainty championship clubs usually require. A division title can be won with depth and resilience. A postseason usually demands something more.

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Would you believe me if I told you there’s a lot of important stuff below the paywall? I mean, why would you doubt that? I guess maybe because you haven’t seen it, or don’t think it’s important enough to be worth five bucks. It is.

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Knowledge matters. Experience matters. Relationships matter. I remind you of this because I’m about to lean on all that to explain what I believe will happen in the Tarik Skubal trade market. There are four teams still in this - Rays, Brewers, Dodgers, and the good ol’ fashioned mystery team, which I believe to be the Braves. There’s a chance it’s the Mariners and if so, there’s going to be a three way deal. Each of them have the return in both ready, controllable players and top prospects to put together a credible, fair offer for the top pitcher available, but who is also about to be a free agent. None save the Dodgers have a chance to re-sign him and for the Dodgers, it gets dicey with CBA and the perception that they’re spending crazy money.

The Dodgers have a huge advantage here. More than anyone save the Dodgers, they know Skubal’s elbow. Their team doctor can’t share all of it, but he can also be involved in the yes/no, and moreso once medical records are shared. The physical process if that happens will be a breeze. Everything I’m hearing is that the Dodgers aren’t scare by the elbow and could put a top OF (Charles Davalan), a top pitcher (River Ryan, on the shelf with a mild hamstring strain), and perhaps a ready pitcher like Emmett Sheehan in the package as well, or perhaps Eric Lauer as a toss-in for innings. I’m not saying it will be those specific players if the Dodgers do come in, but similar. Also, the Dodgers will be the last call the Tigers make and they can likely match at this stage what any of the others do.

The Rays and Brewers are in similar places. They’re budget-constrained, but two months of Skubal is well within any team’s reach. The question is really about how much they give up for a pure rental. Again, it takes two, maybe three top prospects and both teams could do so. Again, it’s likely a combo of OF and P prospects and both match. The Brewers are loaded with SS/OF types so even Jett Williams is doable, if pricey. Do the Tigers need a Sal Frelick or Garrett Mitchell that’s being pushed out in the longer term? Some have suggested Colton Gordon, just acquired from the Astros, could be flipped and a scout told me the Tigers have liked Gordon for a while.

The Rays aren’t as deep as the Brewers, but no one is. They could give up one of their young catchers, something the others don’t really have, or Brody Hopkins, who’s still the best pitching prospect in the org, despite a down-year at Triple-A. Santiago Suarez is one scouts love, though his injuries have held him back so far. Just look at the numbers and you see dominance in the form of a mid-90’s control artist.

Late word that Shane McClanahan was pulled in the fourth inning of his Thursday start with a back issue. This bears watching and may well change the situation for the Rays. With McClanahan and Skubal, that’s a nasty playoff rotation. With just one, it makes it in, but is it dangerous?

Where the Braves fit - if they’re the mystery team - is a clear need in the rotation, but less of a prospect fit. People I trust don’t think they have the pitching to give, given the run of injuries. One suggested that a pitcher like AJ Smith-Shawver - on the edge of coming back and predictable - could be a return, but I feel like that’s a tough sell for Detroit. Cedric de Grandpre just charged to Triple-A and could be a name, but most think the Braves would need to get a third team involved to make the deal and Seattle fits given their ready pitchers. I don’t know exactly how to make that work, but these front offices could, if they decide Skubal is a need.

On Skubal himself, the elbow is not a concern. I’ve heard enough from people to know that not only is the elbow clean now post-chips, but that the rest of the structures are as well. Go back to my interview with Dr. Neal ElAttrache, done just days after the surgery, for details right from the guy who did the procedure. Some team is going to say they just didn’t feel 100 percent about the elbow and backed off. That just means they got outbid.

The Tigers gave us another signal, calling up Max Clark just after activating Javier Baez. I’m not sure where Baez fits, but you don’t start the clock on Clark without playing him every day. The Tigers are playing for the future and while I think the world of Clark as both player and person, this is in part a distraction, showing fans that the future is going to be okay, even if Skubal is elsewhere sooner than you’d think.

CURTIS MEAD, IF BOS (fractured wrist)

The knives came out once the pictures showed that Curtis Mead was wearing a pad over his hand! Yes, I’ve gotten quite the run of texts and emails from people and some readers, but the fact is that even wearing a #paddedglove doesn’t protect against every injury. The linked picture shows that it hit him just under the padded area. Is that a 1-in-10, 1-in-100, or 1-in-a-million hit? I don’t know, but let’s call it one in ten. Mead rolled for damage and took the blow, which happens in probabilities. 1 in 10 things happen all the time.

The encouraging news is that surgery isn’t expected. That’s a significant distinction because it usually means the fracture is stable, well aligned, and likely to heal with immobilization rather than plates, screws, or pins. The challenge isn’t simply getting the bone to knit together. It’s restoring grip strength and tolerating the vibration that runs through the hands every time a hitter makes contact. Those are the last boxes to check, not the first.

A six-to-eight-week timeline points toward a return sometime in September, perhaps with enough runway to remind the Red Sox why they acquired him before heading into the offseason. There’s little incentive to rush him back before the bone is truly ready. Wrists have a way of punishing impatience.

The roster implications are at least as interesting as the medical ones. Boston is suddenly patching together the infield with injuries to Trevor Story, Marcelo Mayer, and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, but the acquisition of Mead - and the names that continue to surface in trade discussions - suggests something larger. It doesn’t read like a club that believes Story is worth spending more time on, even as a sunk cost, nor one willing to bet everything on Mayer’s health. Whether that’s fair or not, actions speak louder than prospect rankings. The Red Sox are accumulating options and organizations don’t usually do that when they’re confident they already have the answers.

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I’m still digesting this piece - I love it’s ambition, I’m not sure of the methodology and I feel it ignores what we know about workload. I still think it’s well worth a read and I’m hoping to learn more from the author soon.

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The myth that a player on the IL can’t be traded is just that, and the trades of both Seth Halvorsen and Connolly Early this week prove it. For Early, he’s the cost of Curtis Mead, the flash-good player that was a DFA last year and traded for Cristopher Sanchez earlier in his prospectdom. This trade doesn’t make any sense for me, given the existence of Caleb Durbin and the idea that Marcelo Mayer will be back at some point soon, so it might put that latter to question somewhat.

For Early, the interesting part is that almost nothing changes medically. Players don’t restart rehab because they change uniforms. The Nationals inherit the medical file, the imaging, the throwing logs, the strength data, and the progression. More importantly, they inherit the elbow. They own it now, because he almost by definition can’t have passed the physical on it, but the team would have to accept it to complete the trade. The job becomes verifying that what Boston saw over the last month matches what Washington sees over the next week.

That’s why the reported timeline makes sense. Early has already checked the important boxes, progressing from flat-ground throwing to a simulated inning. One more extended session lets the Nationals establish their own baseline before sending him out on a rehab assignment. Assuming the elbow continues responding normally, two or three rehab outings should be enough before he’s activated sometime in the second week of August.

Elbow inflammation remains one of those diagnoses that covers a wide range of possibilities, but the fact that Washington traded for him while he was still on the injured list is meaningful. If either club suspected structural damage or believed Tommy John surgery was looming, this deal almost certainly doesn’t happen. Instead, this looks much more like the cases we’ve seen with young starters whose elbows simply became overloaded during their first significant professional workloads. Give the tissue time to calm down, rebuild the throwing volume, and most return without much fanfare. The Nationals are betting that Early’s next headline is about his first start in Washington, not another medical update. That’s usually the kind of bet worth making.

On the other side of this, Curtis Mead got into his first Red Sox game and got hit on the wrist. It’s just a bruise, but could have been much worse, reminding us that risk exists everywhere on the baseball field and that reducing that risk is a choice, or series of choices, by both the team and player. Where Mead was hit probably wouldn’t be helped by a #paddedglove but there are devices that could, up to and including a cricket-style glove.

JUAN SOTO, OF NYM (strained calf)

Yes, there seem to be more calf injuries this year and no, there’s no real pattern to it. For Juan Soto, it’s recurrent, so we may see this second one treated more like how the Braves have with Ronald Acuña Jr.’s hamstring.

One PT I spoke with said that there’s been a slight downtick in severe hamstring strains, which might speak to the efficacy of hamstring prevention programs. However, the kinetic chain will always find the weak link and maybe that’s the calf now, she suggested. It’s an intriguing theory. Teams have invested enormous resources into hamstring screening, eccentric strengthening, sprint monitoring, and return-to-play protocols over the last decade. If those interventions are reducing hamstring injuries, it isn’t unreasonable to wonder whether some of those same loads are simply being redistributed farther down the chain. The calf is responsible for finishing acceleration, decelerating the body, and absorbing tremendous force with every sprint. It’s also much harder to protect once the season starts because baseball players are constantly asking it to do exactly what aggravates it.

If that’s where the science is headed, the next question is whether baseball develops a “Nordic for the calf.” Hamstring injury prevention has become remarkably sophisticated, with eccentric strengthening programs and objective tools like the NordBord helping clubs identify deficits before they become strains. There’s no equivalent gold standard for the calf. Teams measure plantarflexion strength, use force plates to monitor jump and stiffness metrics, and track sprint loads, but no single test or exercise has emerged as the definitive predictor or preventative. It may simply be that the calf is more difficult to isolate, or it may be that we’re just a few years behind where hamstring science was a decade ago. Either way, if this year’s calf spike proves to be real rather than random variation, expect clubs to invest heavily in finding the next weak link before it finds them.

For Soto, recurrence changes the conversation. The Mets aren’t trying to get him back for Tuesday. They’re trying to keep him on the field through September. That likely means a more conservative progression, more attention to recovery between games, and perhaps accepting that he’ll need regular maintenance even after he returns.

That uncertainty also colors the trade deadline. The Mets have veterans they could move and pieces that would interest contenders, but this doesn’t feel like an organization preparing for a teardown. Jim Bowden called it a “reload,” and that’s probably the best description. Keep the core intact, reshape the roster around it, and come back in 2027 with a new manager, healthier stars, and a different supporting cast.

Steve Cohen can afford to think that way. With the owners charging toward a labor fight after the season, there’s value in preserving financial flexibility while still maintaining a roster capable of winning immediately when the next window opens. That’s not rebuilding. It’s recognizing that one disappointing season doesn’t erase the foundation, especially when so much of the disappointment has come with a medical chart attached. It also raises the question of just how deep Cohen would be willing to go with a lockout.

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Apologies for no UTK on Monday as normal. I had a small medical procedure on Monday that took longer than expected and UTK isn’t something that can be rushed.

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