Eduardo Rodriguez undergoes knee surgery, will miss at least six months

The Red Sox have had some tough injury news already this winter, though most of it doesn’t seem overly serious. Hanley Ramirez underwent shoulder surgery, but he should be ready for spring training. Robby Scott also underwent surgery, but again it doesn’t seem like it’ll cause him to miss significant time. There is also the Dustin Pedroia knee issue, something we are still waiting to hear more on. As we wait for that, though, we got some fairly significant news from Eduardo Rodriguez. The young lefty underwent surgery on the knee that has been bothering him in recent years, and it will cause him to stay off a mound for at least six months.

This is obviously a really big deal for both Rodriguez and the Red Sox. The lefty is entering his final pre-arbitration year, so missing the start of next season is a pretty big deal for him financially. For the Red Sox, they are going to be without one of their presumed top five starters for the first month of the year, and likely longer. The reports say he won’t be able to return to pitching for six months. In other words, he won’t really be able to start getting ready for the season until April. You gotta figure he’ll need at least six weeks or so to get ready for a major-league grind, putting his season-debut around June. This could obviously change drastically as time goes by, but that appears to be the timeline for now.

We’ll have more on how this affects the offseason in the coming days, but the quick version is that this will have a big impact. The rotation didn’t appear to be a major need for the club heading into the winter, but they just lost a significant member of their rotation. We’ll keep you updated if more news comes out.