Chris Sale to undergo Tommy John surgery

Well, nobody is going to be super surprised by this, but it’s still a massive bummer. The Red Sox announced on Thursday that Chris Sale was going to undergo Tommy John surgery.

Sale, of course, started having some injury issues pop up a few weeks ago, at which point he was sent for some MRIs and shut down for a couple of weeks. He recently started his throwing program again despite baseball being shut down, which meant that we were soon to hear whether that went well or not. Evidently, it did not go that well. It’s not clear when exactly this surgery is set to be done, but one would assume it will be relatively soon, putting him on track to return at some point in the middle of 2021. Generally, the timeline for a pitcher after Tommy John is a bit over a calendar year.

The good news here is that Tommy John has become more routine over the last decade or so, though don’t mistake this for some totally routine surgery. At the end of the day this is still major surgery and there’s always a nonzero chance for major setbacks after this, which is why this decision wasn’t taken lightly. There’s no good time for Tommy John surgery, but it goes without saying that having it done amid this uncertainty as to how long the 2020 season will be, if it is played at all, makes this recovery period a bit different than normal.

We don’t really have a ton more information right now, but we will get some soon enough. Chaim Bloom and Ron Roenicke are set to speak to the media later on tonight.