The Atlanta Braves will have to try and win a World Series without their ace Spencer Strider, who will miss the rest of the 2024 season after undergoing surgery to repair the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.
The Braves announced Saturday morning that Strider had the surgery Friday, with Dr. Keith Meister in Arlington, Texas, using an internal brace to repair the UCL.
Strider led Major League Baseball last season with 20 wins and 281 strikeouts but barely got through his first two starts of this year. Entering his third season in the major leagues, he was an early favorite to win the National League Cy Young Award but that won’t be happening anymore. He only struck out 12 and allowed seven runs over nine innings in what proved to be his only two starts of 2024.
Todd Kirkland/MLB Photos/Getty Images
The 25-year-old underwent Tommy John surgery in 2019 while playing at Clemson and used his recovery time to understand his mechanics and how to not get hurt again. His story was told by Justin Toscano of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June 2022.
“When you rehab TJ and you start throwing, your first throws are the bare minimum effort,” Strider said. “You’re hardly throwing, really. It’s like that for most of it. So you’re able to sort of manipulate your body and put it in positions you want to go because you’re moving so slow. So it’s hard to gauge if you’re actually picking up some of these new movement patterns.
#Braves‘ Spencer Strider will miss the rest of the season after internal brace surgery Friday to repair the torn UCL in his right elbow. The advantage of brace procedure over Tommy John surgery is shorter recovery, so he could possibly pitch early next season instead of midseason
— David O’Brien (@DOBrienATL) April 13, 2024
Strider rose through the minors and quickly became a dominant force in the majors but he will have to go back to the drawing board to figure out how to prevent his elbow from giving out again.
“And then you start putting some on it and you realize that your body is trying to revert back to what it knows, because that’s all it’s ever done. I was so focused on my back arm and trying to get it to shorten up and follow the path I wanted to go through, and then I realized I need to think more about my front side, more about that part of my body, and it will put my arm where it needs to be. So once I realized that, it started to happen pretty fast.”
Atlanta will most likely turn to Bryce Elder to fill the rotation vacancy left by Strider. Elder started 31 games in the big leagues last year and even made the All-Star team but a rough second half of 2023 led him to start this year in Triple-A.
AJ Smith-Shawver could be another option. He is considered to be the organization’s top prospect and appeared in five games with Atlanta last season. He has a dominant fastball but hasn’t had as much command of his secondary pitches which has led to 10 of the first 19 batters he faced in Triple-A to reach base.
Whoever Atlanta leans on will not fill the giant hole left by Strider but could be a short-term solution and maybe help get the Braves by every five games.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.