Oh No: Cade Horton Out for Season, to Undergo UCL Surgery

[Cubs420psd]

7 minutes ago, gflore34 said:

Ultimately, should Horton ever return, is his best role in the bullpen? 

Yep.

 

Move him to bullpen and get it over with. Maybe he can end up being a high leverage stud.

[Stratos]

He ded.

[Cubs420psd]

54 minutes ago, Brian707 said:

Gonna be very hard to make a deep run in a talented NL without your ace and Boyd looking like he will battle injury all year (likes he done every year but last year)

Impossible? Nah, but I am not betting on it.

Edited April 7 by Cubs420psd

[CubinNY]

The Cubs drafted Horton after 53 sporadic innings and a TJ surgery in college. I don't know what the track record is for guys like this becoming starters, but I can't imagine it's good, or that there's a long list of guys who turned out to have long careers.  

[Neuby]

It's a long season but with three starting pitching options down the Cubs can't afford to wait and not sign a starter of the free agent scrap heap and go over the L/T.

[squally1313]

48 minutes ago, Irrelevant Dude said:

That's fine, but if he's going to get hurt he's going to get hurt.  No reason to waste innings in the minors if he is capable of coming up and getting outs.

Unfortunately there's not a lot of data that shows he's capable of doing that.

Setting aside that we rode Cade Horton and his low K rate and unsustainable BABIP way past any thought out plan last year and hey, look how that went, maybe we should try it again with a guy who hasn't been as good. 

[Jason Ross]

54 minutes ago, gflore34 said:

I think many of us saw the writing on the wall with Horton.  An injury waiting to happen, have take what you can get from him but, never count on his availability.  It'll never be a thing with Horton, in fact, I make a prediction - he'll never pitch more than 150 innings in a season.

Cade Horton literally threw 147 IP last year. We can play the pedantic game and say "well, I said 150" but let's not act like three innings is really throwing off the general post here; he threw a full season's worth of innings last year (modern).

I get it, people are bummed right now that it looks bleak for him in 2026 and potentially for good chunks of 2027. Shane McClanahan hadn't pitched in an MLB game since 2023 and he's back in 2026. A little rusty so far, but he's back. 

Medicine is crazy good right now. I wouldn't take that bet. 

Mostly, I think we need to recalibrate what it means to be a pitcher. If you want guys who throw 98mph, this is what happens; they're going to blow up ever handful of years. The writing is on the wall with literally all of these guys who throw like this. Predicting any player who throws really hard and 5+ innings at a time will need TJS is a near lock. 

[chibears55]

33 minutes ago, Cubs420psd said:

It usually never does.

 

Baseball/medical people have no idea how to avoid arm injuries. They're just throwing stuff at the wall to see what will stick. Cade Horton has been babied the second he came to this organization and its done absolutely nothing.

I was reading where they mentioned that in 2023, there were more pitchers needing TJS in that one year then the entire decade of the 1990s...

I get that there are more pitchers today throwing faster then before is part of the cause, but I do believe the limitations they put on these guys early on and increase weight training they do now has alot to do with these injuries increasing.

[gflore34]

7 minutes ago, Jason Ross said:

Cade Horton literally threw 147 IP last year. We can play the pedantic game and say "well, I said 150" but let's not act like three innings is really throwing off the general post here; he threw a full season's worth of innings last year (modern).

I get it, people are bummed right now that it looks bleak for him in 2026 and potentially for good chunks of 2027. Shane McClanahan hadn't pitched in an MLB game since 2023 and he's back in 2026. A little rusty so far, but he's back. 

Medicine is crazy good right now. I wouldn't take that bet. 

Mostly, I think we need to recalibrate what it means to be a pitcher. If you want guys who throw 98mph, this is what happens; they're going to blow up ever handful of years. The writing is on the wall with literally all of these guys who throw like this. Predicting any player who throws really hard and 5+ innings at a time will need TJS is a near lock. 

Agree most wholeheartedly, it's why Ohtani is ticking time bomb, only a matter of time until his arm blows up - again.  Think the Cubs should put aside Horton as a starter? 

[Jason Ross]

9 minutes ago, gflore34 said:

Agree most wholeheartedly, it's why Ohtani is ticking time bomb, only a matter of time until his arm blows up - again.  Think the Cubs should put aside Horton as a starter? 

Nope. There's just no reason right now. In 1995, yeah, maybe he needs to head to the bullpen. But if we're limiting ourselves to "starting pitchers who have no injury risk" than you're going back to the 92mph guys. 

TJS brings guys back to about exactly where they were. Horton has crazy good stuff and he's probably going to have 2-4 years between surgeries. Especially if this is more "brace" than "full repair". Horton should be back by around this time (or so) next year.

If it's clear during the rehab he's just not able to start, doesn't have the stamina? Sure, maybe the BP. But right now, even with another unfun road ahead for Cade, he should be given every chance to be a starter.

Put it this way: even if he blows up in 4 years again, a year of rehab mixed in, that's 2.5-3 years. If he is a 2.5-3 win guy those years, he's already at somewhere between 7.5 and 9 wins. It would take him years and years to ever get to that as a reliever. 

The game is changing. And maybe we see more piggyback stuff and maybe then the "6 innings a week" he throws is twice in 3+ inning stints. And maybe we can talk about the bullpen. But in the way it's played today, he should come back as a starter. I will admit that's looking at him as a commodity and less as a human, and there's a human factor here too.

[Geographyhater8888]

The long term implications suck. Sucks for Horton. Short term implications suck with Boyd out too. They’re horsefeathered if they can’t score runs with a backend rotation of Tailon, Assad and Rae for at least a month. 

Edited April 7 by Geographyhater8888

[CubinNY]

8 minutes ago, Jason Ross said:

Nope. There's just no reason right now. In 1995, yeah, maybe he needs to head to the bullpen. But if we're limiting ourselves to "starting pitchers who have no injury risk" than you're going back to the 92mph guys. 

TJS brings guys back to about exactly where they were. Horton has crazy good stuff and he's probably going to have 2-4 years between surgeries. Especially if this is more "brace" than "full repair". Horton should be back by around this time (or so) next year.

If it's clear during the rehab he's just not able to start, doesn't have the stamina? Sure, maybe the BP. But right now, even with another unfun road ahead for Cade, he should be given every chance to be a starter.

Put it this way: even if he blows up in 4 years again, a year of rehab mixed in, that's 2.5-3 years. If he is a 2.5-3 win guy those years, he's already at somewhere between 7.5 and 9 wins. It would take him years and years to ever get to that as a reliever. 

The game is changing. And maybe we see more piggyback stuff and maybe then the "6 innings a week" he throws is twice in 3+ inning stints. And maybe we can talk about the bullpen. But in the way it's played today, he should come back as a starter. I will admit that's looking at him as a commodity and less as a human, and there's a human factor here too.

lol, he hasn't been healthy in a 2.5-year stretch since he was in high school. 

[Irrelevant Dude]

31 minutes ago, Jason Ross said:

Mostly, I think we need to recalibrate what it means to be a pitcher. If you want guys who throw 98mph, this is what happens; they're going to blow up ever handful of years. The writing is on the wall with literally all of these guys who throw like this.

And this sucks.  I hate that young superstars like Paul Skenes are almost guaranteed to lose 1-2 years of their prime at some point when the elbow finally explodes.  But that's just the reality of baseball today and I don't think there are any real solutions.  Maybe we get to a point where doctors can medically brace the ligaments BEFORE any sign of injury, I don't know.  But then we're almost into Base Wars-esque cybernetics territory.

[Jason Ross]

1 minute ago, Irrelevant Dude said:

And this sucks.  I hate that young superstars like Paul Skenes are almost guaranteed to lose 1-2 years of their prime at some point when the elbow finally explodes.  But that's just the reality of baseball today and I don't think there are any real solutions.  Maybe we get to a point where doctors can medically brace the ligaments BEFORE any sign of injury, I don't know.  But then we're almost into Base Wars-esque cybernetics territory.

Yeah, sadly, I've got no even clue on this. I guess there is a positive and it's that teams are clearly using biomechanics guys around the league. Most of this is designed to squeeze every last ounce of "stuff" from these guys but I hope that there's some sort of balance that can be found. 

It's cool to see guys throw 98mph with IVB and cut and ride like Horton, but it's far less cool to see them blow up their arm every handful of years. 

Like I mentioned, it's commodified these guys beyond their humanity to a point that feels a little more gross than normal (in the sport of baseball. I think we're well beyond this point in, say, the NFL and brain injury). 

[We Got The Whole 9]

Babying these pitchers has clearly worked wonders. Massive progress from the days when a 19 year old Doc Gooden threw 280 innings out the gate.

[Tangled Up in Plaid]

4 minutes ago, We Got The Whole 9 said:

Babying these pitchers has clearly worked wonders. Massive progress from the days when a 19 year old Doc Gooden threw 280 innings out the gate.

and then he was never close to as good as he was in his first two years

[CubinNY]

4 minutes ago, We Got The Whole 9 said:

Babying these pitchers has clearly worked wonders. Massive progress from the days when a 19 year old Doc Gooden threw 280 innings out the gate.

But he was washed and addicted by 30. I think there are some issues with evaluation and chasing mythical wins. Are starting pitchers more valuable than relievers? Yes, but how much more? it's hard to quantify. If they pitch half a game 2x + how many innings on average more than a reliever - days between appearances? Should they be given more time between starts? Who knows, but it may be time to give a six-man rotation a try.

Or maybe forget about the concept of starter and reliever and pitcher wins as a statistic of importance. Maybe have a system with three or four three-to-five-inning guys, four or five two-inning guys, and three or four one-inning guys. And have a better system to quantify outs, so they can all get paid accordingly. 

Now kids are going to college and getting routinely abused by their coach, who only cares about keeping his job and moving on to the next better one. So by the time they get to pro ball, they're already damaged goods. On the flip side, the ones who survive are so rare that they rake in the highest money come draft time.

It seems like a good time for the smart people in baseball to start thinking differently about the game. But the economics make it hard for both Capital and Labor to do that.

[ILMindState]

 

[Tangled Up in Plaid]

3 minutes ago, ILMindState said:

 

[Cubs420psd]

7 minutes ago, ILMindState said:

 

Fantastic. 

 

Well that absolutely kills this team's ceiling.

[Jason Ross]

[mk49]

That sucks, but kinda exptected.

[Irrelevant Dude]

Is there still some ambiguity as to whether this is full blown Tommy John or another type of repair?  Or do they not know until they get into the elbow?

[Stratos]

Worst-case scenario, cool.

[Jason Ross]

Just now, Stratos said:

Worst-case scenario, cool.

Not yet. Worst case is a full TJS. Best case now is a brace like Steele. The former is out all year in 2026 and most of 2027. Best case? We'll have him mostly next year.