River Ryan to have Tommy John surgery, becoming third Dodger to have procedure this year
MILWAUKEE — The Dodgers announced on Tuesday that River Ryan will undergo Tommy John surgery, a procedure that will likely sideline the promising young right-hander for the entire 2025 season.
Ryan, 25, had a 1.33 ERA and 18 strikeouts in 20⅓ innings of four major league starts this season and, according to manager Dave Roberts, was “making a case” to be part of the team’s pitching plans down the stretch with his high-velocity fastball and swing-and-miss slider/curveball combination.
But Ryan was pulled in the fifth inning of Saturday’s 4-1 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates in Dodger Stadium with an elbow injury that was later diagnosed as ulnar collateral ligament strain.
Ryan’s injury is the latest blow to a short-handed pitching staff that continued a particularly alarming pattern of injuries among young Dodgers pitchers. According to Baseball Prospectus, the Dodgers have lost more time and value from the pitchers and position players who have gone on the injured list this season than any team in baseball.
A Sunday morning MRI exam confirmed that River Ryan’s right forearm tightness was significant enough to sideline him for at least the next two months.
“We were holding out hope, but unfortunately he’s got to get the surgery,” Roberts said before Tuesday’s game against the Brewers. “Even for me, talking to River, he’s been through trials and knows how to handle it mentally. ... But this is a surgery that they’ve got a good handle on, so we expect a full recovery. But it’s disappointing.”
The Dodgers were already without homegrown arms Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin, who had Tommy John surgery last year, and Emmet Sheehan and Kyle Hurt, who underwent the elbow ligament replacement procedure this season.
Right-hander Bobby Miller, 25, also missed two months of this season because of a shoulder injury, and right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto, 25, has been sidelined since June 16 because of a rotator-cuff strain.
In addition, veteran right-hander Walker Buehler is working his way back from his second Tommy John surgery, two-way star Shohei Ohtani is recovering from a second major elbow surgery that will prevent him from pitching this season, and veteran left-hander Clayton Kershaw was out for the first four months of 2024 while he recovered from shoulder surgery.
Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said the organization has launched a thorough review to determine if there is a common thread to the causes of such injuries and if there are better ways to prevent them in the future.
“We’re trying to figure out, is there an acute thing, is there an overarching issue to get at?” Gomes said. “Right now, I wish I had more answers, but we continue to dig. I think we’re seeing it across the industry, and we feel it more acutely when it happens to us, but I don’t think that this is all that unique.
Why have the Dodgers been hit so repeatedly hard by the pitching injury bug? And when — and at what cost — is the right time to pursue potentially pricey reinforcements?
“Are there any external studies from Major League Baseball? Should we do one? How do we best get at it, because it’s not a simple problem to solve, right? There are so many factors … like, what if we acquire somebody who gets hurt? What happened before then? Were they in our system the whole time? We just don’t know.”
Ryan was critical of MLB’s pitch clock while discussing his injury, saying it “definitely makes you speed up a lot,” and it “starts to take a toll” with only 15 seconds between throws. Gomes said that could be one factor in the proliferation of injuries.
“You could start this in the COVID year [2020], maybe that’s the kickoff,” Gomes said. “Maybe injuries are exactly the same [as before COVID], I don’t know. But there are so many things that have helped contribute to the problem.
“Some of them are out of our control, some of them are within, so it’s trying to figure out what it is. Is it COVID? Is it the lockout and shortened spring training [in 2022]? Is it the pitch clock? There are just a lot of factors. And for every argument, you could have a counter, and that’s why it’s such a challenging problem.”
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