The San Diego Padres rotation took a huge hit with the news that right-hander Joe Musgrove will hit the injured list.
The San Diego Padres got some worst-case news regarding their starting rotation as the team announced the right-hander Joe Musgrove will likely open the season on the injured list, according to a report from Steve Adams of MLBTradeRumors.com via 93.7 The Fan.
Musgrove hasn’t thrown in over a week, and Dennis Lin of The Athletic reported that Musgrove didn’t recover as well as he and the team hoped after pitching in an exhibition game against Great Britain’s WBC entry.
Manager Craig Stammen didn’t specify a setback, but he said last week that Musgrove is “in a holding pattern,” and this news comes with the possibility that the pitcher might not be back any time soon.
“He’s most likely going to start on the IL this year,” Stammen said Monday morning. “We’re getting to the point where he’s taken enough time off that it’d be hard to ramp him up to get him to be a viable starter that could throw five innings, 90 pitches. … This was part of the plan. We knew he was going to have to take some time off. We knew we were going to have get him ready for the entire season and not just Opening Day.”
The Padres were aware that Musgrove would have a hard time pitching 200 innings this season, but they were hoping to nurse him through his recovery from Tommy John surgery and get 100-150 from him after he missed last season in its entirety.
A healthy version of Musgrove would have been the Padres best pitcher or close to it. The 33-year old starter threw 559-1/3 innings from 2021-24, and he posted an ERA of 3.20 to go with a strikeout rate of just over 25 percent and a walk rate of just over 6 percent. Musgrove doesn’t throw all that hard, but he knows how to pitch the point where he can induce hitters to chase and get strikeouts when he needs them.
Perhaps the worst part of this is the timing, as it’s now late enough in spring training to make it tough to do any kind of trade or signing to compensate. No one really knows if GM A.J. Preller has the authority to spend or deal given where the Padres’ sale process is at, and San Diego is now stuck with a rotation that starts with Nick Pivetta and Michael King, plus Randy Vasquez and possibly free agent pickup German Marquez.
King is also coming off an injury, and Marquez has been hit hard to so far in spring training as he, too, attempts a comeback from UCL surgery. It’s a sketchy group at best, and now it’s likely to be a rough go for the Padres through at least April and possibly beyond.