Padres starter Joe Musgrove will miss the rest of the playoffs and all of 2025 due to Tommy John surgery
San Diego Padres starter Joe Musgrove left Game 2 of the Padres’ Wild Card series against the Atlanta Braves in the fourth inning due to elbow soreness. It turns out that Musgrove has UCL damage and needs Tommy John surgery, which will keep him out of not just the rest of the Wild Card series, but also all of 2025.
Musgrove has missed time each of the last two seasons due to injury, but has been good when he’s been on the mound. In 19 starts this year, Musgrove put up a 3.88 ERA and 3.96 FIP, and his 99.2 innings were the fourth most on the team, behind Dylan Cease, Michael King and Matt Waldron. He would have been part of the Padres’ playoff rotation the rest of the way, and so now San Diego will have to go with a Plan B.
For the NLDS, the Padres have Cease and Yu Darvish slated for Games One and Two, with TBD after that. I would assume Michael King will be their Game Three starter, and then they’ll pick from Waldron, Randy Vasquez and trade deadline pickup Martin Perez for Game Four.
A little digression here…Musgrove was a supplemental first round pick in 2011 by the Toronto Blue Jays. He was part of that weird, giant trade between the Jays and the Astros in July of 2012 that also saw Francisco Cordero, Ben Francisco, Carlos Perez, David Rollins and Asher Wojciechowski go from Toronto to Houston, with David Carpenter, J.A. Happ and Bradon Lyon going from Houston to the Blue Jays. He was later part of the price the Astros paid to get Gerrit Cole from the Pirates. After a breakout 2020 season, Musgrove was then part of a three team deal involving San Diego and the Mets that resulted in Musgrove going to the Padres and, most notably, David Bednar going to Pittsburgh.
My initial thought was that Musgrove was one of the better picks in the first round in 2011, but when I went and looked, I realized that the 2011 first round was rather bountiful. Here are the players with at least 10 bWAR who were taken in the first round in 2011, from in descending order:
Francisco Lindor
Gerrit Cole
George Springer
Anthony Rendon
Sonny Gray
Trevor Story
Javier Baez
Brandon Nimmo
Blake Snell
Kolten Wong
Trevor Bauer
Jackie Bradley Jr.
Tyler Anderson
Joe Musgrove
Jose Fernandez
Michael Fulmer
C.J. Cron
That’s not bad. Not making the 10 bWAR cut, incidentally, is current Texas Ranger Andrew Chafin, who was selected at #43 overall by the Diamondbacks. Former Texas Ranger Taylor Guerrieri and former Texas Rangers organization member (though not major leaguer) Blake Swihart were also picked in the first round that year.
The first 29 picks of the draft made the majors, which seems notable.
In case you are wondering, the Rangers had two first rounders that year. They took Kevin Matthews at #33 and Zach Cone at #37. That was one of the last drafts before the bonus pool system was put in place, and the Rangers had opted to spend most of their amateur budget on J-2 signings rather than draftees, and thus took with their early picks only players who would sign for slot. That J-2 class the Rangers splurged on included Nomar Mazara, Ronald Guzman and Yohander Mendez, so…yeah.
The 2011 draft was a disaster at the top for Texas, with their second, third and fourth rounders being Will Lamb, Kyle Castro and Desmond Henry, who didn’t end up doing anything. In the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds they took Brandon Woodruff, Derek Fisher and Max Pentecost, high schoolers who were going to be tough signs. They signed none of the three. Fisher and Pentecost went on to be first rounders in 2014. Woodruff, of course, ended up signing with the Brewers as an 11th rounder in 2014 and become one of the best pitchers in the majors before tearing up his arm.
As unproductive as the first seven rounds were for the Rangers, however, they had great success in the rounds after that. Kyle Hendricks was their eighth round pick, and he’s accumulated 21.5 bWAR in his career — that would be a great result from a #8 overall pick, much less an eighth rounder.
Jared Eickhoff was picked in the 15th round, Nick Martinez in the 18th round, and C.J. Edwards in the 48th round, and all of them have had major league careers with some level of success. Connor Sadzeck, Andrew Faulkner, Ryan Rua and Phil Klein were also selected that year, and ultimately made it to the Show. Sadzeck, in fact, is still in affiliated ball, working out of the bullpen this year for the Pirates’ AAA club.