Oof. The dreaded after-season surgery announcement. When you find out about the existence of, and surgery for, an injury that you weren’t even aware of in the first place.
Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner apparently had a sufficiently damaged flexor tendon that it required surgery:
There isn’t yet much information on the injury or the surgery, so I’ll avoid doing any speculating for now. We don’t even know what happened in the first place. I just hope everything goes very smoothly from here.
I’m not as familiar with this injury for position players as for pitchers, for whom the typical recovery window is something like six to nine months. I would expect it’s shorter for position players, but again, I don’t want to play armchair doctor at the moment. There are about five and a half months between that surgery date and the start of Spring Training, for what it’s worth.
Even if Hoerner does wind up ready in plenty of time for Spring Training, the injury and surgery nevertheless present a couple issues. For one thing, his typically offseason is now disrupted no matter what. You never love to see that. Nor do you like to think about whether there is an impact on the bat, even setting aside the throwing arm. For another thing, if the Cubs had any thoughts on shopping Hoerner – a debatable prospect, mind you – this is a pretty significant wrinkle now introduced into those talks.
More will be coming on this, I expect. This kinda sucks, but hopefully won’t wind up being a significant hindrance to Hoerner’s performance in 2025.