The late stages of the Pirates 2023 season saw the team having only two healthy starting pitchers, Mitch Keller and Johan Oviedo. They pieced together the other three days with bullpen arms and some refuse they found on the trash heap at the beginning of August. It’s one of those things that made their record in September more impressive. Well, it turns out that it wasn’t without consequences.

This season saw Oviedo throw 177.2 innings. That’s a fairly heavy workload. Prior to this season, the most that he had seen in his career was 117.1 when you combine the innings thrown in the majors and minors last season. It’s reported that nothing has been confirmed, but that Tommy John surgery has been discussed. If that ends up being the case, we won’t see him pitch again until 2025. This will be something that we’ll be keeping a very close eye on. I’ve been complaining about not having much to cover here on the blog, but this isn’t at all what I was hoping for. Was this something that they could’ve seen coming? Hmmm…