Cubs southpaw Justin Steele is slated to undergo season-ending surgery on his left elbow, manager Craig Counsell told reporters (including Patrick Mooney of The Athletic) this afternoon. Steele was placed on the injured list with elbow tendinitis shortly after his most recent start against the Rangers and was sent to receive a second opinion on the issue after undergoing an initial MRI on Thursday. Whether or not Steele will require a full Tommy John surgery or instead undergo an internal brace procedure is not yet clear. He won’t pitch again in 2025 in either case, but internal brace procedures typically come with a shorter recovery timeline of around twelve months, as opposed to the timeline for Tommy John, which can stretch up to 18 months and would likely impact much of his 2026 campaign as well.
It’s a gut punch for the Cubs and their fans, particularly given initial indications that Steele’s injury wasn’t especially significant. The southpaw told reporters after his placement on the IL last week that he was expecting a minimum stint on the shelf, and the injury did not initially appear dissimilar from the relatively minor elbow issue that caused him to spend two weeks on the shelf last September. When the club opted to seek a second opinion on Steele’s elbow, they suggested that recurring nature of the tendinitis was the impetus behind their decision to seek a second opinion in hopes of putting a stop to the problem in a more permanent fashion. Evidently, that will require the southpaw to go under the knife.
For at least the rest of 2025, that will leave Chicago without perhaps their most talented pitcher overall. Steele has drawn criticism over the years for his repertoire, which is generally limited to just a fastball and a slider aside from a handful of rarely-used tertiary offerings. Starting pitchers can rarely survive in the majors without at least three average pitches they can lean on, but Steele has managed to buck that trend. The unique properties of his fastball have allowed him to not only survive as a starter, but thrive. From the time he earned a job as a full-time starter in 2022 through the end of the 2024 season, Steele’s 3.10 ERA was sandwiched between Justin Verlander and Sandy Alcantara for the ninth-best figure in baseball. His 3.14 FIP also placed him within the top ten, and his 3.46 SIERA was good for 19th and placed him ahead of well-regarded aces such as Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, and Zac Gallen.
The southpaw wasn’t quite pitching up to that elite level in his first starts of the season. He was lit up to an ugly 6.89 ERA with a 19.4% strikeout rate in his first three starts of the year and, even as he mostly looked like his usual self in his latest start when he struck out eight Rangers across seven scoreless innings, his velocity has been down all year and averaged just barely 90 mph in that start against Texas. For a pitcher who usually sits around 92 mph, that’s a notable and concerning drop in velocity, but it’s nonetheless surely frustrating for the southpaw to be shut down just when he was beginning to turn a corner this year.
More to come.