One of the stories of the Tigers dismal 2022 season was the number of injuries they were forced to endure on the pitching staff. Detroit lost all five members of its season-opening rotation at some point along the way, including a pair of arm surgeries for arguably their top two young arms.
Casey Mize underwent Tommy John surgery in June, the culmination of a few months battling elbow troubles. Two months later, Tarik Skubal had to go under the knife himself. His was a flexor tendon repair in his forearm, a disheartening end to what had been shaping up as a breakout campaign. The Tigers didn’t provide more details about a potential recovery timeline, only announcing that he’d miss the remainder of the 2022 season.
It still isn’t clear when Skubal can expect to a return to a big league mound, but he recently updated Evan Petzold of the Detroit Free-Press on his status. The southpaw tells Petzold he’s currently building arm strength in physical therapy and has a follow-up meeting with his surgeon, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, in December. Skubal indicated he hopes he’ll be able to begin a throwing program by January if all goes well. While he declined to specify any sort of timeline for game action, he confirmed he’s likely to pitch at some point during the 2023 season.
It seems questionable whether he’ll be ready for Opening Day, however. That’s hardly a surprise, as flexor repairs are a notable procedure in their own right. Former Tiger southpaw Matthew Boyd underwent a flexor repair last September; he didn’t return from the injured list until 11 months later. Danny Duffy had the procedure in October 2021 and has missed the entire 2022 season after suffering a setback in August. That’s not to say Skubal is certain to face the same recovery timetable, but it’s illustrative of the fact that rehabbing from these procedures is no simple matter.
Nevertheless, the 25-year-old Skubal took a generally optimistic attitude towards the flexor repair, calling it “the best-case scenario in terms of all the surgery outcomes.” He tells Petzold he went into the operation not knowing whether he’d need a full Tummy John surgery that’d surely have kept him out for all of 2023. Fortunately, his UCL was intact and didn’t require repair.
Mize and Skubal are two-thirds of what Detroit envisioned being an excellent homegrown rotation. Both are now recovering from major surgeries, and Mize will miss most or all of next year. The third, Matt…
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