Blake Snell pitched three innings in 2026. That is his entire body of work. Now he is going under the knife.
The Dodgers announced that Snell will undergo surgery on Tuesday to remove loose bodies in his left elbow. He made his season debut last weekend after missing the first month and a half of the season with left shoulder fatigue and inflammation. The debut did not go well. Four earned runs in three innings, and afterward he reported “something in the back of his elbow” while playing catch leading into his planned second start.
Two-time Cy Young winners are not supposed to disappear like this. Snell signed a five-year, $182 million contract with the Dodgers a year ago and was supposed to be the elite veteran arm at the top of the rotation. Instead, he has been in and out of the training room since the day he reported to spring training.
The Dodgers say they expect him back this season. Manager Dave Roberts told reporters it was too early to put a timetable on Snell’s return to baseball activities, but they are looking at less invasive options. The team is reportedly considering the NanoNeedle Scope procedure, which has a shorter recovery window than traditional loose body removal surgery.
For context on what these “loose bodies” actually are, they are small pieces of bone or cartilage that float around in the joint. When they get caught in a hinge, they cause pain and limit range of motion. Pitchers get them. Athletes who put repeated stress on a single joint get them. It is a known fixable problem, but the recovery window varies depending on how invasive the surgery ends up being.
Snell has dealt with this exact issue before. He had surgery to remove loose bodies from his pitching elbow in July 2019 when he was with the Tampa Bay Rays. He came back two months later. The Dodgers are presumably hoping for a similar timeline, which would put Snell back on a mound by mid-July at the earliest.
The bigger problem for Los Angeles is that they were already short on starting pitching. Tyler Glasnow is on the injured list. Now Snell is too. The Dodgers were trying to run a six-man rotation, and they suddenly have four pieces of it healthy. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Anderson, and the rest of the rotation are going to have to absorb a lot more workload than they expected.
The Dodgers responded by trading for Eric Lauer from the Blue Jays this week, which tells you how serious the pitching depth concerns are getting. Lauer is a back-end lefty who can give you innings, but he is not Blake Snell. He is a Band-Aid on a much bigger wound.
This is also the second straight year that Snell’s expensive deal has produced almost no innings. He has now made one start in 2026, and last year he missed significant time with a different shoulder issue. The Dodgers will get to a fourth or fifth year of the contract still wondering whether they ever bought a healthy version of him.
The good news for Dodgers fans is that the team is good enough to absorb this. They have the deepest position-player roster in baseball and the kind of front office that can pivot quickly. Andrew Friedman will find another arm before the trade deadline if Snell’s recovery stalls.
The bad news is that none of those replacement arms is going to be a Cy Young winner pitching at the top of the rotation. Snell was supposed to be that guy. Right now he is a very expensive insurance policy on a procedure table.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
