Blake Snell Has Elbow Surgery to Remove Loose Bodies as Dodgers Hope Lefty Returns to Mound Before Season Ends
Blake Snell’s first Dodgers contract just keeps producing the wrong kind of headlines. The left-hander underwent elbow surgery on Tuesday to remove loose bodies, his second major injury setback in as many seasons in Los Angeles.
Snell had the NanoScope procedure done. The team cleared three bone spurs from the back of his throwing elbow. The Dodgers say the surgery went well and they are optimistic about a return before the end of the 2026 season.
The timing is brutal. Snell signed a five-year, $182 million deal with Los Angeles before the 2025 season after his second Cy Young Award. He was supposed to be the Dodgers’ postseason ace. He has instead spent most of his time in LA on the injured list.
Snell started the 2026 season on the 15-day IL with left shoulder fatigue. That was the same issue that knocked him out for four months last season. He made one start in 2026 and then reported soreness in the back of his elbow during a between-starts catch session. He could not finish the throwing program. The Dodgers shut him down and the surgery was scheduled within days.
The good news is that this is the same procedure Tigers ace Tarik Skubal had earlier this season. Skubal is targeting a midsummer return. Snell had the same surgery back in 2019 with Tampa Bay and was back in big league action about two months later. The team is hopeful for a similar timeline.
The bad news is that he is now part of one of the most injured Dodgers rotations in modern memory. Glasnow has been hurt. Buehler has been hurt. Even Yoshinobu Yamamoto has been managed carefully. The team just placed Brusdar Graterol on the 60-day IL and traded for Eric Lauer from the Blue Jays to backfill some innings.
The Dodgers can survive Snell’s absence in the regular season. They have enough depth, enough offense, and enough division advantage over the Padres and Diamondbacks to win 95 games without him. The problem is October. The Dodgers built this roster to beat the Yankees, Braves, Phillies, and Mets in a seven-game series. That math gets harder when Snell is unavailable or just rounding into form.
Andrew Friedman has earned the benefit of the doubt with this front office. The team won the 2024 World Series by surviving similar injury attrition. They have a deep pool of starters who can be acquired at the deadline if Snell is not ready. They will spend money to fix it if they need to.
Snell is a hard player to evaluate. When he is healthy, he has Cy Young stuff and the swing-and-miss numbers to back it up. When he is not, he is unavailable for months at a time and the contract starts to look immovable. The Dodgers signed him knowing both sides of that profile. They are now getting the worst version of it.
The return target is late August or September. That is enough time to get him stretched out for a playoff start in October. That is also enough time for things to go wrong again, because elbow surgery is rarely a clean process for veteran pitchers.
The Dodgers still have the best record in baseball. The roster around Snell is built to absorb this kind of news. He just has to be the playoff version of himself by the time the lights come on in October, or this contract gets retroactively very expensive.
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.
