The Yankees placed Max Fried on the 15-day injured list with a bone bruise in his left elbow, and while the initial prognosis is better than feared, there are still legitimate reasons to be concerned about where this leads. Fried exited his start against Baltimore after just three innings with posterior elbow soreness. The MRI and CT scan came back with the bone bruise diagnosis and, importantly, no structural damage and no sign of UCL issues.
Fried said he’s happy it doesn’t look serious and confirmed no surgery is required. The Yankees said he’ll be reevaluated “in a few weeks.” That’s the kind of non-timeline that means whatever it means when you’re dealing with elbow soreness in a starting pitcher. A few weeks could mean a quick return. It could also mean he misses more than a month.
The deeper concern is the nature of elbow injuries in pitchers. The UCL is in the neighborhood of every elbow injury, and any extended absence from an elbow issue deserves monitoring even when initial scans look clean. Bone bruise descriptions as “better outcome than initially feared” are the sports medicine equivalent of a worried friend saying “I’m sure it’s fine.”
Fried signed a massive deal to be the ace of this rotation. Losing him for any meaningful stretch of time puts the Yankees in a rotation crunch they don’t have great answers for. Their depth behind Fried hasn’t been a strength, and covering his starts with patchwork solutions is not a recipe for keeping pace in the AL East.
Until he’s actually pitching again, this situation deserves close attention. Elbow injuries in pitchers have a way of telling you one thing and then revealing another.
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.
