Pablo López Probably Needs a New Elbow

We know the steps to the annual spring dance by now: Pitcher appears for spring training, pitcher suffers minor injury or discomfort during practice, America holds its collective breath and hopes that barking elbow will just resolve itself.

Unfortunately, that hope is all too rarely vindicated, as imaging quickly confirms said pitcher has torn an essential bit of connective tissue.

The Twins speed-ran this dance this week with their no. 1 starter, Pablo López. The veteran right-hander cut short a bullpen session on Monday after feeling soreness in his elbow. Minnesota GM Jeremy Zoll announced Tuesday that López had torn an elbow ligament and that season-ending surgery was “very much on the table.”

The first downstream effect of López’s injury is that, barring something ludicrous, like they loaded him into the MRI tube upside-down, we’re not going to see him pitching for Venezuela at the World Baseball Classic next month. Venezuela is going to be among the favorites, and has plenty of major league-quality pitchers to choose from: Ranger Suárez and Eduardo Rodriguez are already on the roster, for example.

But Venezuela’s now looking at starting someone like Keider Montero or Antonio Senzatela in the knockout round. Compare that to the U.S., which can choose from among Joe Ryan, Matthew Boyd, or Nolan McLean to be its fourth starter.

And if you think Venezuela’s going to miss López, imagine how much his absence is going to affect the Twins.

Since joining Minnesota in 2023, he leads all Twins players, regardless of position, with 9.6 WAR. This is despite having been limited to just 14 starts in 2025 by a variety of injuries: a hamstring strain, a shoulder strain, and finally a forearm strain. The latter is one of baseball’s more ominous ailments; it could be nothing, but it’s also often a precursor to a torn UCL.

Nevertheless, López was terrific when healthy in 2025, posting a 2.74 ERA and 1.8 WAR in less than half a season’s worth of work. Few teams could afford to lose such a pitcher.

The Twins needed news like this like they needed a kick in the teeth. Trying to think of a way to describe what morale must be like in Twins Nation right now, I thought of Anglo-Irish soccer manager Mick McCarthy. In 2023, McCarthy was coaching Blackpool in the English second tier — and not well, I should add. He lasted less than three months in the job, and Blackpool finished 23rd out of 24 and got relegated.

I bring this up because McCarthy had an exchange in a press conference that produced a meme relevant to the current situation with the Twins. A reporter asked: “In terms of results, Mick, one win in 17… It can’t go on like this, can it?”

McCarthy smirked wryly and answered: “It can.”

In 2023, the Twins finally snapped their historic playoff losing streak, 18 games over 19 years, and looked to be building toward something positive. (López became the first Twins pitcher since Johan Santana — who is Team Venezuela’s pitching coach in this year’s WBC — to win an ALDS game.) Instead, they slipped from first place to about .500 in 2024, blowing a prime playoff opportunity in the process, and then to 70-92 in 2025.

Along the way, they went through one of the most brutal trade deadline fire sales in baseball history. Like, check to make sure the Mary Tyler Moore statue is still there. Minnesota’s payroll has dropped by a third since the end of 2023. A team that was getting in on major free agents a couple offseasons ago is now getting outspent heavily by the Reds and Royals.

Team leadership was not spared; field manager Rocco Baldelli was fired at the end of last season, and then president of baseball ops Derek Falvey left at the end of January by mutual consent.

Even so, the American League — specifically the AL Central — is so soft that the Twins still had a puncher’s chance at the playoffs: 31.7% on Tuesday morning, to be precise. A rotation headed by López, Ryan, and Bailey Ober can cover up a lot of flaws. A rotation without López, less so.

The leading candidate for the open rotation spot is Zebby Matthews, who pitched to an ugly 5.56 ERA in 16 starts last year, but with a .357 opponent BABIP and peripherals that indicate we should expect his ERA to drop by at least a run in 2026, maybe two. If Matthews fails, Minnesota — having traded away a third of its roster at last year’s deadline — is flush with high-minors rotation depth. The Twins currently have seven minor league starting pitchers on their 40-man roster, including Mick Abel, Kendry Rojas, and 2022 second-rounder Connor Prielipp.

Is there a López in that group? I suspect not. But there’s no shortage of guys who can stand on a mound and look competent for five innings at a time.

I imagine that the news of López’s busted elbow isn’t going to change the overall pessimistic outlook of 2026 for the Twins. But the bad news goes even further than just this year.

López is on a four-year, $73.5 million contract that kicked in for the 2024 season. His $21.75 million salary alone accounts for more than 20% of the Twins’ total payroll this season. That’s a complete write-off now.

Can it get worse? Just ask Mick McCarthy. Spring training is a pretty common time for pitchers to either injure their elbow or discover that their elbow has already been compromised. In general, when it comes to diagnosing and treating an injury — especially a serious one like a torn UCL for a pitcher — there’s no time like the present. The sooner you know what’s wrong, the sooner you can fix it, and the sooner the player can rehab the injury and return to the field.

But February is a rough time to get a diagnosis with a 12- to 18-month recovery period. Now, we don’t know how long it’s going to take López to get back on the mound; at this juncture, even his doctors probably don’t know. Maybe López is a candidate for an internal brace, or he’ll ace the rehab from surgery and be back in Fort Myers a year from now, good as new.

On the other hand, what if the recovery period is more on the 18-month side? Or what if López gets back on the field within a reasonable period of time but needs a few months of game action to get back into ace form? Now we’re talking about not just one lost season but two. And two seasons is all López has left on his current contract. In a worst-case scenario, he’s already thrown his last meaningful pitch for the Twins. Man, that’s depressing.