Trio of Playoff Contenders Each Loses Superstar to Injury

Until this weekend, baseball’s injured list was noticeably bare to start the 2026 season. Then, beginning with Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk on Friday, the stars went down in rapid succession. The Cubs lost two of their top starting pitchers, Cade Horton and Matthew Boyd, in consecutive days. Joining them on the IL are two of the top players in the National League, Mets left fielder Juan Soto and Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts, and one of the best pitchers in the American League, Astros ace Hunter Brown. Each of those three teams has a share of first place at the moment, making these especially high-leverage injuries.

It’s unusual for misfortune to befall the Mets until they have a longer run of success, as this team’s curse is one that knows how to draw out the denouement until the most poetic time. But that may come later, as Soto’s injury appears to be the least severe of the three players involved.

Running from first to third on a Bo Bichette single on Friday in San Francisco, Soto tweaked his calf muscle and was replaced by Tyrone Taylor. After an MRI revealed a strain, rather than something more serious, the Mets waited two days before ultimately deciding on Monday to put Soto on the IL. In announcing the roster move, the team said, “A typical return to play for this type of injury is approximately 2-3 weeks.” That timeframe would make this the longest IL stint of Soto’s mostly injury-free career. This is only his fourth major league IL stint and first since 2021, when he missed 10 games with a strained left shoulder. Before that, he was on the COVID IL for the first eight games of 2020 due to possible exposure to the virus, and in 2019, he spent the minimum 10 days on the IL for back spasms. Since the start of the 2022 season, he has played in 640 out of 658 team games, making him one of the healthiest players in baseball across that span.

My initial thought was that the Mets would go with a platoon of Brett Baty and Taylor in left field, but Baty got the start in right field on Saturday and was scratched with a jammed thumb on Sunday, so it’s a little hard to gauge how much the team plans on using Jared Young, who started both games in left field this weekend.

I ran the ZiPS projections for a few scenarios, and as you would expect, Soto’s injury has little impact on the Mets’ playoff odds because he is not expected to miss much time. I also looked at how a longer absence would change the odds, but keep in mind, there’s absolutely nothing at this stage that indicates those are even remote possibilities.

Next up we have Betts, who exited Saturday’s game with back pain after scoring a run in the first inning of the Dodgers’ 10-5 win over the Nationals. He received an MRI and was diagnosed with an oblique strain. The recovery time for an oblique strain is typically about four to six weeks. Even if he needs longer than that to return to the lineup, he should still have plenty of time to salvage his season after getting off to a slow start. Across his first eight games, he was batting .179/.281/.429 with two home runs and a 101 wRC+.

Betts stayed healthy throughout the 2025 campaign, with the exception of a minor toe injury, but a prolonged stomach illness in the preseason caused him to lose a good deal of weight, and very likely contributed to his having his worst offensive season since he was a prospect playing in the New York-Penn League nearly 15 years ago. The hope was that, after a full offseason to get back into playing shape, he would enjoy a bounce-back year. That said, he’s Mookie Betts; we certainly shouldn’t expect that he won’t have a strong 2026 season, but it’s definitely a disappointment that his resurgence has been delayed.

The Dodgers don’t appear to have quite the depth that they used to, but the replacement option at shortstop is pretty clear, with Miguel Rojas and the recalled Hyeseong Kim splitting time there. While a Rojas/Kim platoon would be at or near the bottom of a shortstop positional power ranking, that’s mostly due to the intense competition at the spot than any inadequacy on their part. And the good news for the Dodgers is that the projections generally agree that they’re the strongest team in baseball. Considering they already have a three-game cushion in the NL West, they should be fine.

Lastly, we come to Brown. This is potentially the scariest of the three injuries: Brown is a pitcher, shoulders are a scary body part for pitchers, and the extent of the injury is not yet known, at least to the public. While ZiPS was more positive than the other projection systems on the Astros, it did see there being significant downside risk for them, given that much of their value comes from relatively few players. One of those relatively few players is Brown, who finished third in the AL Cy Young voting last year. The departure of Framber Valdez over the offseason made Brown’s position as the foundation of the rotation even more crucial. The Astros are not projected to be in as strong a position as the Dodgers or Mets, so losing a few wins here could prove to be detrimental.

ZiPS is also not particularly enthralled with Houston’s options to replace Brown. The projection for Cody Bolton, who made his first major league start last night, is a 4.94 ERA as a full-time starter, and he’s day-to-day at the moment after getting hit by a hard comebacker off the bat of Edouard Julien. My mean computer is more optimistic about Spencer Arrighetti and Colton Gordon, both more likely replacements for Brown over the long term than Bolton, but it sees them both as merely competent fourth of fifth starters, which is a pretty big drop-off from a legitimate Cy Young contender.

Unless we get some pretty bad news about Brown, it looks like the baseball gods weren’t particularly cruel on this occasion. Because if it’s one thing the fates love, it’s reminding you that no matter how carefully you build your roster, or how much work you put into Plans B, C, D, and so on, at any time, they reserve the right to laugh in your face and leave you starting a Triple-A journeyman in a crucial September matchup.