Heading into this season, the Braves were anticipating that Spencer Schwellenbach would be healthy and ready to go after he had his 2025 season cut short due to a fractured elbow. Unfortunately, here on the first day of pitchers and catchers being at spring training, it’s become clear that Schwellenbach’s elbow is still bothering him.
Braves beat writer Mark Bowman of MLB.com is reporting that Spencer Schwellenbach is experiencing elbow inflammation in his throwing arm and as such, he’ll be starting the year on the 60-Day IL.
The only good news about this is that because we’re so early on in things, if all goes well then he could start ramping up to return starting in April since recovery from having bone spurs removed via surgery is usually 10-12 weeks. Still, you never want to see pitchers miss this much time early on since they’ll be behind the proverbial 8-ball once the regular season rolls around and Schwellenbach starting the season on the 60-Day IL means we’re not going to see him pitch for a couple of months as a result — smooth recovery or not. You also definitely don’t want to see elbow issues of this magnitude coming from a young pitcher of Schwellenbach’s caliber — especially considering that elbow issues are what ended up costing him the majority of his 2025 campaign.
The only thing the Braves can do now is just hope that the inflammation is being caused by the bone spurs, since that’d be pretty straight-forward in terms of treatment and recovery. If anything gets more complicated then that’ll certainly be concerning and then he could very well miss a ton of time once the regular season rolls around. We’ve just got to hope for the best when it comes to this and have also got to hope that between this and Ha-Seong Kim’s stroke of bad luck that the Braves are getting their bad injury luck out of the way early on. Atlanta has some pretty high expectations for this upcoming season and just about the only way that this could be derailed is if they end up going through another injury-plagued season.
The good news is that Atlanta’s offseason dealings have insured that they will at least have a lot better depth than they did during the 2025 season but it’s certainly kind of lame to see that depth being put to the test right from the jump.
Also in other news, Bowman is also reporting that Robert Suarez will be late reporting to camp because he’s dealing with visa issues. Fortunately, that’s not an injury but it’s still just another frustrating thing for the Braves to deal with this early on in the campaign.
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