Brewers reliever JB Bukauskas will undergo lat surgery, reports Todd Rosiak of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The procedure comes with a 9-10 month recovery timeline, so it’ll end his season.
Bukauskas was in camp as a non-roster invitee after Milwaukee outrighted him off the 40-man last month. The 28-year-old righty spent most of last season on the 60-day injured list. He tossed six innings of one-run ball. A lat injury sent him to the IL in the middle of April and wound up being a season ender. That unfortunately flared up yet again in camp and will cost him the entire ’25 campaign.
A 2017 first-round pick, Bukauskas has made 33 major league appearances between three teams. He has a 5.04 earned run average over 30 1/3 innings. He has gotten grounders on an impressive 53.2% of batted balls, but injuries have prevented him from carving out a consistent bullpen role. Within the past few years, Bukauskas has lost time to an elbow strain, a teres major (shoulder) injury, and multiple significant lat issues.
Since he is not on the 40-man roster, Bukauskas will spend the year on the minor league IL. He’ll qualify for minor league free agency next winter, when he’ll hopefully get healthy and look to catch on somewhere with a non-roster Spring Training invite.
This team is so deep in pitching I can’t see how it even impacts them! The Mets wish they had the same problem.
That stinks for the guy. Best wishes in your recovery, young man.
Bummer. Any relation to Bear great Dick?
Bear great Dick was a Butkus, not a Bukauskus.
Team name in first sentence. Yay!
According to yankee fans only yankee players get injured and it’s the teams fault
What are you going on about?
Bud was a good pitching coach.
I loved his work with Harrison Ford in Star Wars!
So does this injury keep him on major league salary for the year ? May be a blessing in disguise, I thought he was out of the league