Right-handed Rangers pitching prospect Alejandro Rosario is likely to miss the 2025 season due to an elbow injury, president of baseball operations Chris Young told reporters (including Kennedi Landry of MLB.com). Rosario will require surgery, though Young was reluctant to offer any concrete details.
“It’s likely UCL,” Young said, as relayed by Landry. “I don’t want to officially say, but yeah, it’s elbow and will probably require Tommy John.”
The 23-year-old was a fifth-round pick by the Rangers in the 2023 draft. It’s a brutal blow for the righty, who was nothing short of sensational in his first season as a pro in 2024. He split the year between Single-A and High-A, pitching to a sterling 2.24 ERA overall with 88 1/3 innings of work. He struck out an incredible 36.9% of opponents faced in total last year while walking just 3.7% of batters. It was a massive leap forward for a player who never posted an ERA below 5.00 during his collegiate career.
Unfortunately, that incredible breakout will be put on hold for the 2025 campaign. While specifics of what exact procedure Rosario will undergo have not yet been made public, even an internal brace procedure comes with about a year of rehab time, with full Tommy John requiring a longer rehab that would likely stretch into the 2026 season. Rosario appeared on track to either start 2025 at Double-A or earn a promotion to the level early in the campaign, but those plans will have to be scuttled for the year. That seems likely to delay his big league debut until 2027 at the earliest, surely a disappointing development for both the Rangers and the righty himself.
Fortunately for Texas, they’re hardly short on starting pitching options for the 2025 campaign. Nathan Eovaldi, Jacob deGrom, Jon Gray, Tyler Mahle, and Cody Bradford currently project as the club’s starting five on Opening Day, with Dane Dunning also on the roster as a potential swing man. That roster is supplemented by a handful of young prospects, including former first-round picks Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter. Both of them made their big league debuts in 2024; Leiter struggled through 35 2/3 innings of work with an 8.83 ERA, though he did pitch to a 3.51 ERA in 77 innings of work at the Triple-A level. That’s a particularly impressive figure given the inflated offensive environment of the Pacific Coast League and his excellent 33.3% strikeout rate.
Rocker, meanwhile, showed out in a three-start cup of coffee late in the year with a 3.86 ERA and 3.68 FIP. He was even better in the minors, with just three earned runs allowed across seven starts between the Double- and Triple-A levels last year after returning from Tommy John surgery earlier in the year. The presence of Leiter and Rocker, as well as other youngsters like Emiliano Teodo, should help the Rangers to weather Rosario’s delayed big league timeline even as Gray and Mahle head for free agency after the 2025 season.
This is a real bummer for Rosario. I was looking forward to following his progress. The Rangers rarely cultivate their own starting pitchers, but that might be starting to change.
What?!
Yankee fans think only Yankee players get injured !
Not really
I feel bad for your sad life
Ouch. This one hurts
It was only a matter of time. 6’1 and 180 pounds doesn’t hold up well to throwing 100mph. Hope his recovery goes well but I’m thinking late inning reliever is where he ends up now.
That makes no sense
Maybe they should just convert him to 1B and call it a day??
That’s a shame. Got the chance to see him pitch against the Fredericksburg Nationals while I was on vacation and decided to take in an MiLB game last year. He was lights out. Electric stuff.
do you have to use the word brutal in every post? One post has the word 3 times.
Terrible, awful, setback, thesaurus.
Does it give your life a sense of purpose to be such an a$$? This app is free pal.
Alejandro Rosario’s injury isn’t just a tough break—it’s a test case for how modern pitching development is outpacing biomechanics. The Rangers turned a once-erratic collegiate arm into a statistical marvel in just one year, slashing his walk rate while boosting his strikeouts to near-elite levels. But was his UCL the price of that transformation? Teams are getting better at refining raw pitchers into high-strikeout, low-walk monsters, but the human arm hasn’t evolved to sustain the torque required for such rapid leaps in performance. As pitchers develop faster than ever, will we see more cases where the body simply can’t keep up? At what point does efficiency become self-destructive?
Yay u found chatgbt!
Okay, you can turn it off now!
@el_chapo_
I found a what? Not sure why you would reply if it had nothing to do with what I said.
“Meanwhile” has to start the sentence, not come in the middle between commas.
He used the word “,meanwhile,” correctly!! It was used to complete the sentence. At the beginning of a sentence is used as a conjunctive adverb to show two things are going on at the same time.
What a surprise! Someone who can’t use commas correctly and then writes a sentence with at least two grammatical errors.
Go back to the kids table.