Max Kranick's upcoming surgery latest in disturbing trend on Mets' staff
Max Kranick of the Mets walks to the dugout after the sixth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays at Citi Field on June 13. Credit: Jim McIsaac
And just like that, another fallen domino.
This time it is Max Kranick, who will undergo a significant surgery involving his pitching arm, Mets manager Carlos Mendoza announced Friday.
Mendoza, at the time, said it would be Tommy John surgery, which would be Kranick’s second, but an MLB.com report later said it could be either UCL repair or a flexor tendon repair — both season-ending surgeries. The Mets have yet to confirm which it is.
Last week, Dedniel Nunez got Tommy John surgery, also his second. Drew Smith is recovering from his second such surgery and Danny Young and Christian Scott are on the injured list for the same reason.
It’s easy to point a finger at the Mets: Maybe there’s a problem with their usage, or their training staff, but the truth is that this continues to be a concern across Major League Baseball. (Both president of baseball operations David Stearns and Mendoza have expressed full confidence in their staff and processes, by the way.)
According to the American Medical Association, 36% of active major-league pitchers had undergone Tommy John surgery by 2024 — a 29% increase from 2016.
There at times seems to be a sense that pitchers — aside from your aces and your high-leverage relievers — are disposable. They’re constantly challenged to throw at higher and higher velocities and encouraged to learn new pitches and deploy them quickly.
And surprisingly, this hasn’t always hurt teams. If you want proof, look at the Dodgers, who won a World Series last year behind a few reliable arms, a revolving troupe of relievers and a litany of pitchers cluttering the injured list.
In the macro, that’s bad for baseball, particularly because this problem will just get worse as the level of competition continues to increase. The bigger issue is that there’s no neat solution.
That maybe isn’t as alarming when you’re dealing with a low-level injury, but Tommy John surgery is a different, more formidable beast.
Although the surgery is largely successful, subsequent surgeries lower that success rate and the rehab process is grueling. Just ask Mets lefthander Brooks Raley, who finally was activated on Friday after tearing his UCL in May 2024.
“It was a journey,” the reliever said. “The first six months of no throw[ing] is tough. I’ve never been through anything like that before.”
For what it’s worth, Raley, who didn’t allow a single run in seven rehab outings, said his stuff now is “in line and maybe a tick better” than it was before he got hurt. But he had thoughts, too, on why this is happening so much more than it used to.
“I just think the sport demands a lot now,” he said. “I think every pitch that you throw now is graded. I think guys back in the day had the opportunity to go out and get outs, throw deep into ballgames even if their velo is down or their shapes are off. There was more pitchability because there was a little less information. Now there’s an expectation of how teams fill rosters based on the stuff that [pitchers] bring. It’s a two-sided deal, the projections of the player that you are is less [favorable]. It’s an imperfect system. It would be a long-winded answer . . . but it’s just high velocity and big shapes.”
He’s echoing what physicians have been saying for a while now.
In an article written for Medium in 2024, Yankees head team physician Christopher Ahmad pointed to a slew of factors — the emphasis on velocity and power, bigger and stronger athletes (he notes that recent studies show that heavier, taller pitchers are more prone to UCL tears), the number of “max effort” pitches being thrown against increasingly potent hitters, and a shift toward “designer” pitches such as the sweeper and power changeup that put a lot of strain on the forearm.
It’s a brutal price to pay for the sake of optimization. Players are, of course, human beings, and you can imagine that a guy like Kranick, 27, is about as devastated as anyone: He went from reclamation project to bullpen mainstay, just to get hurt.
“He worked his butt off all last year to get his body in the right spot and started throwing harder,” pitching coach Jeremy Hefner said of Kranick earlier this year.
For his part, Kranick, who missed all of 2022 while recovering from his first surgery, was determined back then. “Guys can kind of go two different ways,” he told me in April. “You can kind of feel sorry for yourself, like, I’m not on the roster, my path to the big leagues is a lot longer now, you can feel like the victim, or you can take it as an opportunity of, OK, I’m going to prove you guys wrong.”
Unfortunately, he (and so many of his colleagues) will have to prove it again.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
