A year ago, almost to the day, the Phillies’ highest-ranking baseball executive sat in the dugout before a game and touted Andrew Painter — 19 at the time — as both untouchable in trade talks and a possible major-league starting pitcher in 2023.
In discussing Painter on Wednesday, Dave Dombrowski took on a decidedly more ominous tone.
“It appears,” he said, “he’s going to need Tommy John surgery.”
And there they were, the three words that no pitcher or team ever wishes to hear, especially about one of the top prospects in the sport. But with Painter’s symptoms persisting after 4½ months of conservative treatment, the Phillies’ medical staff recommended that the 20-year-old undergo a reconstruction of the torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.
Painter will get another opinion Monday from prominent Los Angeles-based surgeon Neal ElAttrache, who operated on Bryce Harper in November. If ElAttrache concurs with the Phillies’ doctors, he will operate on Painter on Wednesday.
The typical recovery time from Tommy John surgery for pitchers is 12 to 18 months, which likely KO’s Painter for all of next season.
“It’s sad,” manager Rob Thomson said. “I feel terrible for him. I’m sure this offseason he was thinking about being in the rotation, being in the big leagues, and all of a sudden, the injury happens. It’s too bad.”
The tendency now will be to wonder why Painter didn’t have the surgery sooner — and whether the Phillies rushed their 2021 first-round pick by overtly dangling a rotation spot in spring training and adding a cutter to his repertoire in the offseason.
Dombrowski pushed back on the last point, noting that the cutter was more a variant of Painter’s existing slider than an entirely new pitch. Phillies director of pitching Brian Kaplan, who has known Painter longer than anyone in the organization, agreed with that characterization.
But Kaplan also conceded recently that Painter may have overused the cutter in his only spring-training start. Of Painter’s 29 pitches on March 1 against the Twins, six were cutters, including one for a strikeout of veteran outfielder Max Kepler.
“Probably was a little excited about the pitch and probably used it a little too much as a new toy,” Kaplan said. “No one blames a 19-year-old for being excited. Some of that excitement turns to anxiousness, and maybe he goes outside of himself a little bit in the excitement of the potential of being on an opening-day roster.”
Scott Boras, Painter’s agent, expressed reservations about moving too quickly. In the offseason, he rattled off a list of pitchers — Madison Bumgarner, Kerry Wood, Fernando Valenzuela, Bret Saberhagen, Dwight Gooden, Félix Hernández — who got to the majors at 19 or 20 and didn’t pitch deep into their 30s.
But the Phillies didn’t intend to treat Painter like a fully developed starter. Even if he hadn’t gotten injured, he would’ve been on an innings limit, with in-season breaks and other creative ideas to manage his workload after he threw a total of 109⅔ innings in the minors.
Painter was the top Phillies story line when spring training began, mostly because team officials indicated privately that he was the leading candidate for the final spot in the rotation even though he hadn’t pitched above the double-A level. He lockered next to ace Zack Wheeler. His bullpen sessions attracted even owner John Middleton.
Surgery was never an inevitable outcome after Painter felt discomfort in his elbow after his lone spring start. He got multiple opinions, including from ElAttrache, with every doctor agreeing that the degree of the sprain and its location on the ligament — proximal, not distal — indicated it may heal with rest and treatment, a plan that Dombrowski labeled as “conservative.”
There are examples of pitchers who have overcome partial tears to continue pitching without ever undergoing Tommy John surgery in their career. David Price and Masahiro Tanaka are two of the more well-known examples.
Painter didn’t throw for six weeks, then began a gradual buildup. In a statement released by the team, the Phillies noted that recent imaging revealed “interval healing” in the ligament. But Painter felt pain before he was scheduled to face hitters in live batting practice July 4 in Clearwater, Fla. It hasn’t subsided.
“Unless there’s a complete tear — and he does not have a complete tear — there’s many, many pitchers pitching out there with tears,” Dombrowski said. “It’s more a matter of symptoms of pain. Everybody is different. You never know that until you go through the process.”
And so, in all likelihood, the Phillies won’t see Painter on a major-league mound until 2025. He will be 22 then, and still have a long career ahead of him.
“I’m sure it’s tough with everything we were talking about before spring and maybe the opportunity that he would’ve had this year,” said Wheeler, who had Tommy John surgery as a 25-year-old in 2015. “But you’ve got to go take care of it. Probably good that it happened now. Get it out of the way, so he can have a nice, long career.”
But it remains an organizational bummer, considering how much the Phillies believed in Painter’s ability to help them right now.
“I just feel for him,” Dombrowski said. “He was right on the verge of being a big-league pitcher. But he’s a youngster. [Even] if there’s a little bit of time delay coming back, building his stuff back up, you’re still talking about a very young man who still has a long future ahead of him.”
