The Cubs will not be getting reliever Julian Merryweather back from the injured list for the last weeks of the season as they had originally hoped.
Merryweather is scheduled to undergo season-ending knee surgery Friday, manager Craig Counsell announced Thursday. The team anticipates Merryweather recovering from the procedure, a right patellar tendon debridement, in time for spring training.
“The knee has been an issue for most of the season here,” Counsell said Thursday before the Cubs opened a four-game series against the Nationals. “And it just didn’t get over the hump here to merit him pitching for the rest of the season. So surgery’s kind of always been an option here since we went on the IL, and determined at this point to go forward with it.”
Merryweather, poised to pitch in high-leverage spots going into the season, only pitched 15 innings. He spent three and a half months on the IL with a stress fracture in a rib on his right side. And then he was only active for about a month before landing on the IL again in late August, this time with tendinitis in his right knee.
He is the fifth Cubs reliever to have his season ended by injury, joining Adbert Alzolay (Tommy John surgery), Yency Almonte (shoulder surgery), Luke Little (lat strain) and Ben Brown (neck). Injuries to back-end relievers also contributed to the Cubs’ May and June slump.
“When the leverage pieces get taken away quickly, that’s harder to address,” Counsell said. “There’s no question about it. And it requires, certainly, more work. But it’s also a lesson in the importance of having solutions and plans to make sure that you do your best to cover for it, or to keep the situation as usable and successful as possible.”
Merryweather has managed the issue with his right knee off and on for his whole professional career. But this year was the first time he went on the IL at the major-league level for a right knee injury.
Even last season, when Merryweather pitched the most relief innings (72) he’d ever pitched in a professional season, he remained available late in the year as the Cubs had a spike in reliever injuries.
This year, he dealt with the knee issue from early on, and his mechanics never quite felt in sync.
He’d only allowed one run in a total of 4 ⅔ innings when he landed on the IL the first time. Then recovering from the stress fracture became the priority. But when he returned, his knee injury began to flare up at unpredictable intervals.
He had three straight shutout appearances in mid-to-late August, during which he said he felt good. But in his next outing, he allowed five hits and four runs in an inning against the Marlins. Soon after, he landed on the IL.
The effects of Merryweather’s knee injury could be seen in a drop in velocity. While last season his fastball sat comfortably at 98 mph, this year it averaged 96. And in Merryweather’s last start, it dropped to 93.7. As he tried to compensate for the injury, his command wavered as well.
“It’s one of those tricky things where nobody wants surgery,” Counsell said. “You don’t want to have surgery if you don’t have to. But at some point it affects you to the point where it’s not getting better, and there are some [effects of] having a hard time getting into a delivery you want because of the injury, not recovering the right way because of the injury. So it just starts to affect too much and that’s when you have to say, ‘I’ve got to go get it fixed.’”