Reds announce RHP Hunter Greene will undergo Tommy John surgery

Well here’s some really bad news that I wish I could say was a very late and very cruel April Fool’s Day joke.

The Reds announced this evening that top prospect Hunter Greene will undergo Tommy John surgery.

The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans broke the news a few minutes earlier in the evening. He also provided a bit of detail on the surgery.

Dr. ElAttrache is also who will be performing the reconstruction for Corey Knebel, which is only topical because as I type this, the Reds are currently playing the Milwaukee Brewers.

Greene was shut down early in August 2018 to tend to a UCL sprain. He and the team opted for rest and rehabilitation to nurse the injury, rather than go immediately under the knife. Obviously, the idea was to try and get it right without having to miss over a year recovering from surgery. The gamble, such as it was one, won’t pay off here, as Greene will now miss all of 2019 and, probably, half of 2020 before returning to the mound in a competitive baseball game.

Greene was the number two overall selection in the 2017 MLB draft. He pitched only four professional innings in that season. He went to Dayton to begin the year in 2018, where he pitched 68.1 innings for a 4.48 ERA for the Dragons. That number includes a pretty rough first month from the 18-year-old hurler, as from May forward, that ERA number drops to 3.13.

Hunter Greene wowed in last season’s Future’s Game, throwing 19 pitches over 100 mph.

So, basically, this all sucks and everything is terrible. Greene won’t turn 20 until August of this year, so there’s still a lot of time for the youngster to come back and pitch well for the Reds. Still, this is terrible, terrible news for the team and its fans.

We wish nothing but the best for Hunter Greene.