Hunter Greene Out Through the 2027 Season

The worst-case scenario for Hunter Greene’s elbow has come to pass. The ace right-hander had Tommy John surgery on Thursday, ending his 2026 season and almost certainly knocking him out for the entire 2027 season, too. This was Greene’s second elbow procedure this season; a previous arthroscopic surgery to remove loose bodies delayed his seasonal debut until Independence Day. Greene’s 2026 season wraps up with a 6.83 ERA, but a better 3.55 FIP over 27 2/3 innings in five starts. This is a full Tommy John revision — Greene previously had Tommy John surgery in 2019 — and not the internal brace procedure that tends to have a quicker recovery.

Suffice it to say, this is a major blow for both Greene and the Cincinnati Reds. For Greene, it’s the latest (and scariest) injury setback in a professional career that has never seen him throw enough innings to qualify for an ERA title. There comes a point at which one starts to wonder if he has crossed the proverbial Rubicon, the point where teams now can’t realistically tell themselves that they can keep him healthy as a starting pitcher. His fastball-splitter-slider repertoire would almost certainly play nicely in relief, though he’ll be hard-pressed to make the same impact as a closer as he could as a legitimate frontline starter.

For the Reds, a rotation eventually topped with a one-two punch of Greene and Chase Burns, with Andrew Abbott a perfectly reasonable third starter, a low-key free agent as their fourth man, and the best-looking of the in-house options rounding out the quintet, was supposed to be the team’s greatest asset going forward. Losing Greene for a very long time, and quite possibly permanently from the rotation, puts a giant hole in what was the team’s only real source of strength. The bullpen has been lousy, the offense is last in the league in wRC+, and the defense is very average.

There was an alternate timeline in which things worked out differently. A terrible June delivered a major blow to the Reds’ postseason odds, but they still held out at least some hope that if they could immediately start winning again upon Greene’s return, they could go on a wild-card run. As I wrote at the time, the team’s next couple of weeks were absolutely crucial for maintaining their October chances. But the Reds went just 6-8, winning only a single series (against the lowly Rockies), and their playoff probabilities dwindled to teensy fractions of a percent.

Losing Greene for 2026 is a moot point for the Reds right now, but losing him for 2027 basically puts them in a position where, unless they spend aggressively this offseason, they’ll go into the year without any particular team strength, just scattered highlights like Burns and Elly De La Cruz. Projecting Cincinnati’s rotation options for 2027, including Greene if he were healthy, reveals just how much work this team will have to do to fill his void.

Greene wasn’t projected for a ton of innings in 2027 due to his injury history, but 108 1/3 innings of a very good pitcher with high upside is a lot better than zero. And there was always at least a chance that the team would roll high on Greene for a change, and maybe even get in 150-170 innings of work. With that possibility now erased, like a time-diagnostic photograph from Back to the Future, the 2027 rotation looks to be in pretty poor shape.

The impending lockout only complicates things for the Reds. Even in a normal offseason, it’s not likely that the team’s owner, Phil Castellini (father Bob officially stepped down as controlling owner in February), would be aggressive about spending money in the winter on a high-end pitcher. But with Reds ownership widely believed to be hardliners on the salary cap, with the elder Castellini even voting against the very limited player gains that ended the 2022 lockout, it’s hard to believe that this is a team that was going to spend heavily. Last time, there was a flurry of signings in the days right before the players were locked out, but Cincinnati almost definitely won’t be participating all that much if history repeats itself.

So, where does this leave the Reds? In the (obviously) very preliminary 2027 projections, ZiPS sees them as the worst team in the NL Central.

Obviously, there’s a whole offseason for things to change, but as a starting point, this is not a great place for a… let’s say thrifty… team to be in if it plans on being even a wild-card contender. Complicating things is that the farm system, at least by our reckoning, ranks near the bottom of the league, at 25th. That’s down from 21st in the preseason and 18th at the end of last season. If the team can’t add talent via its wallet, it will be hard-pressed to use the farm system to either beef up the roster or acquire high-end major league talent. It’s much harder to simply hoodwink other teams than it used to be; neither Dave Stewart nor Ruben Amaro Jr. is likely to snag a GM job this winter.

This version of the Cincinnati Reds is not yet doomed, but you can see the writing on the wall. They’re basically in the position of a major character on HBO’s The House of the Dragon; they’re still alive and kicking, but you know the final season is coming, and the source material it’s (mostly) based on has them facing their end in just a few months. The loss of Hunter Greene, when combined with the team’s inability to lock up Elly De La Cruz on a long-term extension, means that the looming fire sale is no longer beyond the horizon but on it — and quickly approaching.