The Atlanta Braves just placed right-hander Spencer Schwellenbach on the 60-day injured list with bone spurs in his throwing elbow, and that means one of the NL East’s better young arms is now staring at a timetable that likely keeps him off a big-league mound until at least June.
Spencer Schwellenbach lands on 60-Day IL
That is a brutal development for a team that has spent the better part of five years building a contender while simultaneously watching chunks of it fall apart physically at the worst possible times, because every October conversation about Atlanta seems to end with some variation of “yeah but imagine if they were healthy.”
Spencer Schwellenbach was a big reason for optimism after he went 7-4 with a 3.09 ERA in 17 starts last season before a fractured elbow shut him down, and new manager Walt Weiss said everything looked fine during the ramp-up until a recent bullpen session set off alarms, which is the kind of sentence that makes pitching coaches reach for antacids.
If this story sounds familiar, it should, because the Braves basically lived it a year ago when Bryce Elder was the only starter to clear 23 outings while Chris Sale missed months with a rib fracture, Spencer Strider fought through hamstring trouble after losing almost all of 2024 to elbow surgery, and Grant Holmes saw his season end with a partial UCL tear. It becomes exhausting to even list, and yet here we are adding another name before anyone has played a Grapefruit League inning.
Weiss said what every manager says in February about depth being tested and hoping it would not happen this early, but the reality inside a division that also features Philadelphia and the New York Mets is that early counts too, and banking wins in April often decides who gets to host playoff games later.
Spencer Schwellenbach is not just another arm; he was supposed to be part of the stability plan, part of the bridge from the chaos of last year to something more predictable this summer, and now Atlanta is back to rearranging timelines before the luggage has even made it off the bus.
Nobody in Philadelphia is throwing a parade over somebody else’s medical report, but pretending this does not shift the competitive math would be dishonest, because when a rival loses a mid-rotation difference maker for months, it matters.
The Braves remain talented, dangerous, and fully capable of surviving the hit, yet every subtraction chips away at that margin for error, and in a race where the Phillies expect to be right there all season, June suddenly feels a long way off for Atlanta.
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