Heading into this season, the Braves were anticipating that Spencer Schwellenbach would be healthy and ready to go after he had his 2025 season cut short due to a fractured elbow. Unfortunately, here on the first day of pitchers and catchers being at spring training, it\u2019s become clear that Schwellenbach\u2019s elbow is still bothering him.<\/p>\n
Braves beat writer Mark Bowman of MLB.com is reporting that Spencer Schwellenbach is experiencing elbow inflammation in his throwing arm and as such, he\u2019ll be starting the year on the 60-Day IL.<\/p>\n
The only good news about this is that because we\u2019re so early on in things, if all goes well then he could start ramping up to return starting in April since recovery from having bone spurs removed via surgery is usually 10-12 weeks. Still, you never want to see pitchers miss this much time early on since they\u2019ll be behind the proverbial 8-ball once the regular season rolls around and Schwellenbach starting the season on the 60-Day IL means we\u2019re not going to see him pitch for a couple of months as a result \u2014 smooth recovery or not. You also definitely don\u2019t want to see elbow issues of this magnitude coming from a young pitcher of Schwellenbach\u2019s caliber \u2014 especially considering that elbow issues are what ended up costing him the majority of his 2025 campaign.<\/p>\n
The only thing the Braves can do now is just hope that the inflammation is being caused by the bone spurs, since that\u2019d be pretty straight-forward in terms of treatment and recovery. If anything gets more complicated then that\u2019ll certainly be concerning and then he could very well miss a ton of time once the regular season rolls around. We\u2019ve just got to hope for the best when it comes to this and have also got to hope that between this and Ha-Seong Kim\u2019s stroke of bad luck that the Braves are getting their bad injury luck out of the way early on. Atlanta has some pretty high expectations for this upcoming season<\/a> and just about the only way that this could be derailed is if they end up going through another injury-plagued season.<\/p>\n The good news is that Atlanta\u2019s offseason dealings have insured that they will at least have a lot better depth than they did during the 2025 season but it\u2019s certainly kind of lame to see that depth being put to the test right from the jump.<\/p>\n