ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 Chicago Cubs pitcher Cade Horton will miss the rest of the 2026 season after an MRI revealed UCL damage in his right elbow, Chicago manager Craig Counsell said Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cCade is gonna have surgery,\u201d Counsell said before the Cubs game against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field. \u201cHe\u2019s gonna miss the rest of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The exact procedure, whether it will be a full Tommy John reconstruction or an internal brace repair, won\u2019t be determined until surgeons go into the elbow. Horton visited renowned elbow specialist Dr. Keith Meister in Arlington, Texas, on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
No surgery date has been set.<\/p>\n
The announcement confirms what Cubs fans feared when Horton walked off the mound<\/a> in Cleveland on April 3, after just 17 pitches. His velocity had dropped from 96 mph in the first inning to 93.8 mph on his final pitch before he waved toward the dugout.<\/p>\n It will be the 24-year-old right-hander\u2019s second elbow reconstruction surgery. He had Tommy John surgery as a freshman at Oklahoma in 2021. He was the No. 7 overall pick in the 2022 draft and broke through in the majors last season with an 11-4 record and a 2.67 ERA in 118 innings. He finished second in NL Rookie of the Year voting. In his 2026 debut, Horton held Washington to two runs in 6 1\/3 innings just one week before the injury.<\/p>\n The blow is particularly tough because the Cubs are already without ace Justin Steele, who is recovering from his own UCL surgery<\/a> and is not expected back until late May at the earliest. With Matthew Boyd<\/a> also on the injured list, the Cubs will lean on Colin Rea and Javier Assad in the rotation. Rea stepped up in a similar role last season, posting a 3.95 ERA across 27 starts after Steele went down.<\/p>\n \u201cColin\u2019s going to be asked to pitch more innings out of the bullpen, and then somebody\u2019s going to take Colin\u2019s bullpen innings,\u201d Counsell said. \u201cThat\u2019s how it\u2019s going to be addressed on paper. But it\u2019s not all on Colin. … We all have to just do our part.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 Chicago Cubs pitcher Cade Horton will miss the rest of the 2026 season after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":669611,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2399],"tags":[5,138,24,4245,161,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-669610","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago-cubs","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-chicago-cubs","11":"tag-chicagocubs","12":"tag-cubs","13":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116367281749044253","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}