The Pirates announced today that pitching prospect Nick Kingham has undergone Tommy John surgery. This news has been coming for a while (Kingham left his start on May 6th with elbow soreness and the team has been silent about it since then beyond saying he was going for a second opinion, which is never good news), but that doesn’t make the news any better.
The obvious default position for Nick Kingham in 2015 was to hope that the Pirates wouldn’t need him in the rotation, but it’s hard not to be a bit concerned about the Pirates’ starting pitching depth at this point. With both Kingham and Brandon Cumpton lost to Tommy John surgery, the Pirates are now covering the last two spots in their rotation with Charlie Morton, Jeff Locke, Vance Worley, Casey Sadler, and Clayton Richard. I know that a lot of people think that I’m being ridiculous worrying about the rotation this year, given the starters performances to this point, but I think that more pitchers are always better than fewer pitchers. Locke and Worley have both been ineffective this year, Morton is always a health risk, and Sadler and Richard are far from sure things. Everything looks fine now, but that doesn’t mean it will in a month.
Long-term this likely affects the Pirates’ rotation plans for 2016, as well. Kingham has only made 20 Triple-A starts in his career and likely won’t be back in any capacity until early next summer. Depending on his rehab, that pushes his Pirate debut back to some point in very late 2016 or 2017. Obviously that’s down the road a ways, but if the Pirates were currently planning on having Kingham be a part of the rotation in 2016 (and I think they probably expected him to at least compete for a spot), they now have to recalibrate those plans.
This doesn’t necessarily register as a huge event for the 2015 Pirates right now, but I suspect that we’ll have to wait and see how the season unfolds to know if or how much of an impact it really has. And it’s also worth noting that Kingham’s surgery makes it two Tommy John surgeries for two top pitching prospects in two years for the Pirates (which doesn’t count Clayton Holmes’ TJ last year). Sixteen months ago, it might’ve seemed like the Pirates were doing a better job keeping their young pitchers free of the scourge of elbow injuries that have plagued baseball the last few years, but that doesn’t really feel like the case anymore.
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