The Seattle Mariners have lost star pitcher Robbie Ray for the season.
The latest development for the 2021 American League Cy Young Award winner was not a good one. Ray will need surgery to address a “flexor tendon repair” and will miss the rest of the 2023 season, Mariners manager Scott Servais said via Daniel Kramer of MLB.com.
Ray was already on the 15-day injured list due to a flexor strain, but recently underwent further testing that revealed more damage in a different area of the tendon, reports Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times.
His season has prematurely ended after just one start. He started the second game of the season for the Mariners and took the loss in a 9-4 drubbing. Ray allowed five runs (three earned) on four hits in just 3 1/3 innings pitched. He struggled with his command and walked five of the 19 batters he faced. Ray later told reporters that he had felt tightness in his forearm starting in the second inning. A day later, he was placed on the injured list with a Grade 1 forearm strain. It only snowballed from there.
The left-handed starter had a huge year for Seattle in 2022 and figured to be a key part of its rotation this season. Ray threw 189 innings over 32 starts, posting a 3.71 ERA, 1,190 WHIP and allowed 7.8 hits per nine innings while posting a K/9 rate of 10.1. Ray also struck out 27.4 percent of the batters he faced last season.
This is a key loss for the Mariners and the MLB world reacted as such on social media:
Robbie Ray out for the season; stormy skies over the Mariners game in Philly. In drama this is called pathetic fallacy
— To Love a Mariner Podcast (@toloveamariner) April 26, 2023
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.