Word came yesterday afternoon that Cole Waites’ season had hit a new level of frustration, as he underwent Tommy John surgery and is expected to be out of action until the beginning of the 2025 season. Waites reported to camp this spring looking forward to a chance to compete for a job in the big league bullpen, and expecting to be a part of the 2023 Giants’ campaign. But things went sideways almost from the very beginning, as a lat strain took him out of action for much of the spring.
At media day in Sacramento in April, Waites told Doug Bruzzone: “It’s definitely frustrating. But it’s good that it happened early enough that it didn’t really hold me back.” According to friend of the site Bruzzone (whose Giants-based Substack you should also be reading),
Waites described himself as fully built up in terms of in-game stamina, with the only thing left for him to do is work on pitching in back to back games, which should take around 2-3 weeks of game action.
Unfortunately, it was clear fairly early on that something was not quite right with Waites, even as he got back into action. Like almost all of the Sacramento pitchers, he had trouble adjusting to the ABS system, which was intentionally set to a lower-than-normal top-end of the strike zone, specifically to foil pitchers like him, who relied on fastballs at the top of the zone. His walk rate, along with many of his teammates’, spiked up, with nearly one in every five batters receiving a free pass from him. More worrisome, however, was the behavior of his fastball. Hitters seemed to be getting off better swings against him. Where the outlier characteristics of the pitch had always before generated whiff rates well in excess of 40 and even 50 percent, now he could go entire outings without a hitter swinging through the pitch. Something was odd, something was off, and it seemed like something was wrong.
By mid-July he was shut down and placed on the 60-day IL, though without much explanation. Now, everything seems clearer. We understand where the missing hop went and why. Somewhere along the way, the UCL was frayed and torn. Was the lat strain connected? Did he try to ramp up too quickly? Or did the actual injury take place much later? None of these things are clear. What is clear is that Waites, a special arm who has unfortunately spent nearly as much of his pro career on the IL as on an active roster, will now be missing another season. Since being drafted back in 2019, for a variety of different reasons, he’s pitched just 111 innings. Not all of that was arm related — he missed much of 2021 due to knee surgery, and upper-body muscle strains have put him on the shelf a couple of different times in his career.
The positive side of all that, I suppose, is that the arm doesn’t have that many innings on it, and should, post-TJ, still offer up some high-octane late relief potential. Still, it has to be a bitter pill for Waites and a difficult and depressing rehab process stretching before him. He got just the sweetest taste of the big leagues, but he’s going to have to wait a while longer before he can sample the full meal. One of my own personal oddities is that I’ve always had an affinity for people whose names form a complete sentence. Give or take an extra “e” in the last name, Cole is one of those people. “Cole waits.” It’s sardonically appropriate in this case, because waiting is something that Waites has had far too much experience with so far as a professional pitcher. It will be interesting to see how the Giants handle Waites on the 40-man. As we’ve discussed, spots on the roster as going to be tough to come by, and holding one for a player who won’t perform next year might not be something the Giants want to do. This could be one of those occasions where they non-tender the player and then re-sign him to a two-year minor league contract, as we’ve seen them do in the past with injured players.
HITTER of the NIGHT: Trenton Brooks (Sac), 2 for 5, GS HR (22), 2 R, 4 RBI
PITCHER of the NIGHT: Spencer Bivens (Rich), 6.0 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 6 K
Let’s get to the short-slate Minor Lines, as only the upper level guys were in action last night. The days are dwindling but the effort is still mighty!
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to There R Giants to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.