Brandon Barriera, a Toronto Blue Jays pitching prospect, will undergo season-ending surgery
Brandon Barriera hasn’t pitched in three weeks, and the 20-year-old Blue Jays prospect is expected to miss the rest of 2024 with an elbow ailment.
Brandon Barriera, a Toronto Blue Jays pitching prospect, is set to have season-ending elbow surgery, TSN’s Scott Mitchell reported Saturday afternoon.
Barriera last pitched for Single-A Dunedin on April 6. He departed the start early due to an arm injury and was placed on the 7-day disabled list on April 9.
Mitchell’s report comes only one day after Ricky Tiedemann, the Blue Jays’ top prospect, was diagnosed with left ulnar nerve irritation. Tiedemann will take a 7-to-10-day break from throwing, but Barriera will not.
It remains to be known if Barriera will have Tommy John surgery or an internal brace operation. In either case, he will be sidelined for at least the next ten months.
The Blue Jays’ farm system ranks the 20-year-old left-hander as the No. 4 prospect and the No. 2 pitcher.
Toronto selected Barriera in the first round of the 2022 MLB Draft, then gave him an above-slot $3.6 million signing bonus.
A shoulder injury kept Barriera off the mound for the first month of the 2023 minor league season, and an elbow injury knocked him out for another eight weeks. He went on to post a 3.98 ERA, 0.934 WHIP and 11.1 strikeouts per nine innings across seven starts in Rookie Ball and Single-A, up until a bicep injury ended his season prematurely in August.
Barriera allowed two earned runs in 1.1 innings of work in 2024 before he hurt his elbow again.
Tiedemann and Barriera are the Blue Jays’ consensus top-two pitching prospects, while the rest of the top-eight players in their system are all batters.
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