Minnesota Twins pitcher Pablo Lopez will miss the next 8-12 weeks after straining the teres major muscle in his right shoulder. Additional imaging on the injury revealed a grade 2 strain. Team officials believe that the earliest the righty can resume throwing will be in four weeks.
Lopez was forced out of his start on Tuesday against the Athletics with what the team called “shoulder tightness”. However, the 8 year veteran informed the training staff that his shoulder wasn’t improving, which led to additional testing, ultimately revealing the strain.
“I tried to stay loose… we had a long inning,” he told reporters Tuesday. “Then I went out there and made my three warmup pitches [before the sixth] low-to-mid intensity, and I felt the same thing. If it felt that way, then if I try to make a max-effort throw to get the inning started, you wonder what could happen.”
Currently 5-3 with a 2.82 ERA, and 61Ks across 60.2IP, Lopez will be a tough arm to replace in the Twins rotation. After a slow start to the year, Minnesota has clawed their way into 2nd place in the ultra-competitive AL Central with a 34-27 record. Four of the five teams in the division are currently 3 games or more above .500, with the lone exception being the Chicago White Sox.
The injury is the same one that affected teammate Joe Ryan previously. Ryan picked up the injury in August and would go on to miss the remainder of the season, but has since returned to the Twins rotation and looks as good as ever. That’s good news for Lopez’s long term outlook, but does little to help Minnesota patch together a solution for the 29 year old’s impending absence.
Lopez, Ryan, Bailey Ober, and Chris Paddack have combined to put together one of the top rotations in the Major Leagues, with a 3.43 team ERA, while ranking 8th in strikeout rate at 23.2%.
In the meantime, it would appear as though RHP David Festa will get the first chance to replace Lopez’s innings for the big league club. Festa was scratched from his scheduled start for Triple-A St. Paul on Wednesday and is currently penciled in as the team’s starter for Thursday’s contest vs. the Athletics.
The 25 year old has made 3 appearances for Minnesota in 2025 thus far, recording a 1.38 ERA with a 15:5 K to BB ratio across 13 innings. That being said, Festa has yet to last longer than 4.2IP in any of his starts, so it’s safe to assume the Twins front office would like to see him pitch deeper into games this time around.
Photo: Tony Webster. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.