Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Quinn Priester is set to undergo season ending thoracic outlet decompression surgery on Monday, ending his 2026 MLB campaign.
Priester has yet to pitch this season at the major league level after being shut down during spring training. After attempting to ramp up his baseball activities via 8 minor league starts, the 25 year old looked out of sorts, posting a 15.75 ERA while walking 24 batters across 16 innings. As a result, the club and player alike agreed that surgery was the best option to fix the issue once and for all.
“After going to Dr. Pearl again, and doing all the things that we had gone through to try and fix this problem without surgery, we’ve just kind of gotten to a point where these things aren’t working,” Priester said. “So we’re going to go down on Monday and get surgery with Dr. Pearl, make sure we clean this issue up, so that the rest of my career, this isn’t an issue.”
In 2025, Priester posted a 13-3 record with a 3.32 ERA across 157.1IP. Now, he’ll need to hope he can replicate that level of success when he reports for spring training in 2027.
For those wondering why the right hander didn’t undergo the procedure earlier this year instead, the typical recovery timeline for such a procedure is 8 to 10 months. Three of those months would include a complete shutdown of baseball activities. As such, Priester would have missed the entire 2026 campaign anyways. By attempting to rehab his way through the process, he gave himself a small chance to return to a Major League mound in 2026.
Priester was already on the 60 day IL for the Brewers, so there won’t be much of a roster impact for the club. However for the player, he’ll now sit at 2.134 years of major league service which would put him on the bubble of Super Two eligibility for any arbitration hearings.
In the meantime, Milwaukee will continue to lean on Jacob Misiorowski, and Kyle Harrison to lead their rotation. Robert Gasser, Brandon Sproat, and Shane Drohan are rounding out that group for the moment, but Brandon Woodruff, Logan Henderson, and Coleman Crow are expected to factor in at some point this summer.
Up next for the Brewers is a Thursday afternoon affair against the Cleveland Guardians.
Photo: Michael Barera. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.