The UCL Internal Brace Surgery Non-Study

by
October 27, 2023

Since both Shohei Ohtani and Drew Rasmussen got an internal brace in their elbow instead of the full Tommy John surgery, I decided to see how other pitchers who got the brace performed … and the study didn’t take long. With fewer than a dozen samples, there is no study.

Using Jon Roegele’s Tommy John surgery database, the following five major league pitchers got the surgery and returned to the majors. The surgery failed with Matt Bush and he eventually needed a full Tommy John surgery.

MLB Pitchers with UCL Internal Brace Construction
Player Surgery Date Team Return Date Recovery Time (months)
Nick Anderson 10/1/2021 TB 4/1/2023 18
Zach Britton 9/8/2021 NYY 9/24/2022 13
Rich Hill 10/1/2019 LAD 7/29/2020 10
Matt Bush 9/1/2018 TEX 4/3/2021 Needed TJS
Seth Maness 8/16/2016 STL 5/13/2017 9

Again, with a sample size of just five, I’m not going to draw zero conclusions from the list.

Additionally, these four guys got the brace and never returned to the majors.

MLB Pitchers with UCL Internal Brace Construction (Didn’t Return to Majors)
Player Surgery Date Team
Mitch Harris 6/15/2016 STL
Yadiel Rivera 9/1/2020 TEX
Kent Emanuel 6/3/2021 HOU
Sean Doolittle 7/1/2022 WAS

No analysis from me but the information is here if anyone wants to break out their Jump-to-Conclusions mat.

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Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.

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pdunes
2 years ago

Using a null hypothesis of brace is equally successful as TJS and TJS is 85% successful, my inferred P score with 5 out of 9 of the brace surgeries failing is why are surgeons doing this instead of TJS?

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RotoholicMember since 2016
2 years ago
Reply to  pdunes

The guys opting for internal brace might be more likely to have a failure from full TJ. So, 85% success for them might be optimistic.

0
DBallMember since 2025
2 years ago
Reply to  pdunes

I think your denominator is too high here. Out of the “didn’t return to MLB” players, we have:
Rivera with a career wrc+ of 26…enough said

Emanuel who had a shiny 2.55era but a 5.49 FIP in a tiny sample (was bad in AAA this year, and overall minor stats are pretty mediocre)

Doolittle who was 36 at the time and nearing the end of his career anyway (plus he’s a family guy, so maybe he could have pushed it to make it back for a year or two, but wasn’t worth it to him, already rich)

Harris whose similar to Emanuel but was also 2 years older at time of surgery.

So I’d go with 1 of 5 failing, gotta P-hack to make it look closer to TJS lol

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