Ah, it begins. The Spring Training injury parade. You know it’s coming each year, and you just hope it’s a very short parade without a lot of gigantic, important floats.
The Chicago Cubs brought big righty bat Tyler Austin back from Japan this offseason on a modest big league deal, hoping he could contribute off the bench. That’ll still be the hope, but it’s gonna have to wait:
Cubs injury news: IF Tyler Austin underwent surgery yesterday for right patellar tendon debridement and is out for months.Counsell said Austin’s knee had been bothering him and wasn’t responding well. LHP Jordan Wicks is dealing with forearm inflammation. No UCL concerns, down for days not weeks
— Meghan Montemurro (@mmontemurro.bsky.social) 2026-02-25T16:53:06.890ZThe good news is that a debridement procedure is not necessarily as significant as a repair, and maybe that means a more likely return sometime this season. The bad news is that there’s no way to know how effective Tyler Austin will be against big league pitching when that return comes, given that it was already a question in his return from Japan. At least now he and the Cubs will have a clear, long opportunity for him to ramp up against minor league competition at a time TBD.
Meanwhile, the bench competition coming out of Spring Training just got a little more clarity, including the Michael Conforto addition. He and Austin didn’t necessarily overlap in roles (other than, perhaps, covering some left field time), but it’s a more clear opportunity for Conforto to win a job as a bench bat.
We know that, of the four bench spots (I say four because I’m counting Moises Ballesteros as “the” designated hitter for purposes of the 13 position player spots), two are essentially locked down by the back-up catcher and Matt Shaw. One is very clearly going to go to someone in the reserve outfield competition – Conforto, Dylan Carlson, Chas McCormick, Justin Dean, and Kevin Alcantara – and the other can be given out to a variety of possibilities, including a utility guy like Owen Miller or Scott Kingery, or a second player from that outfield group.
Tyler Austin, even though he was on a big league deal, wasn’t necessarily a lock to make the team out of camp, so he would’ve been in that competition, too. His split deal pays $1.25 million in the big leagues and $400,000 in the minor leagues.
(As for the Jordan Wicks mention in Meghan Montemurro’s post, we’ll just have to monitor where he is when he starts throwing again. Forearm issues popping back up for Wicks are certainly a concern, and you don’t want to see him miss time in case he’s needed in the first half of the year while the Cubs spread around the innings.)
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