White Sox’ Edgar Navarro To Undergo Tommy John Surgery

White Sox reliever Edgar Navarro is slated to undergo Tommy John surgery in early March, the team announced to reporters Tuesday evening (X link via Scott Merkin of MLB.com). He’ll miss the 2024 season as a result and could be sidelined early in 2025 as well.

Navarro, 26, made his big league debut with the ChiSox in 2023, pitching 8 2/3 innings out of manager Pedro Grifol’s bullpen. He was tagged for seven runs on 11 hits and a pair of walks with nine punchouts in that brief cup of coffee, with the bulk of the damage coming in one nightmare outing that saw him yield five runs in a lone inning of work. Chicago outrighted him off the 40-man roster in December to clear a roster spot for free-agent signee Erick Fedde. Injured players can’t be placed on outright waivers, so the fact that Navarro was outrighted a couple months back suggests this is a new injury that occurred in the offseason.

In the upper minors, Navarro has enjoyed better run prevention but still displayed shaky strikeout and walk tendencies. He notched a combined 3.59 ERA between Double-A and Triple-A in 2023 but did so while fanning just 19% of his opponents against a 16.1% walk rate. Navarro kept the ball on a huge 59.8% clip in the minors and at a 53.8% clip in the big leagues, leaning hard on a sinker that averaged 93.6 mph. That’s an encouraging trait, but he’ll need to drastically improve his K-BB profile if he’s to find sustained success at the game’s  top level. The injury in question will prevent his ability to refine that K-BB profile for at least the next year.

Navarro has never been considered among the White Sox’ top prospects, due in no small part to his poor command. He’s shown the ability to miss bats at times and has consistently piled up grounders at borderline elite levels, but the 6’1″ righty has also walked 12.8% of his opponents across all professional levels and plunked a whopping 44 batters in 273 professional innings. In all, he’s allowed 16.2% of his opponents to reach base without even putting a ball in play.