Cubs' Justin Steele scheduled for season-ending elbow surgery
LOS ANGELES – Cubs left-hander Justin Steele called pitching coach Tommy Hottovy on Saturday to deliver the news: He was going to undergo season-ending elbow surgery.
“He wanted me to know from him, and talk through it a little bit, and talk through what options he had and what plans he had,” Hottovy said Sunday afternoon. “And that’s the kind of guy he is. He wants to respect the work we've all put in together. And we’ve known each other for a long time now, too.”
Hottovy’s voice wavered and eventually broke as he acknowledged the emotions of the moment.
Steele is scheduled to undergo surgery on Friday to repair his flexor tendon and address his compromised ulnar collateral ligament, manager Craig Counsell announced Sunday.
“He's got a great attitude about it, as he always does, and knows that it's kind of part of the career that he's chosen,” Counsell said. “And just take it a step at a time and do the best he can to come back even better.”
The team expects to have a better sense of Steele’s recovery timeline after the surgery. It will be unclear until then the degree to which Steele’s UCL needs to be reinforced, Counsell said, whether that be a full Tommy John surgery or a less extensive repair.
Dr. Keith Meister, who has made elbow reconstruction a specialty, is set to perform the procedure, according to the team.
“It's just a bump in the road,” Hottovy said. “But where he is in his career, what he's been able to prove, excited and confident that when he does get through this and comes back, that he can be his dominant self again. Conversations with Justin have just been centered around the positivity of that and trying to make sure that we understand where we are in the journey.”
Steele has had a series of elbow and forearm issues over the past three seasons, including IL stints in June 2023 and September 2024. He also underwent Tommy John surgery in 2017 as a minor-leaguer.
“By nature, what we do as pitchers is not natural,” Hottovy said. “And guys just wear that force in the brunt of their throwing motion differently. Some guys, you see it in the shoulder, some on the elbow. And Justin is just one of those guys, with how he throws, the elbow has always been the point where we'd have the most force.
“You can look back to a lot of a lot of innings over the last few years and some stints where the elbow wasn't feeling great — you try to give him time. But I can't speak to a specific time or anything that caused it.”
Coming out of his last such stint, a two and a half week stay on the IL last September, Steele made two more starts to finish the season. Then, with the mid-March Tokyo Series on the horizon, he said he only took about 10 days off before resuming catch play.
“Part of the offseason training was, ‘Okay, I want to make sure that my elbow is feeling good through the offseason,’” Hottovy said. “Because what you didn't want to do is come back, make two starts, shut it down, and then ramp it back up and then it's like, ‘Okay, now it's flared up again.’ Because he didn't have any of that [this offseason]. He was able to just to play light catch, keep moving, and he was able to kind of stay on a normal routine.”
Though Steele gave up five home runs in his first three starts of the season combined, he improved every start, culminating in seven shutout innings against the Rangers last week.
As his elbow tightened midway through that dominant start, Steele continued to talk through the issue with Hottovy and Counsell. But the cold made it unclear whether the sensation stemmed from an injury or the temperature.
“The two days after, he really started to feel better,” Hottovy said. “So in my mind, I was kind of getting to the point where, he might just be over the hump here. But then when they went in there and saw some of the changes from the end of the year last year, you start putting the pieces together in your head. OK, if this is going to keep happening, if it's going to get a little bit worse every single time, what does that mean?”