MILWAUKEE – For the second time in a week, a Cubs starter is faced with the possibility that he might not make any more starts this season.
But Ben Brown, the right-hander who went from the Opening Day bullpen to posting the best numbers in an injury-ravaged rotation, is seeing the stress fracture in his neck as a blessing in disguise.
This is the same injury that cost Brown the back half of his 2024 season, it turns out, a revelation that has given Brown and the Cubs a lot more confidence that they can iron things out more efficiently than two years ago.
The diagnosis then of a benign growth on a bone in Brown’s neck, an osteoma, was “totally wrong,” Brown said Saturday. The clear discovery of the stress fracture this time around means the team won’t have to take time to figure out what’s bugging Brown, and he’ll be quickly shut down from throwing while his vertebrae heals over the next several weeks – something that didn’t happen as he rehabbed in 2024, which meant the pain persisted.
What does all this mean for Brown’s timeline? It means that the window for Brown to heal and then ramp back up as a starting pitcher isn’t very big.
Potentially, Brown could wind up facing the same fate as lefty Justin Steele, who needs enough time to ramp up from his own injury setback that team president Jed Hoyer said it’s “unrealistic” that he’d return as a starter this year.
“You shut down a starter for a long time, it takes a while [for them to get back to the point where they’re stretched out enough to go deep into games],” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said Saturday. “The time frame to get him back as a starter, it takes out a big chunk of the season, for sure.”
In an ideal world, Brown would like to get back as soon as he can, and boy, wouldn’t that be nice for a Cubs team dealing with an avalanche of pitching injuries that’s threatening to bury it in the middle of the summer?
But the revelations about this injury – and its now-understood recurrence – has him focusing on the long term of his career and on figuring out how he can change what he does as a pitcher to make this the last time he deals with it.
“Ultimately, there’s just stress on my bone. Something in my throw or in my mechanics is leading to that,” he said. “There’s something that I’m doing that’s causing it, and I’m working night and day to get to the bottom of that.
“As far as career outlook goes, there’s almost a positivity around that, like, ‘Hey, we might be able to actually figure this out.’”
Any fan of “Schoolhouse Rock” knows that knowledge is power, and Brown is finally well armed, even if he’s going through a worse injury than he did two years ago.
That had the 26-year-old with the 1.85 ERA – baseball’s fourth lowest among pitchers who have thrown at least 60 innings – sounding downright upbeat, even if he’s facing a long recovery period that could dramatically limit, alter or maybe even wipe out the remainder of his season.
“Sometimes a more defined thing might seem worse. I even said it the other day, ‘I feel worse this time around.’ But it’s almost like it’s a good thing,” Brown said. “We can figure this out the right way. … I’m optimistic, the team’s optimistic.
“The biggest thing is figuring out how to not let this happen again. Because the bone could heal, I could come back this year, it could be great, throw some really good innings and contribute to this awesome team. But I want to pitch five years from now.
“What does that look like? And that’s the biggest focus right now is, ‘What can we do practically to get on top of the curve here?’”