Milwaukee Brewers starter Brandon Woodruff is hurt again. That much is clear. What isn’t clear yet is whether he’ll need another surgery, but manager Pat Murphy isn’t ruling it out.
The Brewers placed Woodruff on the 15-day injured list with right labrum inflammation after he left his last start early. It’s the same shoulder that cost him the entire 2024 season after he went under the knife. Murphy told reporters, including Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that the setback wasn’t a total shock.
“It wasn’t totally a surprise,” Murphy said. “Not a surprise. I mean, the alternate thing is he can have another surgery.”
That phrasing carries weight. Murphy didn’t dance around the possibility. He just laid it out there. And when a manager starts talking about surgery as an alternative, you know they’re preparing for the worst.
Woodruff’s health has been a mess for three years now. He missed all of 2024 recovering from shoulder surgery. Then in 2025 he made only 12 appearances because of a lat strain. This season he got nine starts before the shoulder flared up again. Those nine starts were good — a 2.98 ERA and 47 strikeouts against 10 walks — but they’re just another small sample in a career that keeps getting interrupted.
The Brewers are chasing another NL Central title. Losing Woodruff from the rotation hurts. There’s no way around it. But the bigger question is about his long-term future. He has spent his entire nine-year career in Milwaukee. Two All-Star nods. A career 3.10 ERA. Over 900 strikeouts. When he’s healthy, he’s the kind of pitcher you build a rotation around.
The problem is that version of Woodruff barely shows up anymore. Injuries have become the story. They’ve chipped away at his availability season after season. A lat strain here. A shoulder issue there. Now inflammation in the same area he already had repaired.
It’s worth noting that Woodruff pitched through a tough stretch before this latest injury. His velocity was down in some outings but the results were still solid. The Brewers hoped rest would do the trick. It didn’t. Now they’re back in wait-and-see mode. Surgery might be the only way to get him back to something close to his old self. But no one is pretending that’s a simple fix.
For now, Woodruff is sidelined indefinitely. The Brewers will re-evaluate him in a couple weeks and go from there. Whether he avoids another operation or finally goes under again, the clock on his prime years keeps ticking.
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