Rookie Emerson to have season-ending left wrist surgery

SEATTLE -- The Mariners had been bracing for the possibility that Colt Emerson’s first season in the big leagues had come to an end, and that is indeed the case.

General manager Justin Hollander announced before Monday’s game against the Phillies that the rookie shortstop will undergo surgery on Wednesday to repair the displaced tendon in his left wrist.

Dr. Donald Sheridan, the orthopedist in Arizona that Emerson met with when the issue first surfaced in February, will perform the procedure.

“He will be ready for the season next year,” Hollander said. “No concerns on that.”

Hollander added that Emerson will have limitations to his offseason workouts -- specifically, that he won’t be able to swing for most, if not all, of the winter. The club will tailor a recovery plan that includes upper-body weightlifting that will be modified as needed.

It’s likely that Emerson will be monitored closely in Spring Training as well.

Emerson was placed on the 10-day injured list on Aug. 14 in Houston, one day after a conversation with Hollander, president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto and manager Dan Wilson in New York about the club’s decision to option him to Triple-A Tacoma amid struggles extending two months.

It was during that confab that Emerson raised the wrist issue more vocally. The club then determined instead to place him on the Major League IL instead of optioning him.

From there, Emerson met again with Sheridan, who’d suggested during their first consult that Emerson might eventually necessitate surgery.

“This year, it just got much worse for him,” Hollander said. “So again, different guys have different pain thresholds. My belief is that Colt Emerson has a really high one, and he played to the point until he felt like it had crossed the threshold of being smart for him to continue to play.”

Dipoto said during the development’s immediate aftermath that it would explain much of Emerson’s struggles. He also suggested at the time, once the severity of the issue became more clear, that the club was anticipating surgery as a possibility.

“It also gives me some comfort to understand what happened during his time here,” Dipoto said.

“He just wants to compete. He wants to contribute. It's hard to hit with a bad wrist, and it's especially hard to hit with a bad wrist when you're trying to play against a level of competition you've never played before.”

When Emerson debuted on May 17, he was just 20 years and 301 days old -- making him the youngest in franchise history to do so since Félix Hernández in 2005, when he was 19.

That came just seven weeks after Emerson signed an eight-year, $95 million contract extension, which was the richest in MLB history for a player who’d yet to reach The Show.

Over his first 23 games, Emerson slashed .237/.310/.566 (.876 OPS) with six homers, which included a few awe-inspiring moments -- headlined by homering for his first MLB hit. But in 46 games since then, he slashed .166/.212/.214 (.426 OPS) and saw his strikeout rate climb from 28.6% to 37.6%.

After Emerson’s conversation with Mariners brass in New York, it became clear that the wrist issue was more significant, which culminated with the decision to undergo surgery.

“As was the case when we were intending to option him, the biggest thing was just doing the right thing for Colt, and getting him on track,” Dipoto said.