Morrow hopes to avoid surgery on radial nerve

TORONTO -- Blue Jays right-hander Brandon Morrow is still at least three weeks away from picking up a baseball and may require surgery on the entrapped radial nerve in his right forearm that ended his season.

Currently, the 29-year-old is in the middle of a six-week moratorium from throwing and will find out in the next few weeks whether surgery will be required to release the entrapped nerve. The surgery would take place in October with an expected recovery time of three months.

In about three weeks when Morrow is able to resume throwing, he will slowly amp up his rehab. Morrow will then decide if surgery is necessary in order to be ready for Spring Training in 2014.

"To test it, I need to be off the mound throwing bullpens at 100 percent effort level," Morrow said. "I can't go through and baby it. I need to know if it's going to be good or not."

The Blue Jays starter has been dealing with the issue since late May, but after the typical rehab process failed to produce any significant results, Morrow was shut down for the season.

"I think we were hoping with a little bit of rest and rehab it would respond better and the nerve would release itself or that the time off and the rehab would help with the compression," Morrow said. "But then when I tried to amp it up and get off the mound, [that] extra five or 10 percent effort level makes a big difference. Then it was the same as it was at the end of May."

Morrow first felt the pain halfway through his start on May 23 vs. Baltimore with what he described as "light soreness." He then pitched his bullpen session and made his next start against Atlanta on the May 28, but found the injury too much and was pulled after two innings.

Morrow tried different amounts of rest and rehab attempting to make sure he could come back and pitch a meaningful number of innings, but when he was just three days away from making his first rehab start, he realized that he couldn't pitch through it.

"I just couldn't go forward like that," Morrow said. "Not only painful, but it was affecting my mechanics. Trying to work around it, I could tell it was affecting too much."

It's made for a very frustrating summer for Morrow, who only made 10 starts in going 2-3 with a 5.63 ERA and 42 strikeouts in 54 1/3 innings.

"It's been tough. Tough to watch. Tough for me to watch, even turn on a game," Morrow said. "To even watch games, you feel like the sick kid during winter and watching all your friends sled outside, and you're at the window like, 'why can't I join?'"

It also marks another year in which Morrow has failed to make 25 starts, something he's only accomplished twice in his seven-year big league career.