MILWAUKEE -- Eager to build upon a 2025 season in which he was the Brewers’ most reliable starting pitcher, Quinn Priester tried everything to get 2026 on track. Nerve-blockers. Anti-inflammatories. Massage, cupping and scraping. Hot tubs. Blood flow restriction machines. He even worked on his everyday posture.
None of it solved the symptoms of thoracic outlet syndrome, and so Priester has been left with only one option: Season-ending surgery.
“We’ve just gotten to a point where none of those things are working,” Priester said ahead of the finale against the Guardians on Thursday afternoon at American Family Field.
He will undergo decompression surgery on Monday in Dallas with Dr. Gregory Pearl, one of the leading specialists in T.O.S., a condition in which the bundle of nerves running through the neck to the lower extremities is squeezed, causing numbness, discomfort, and in the case of a pitcher like Priester, loss of the feel necessary to command the baseball.
During surgery, Pearl will remove Priester’s first rib to create space around the nerves, leaving Priester with a permanent memento to remember what has been the most difficult saga of his career.
“Four months of trying things can be tough,” Priester said. “I’m confident going forward that this is the right decision. This is going to get me back and better than I was.”
After surgery, he expects to resume plyometric throwing at the 8-10 week mark, then light catch at 12 weeks, then a build-up to the mound. Based on peers who have had the same surgery, including Phillies ace Zack Wheeler last year, Priester anticipates it could take 8-10 months before his body is back to feeling 100 percent.
That gives the 25-year-old a long runway to help the Brewers. He has four years of club control remaining, starting with his final pre-arbitration season in 2027.
Priester’s symptoms date back to last season, when the Brewers won 19 consecutive games in which he pitched before wrist soreness began to be an issue in the waning weeks of the regular season and into the postseason. He thought he’d be ready to go this season after plenty of rest, but symptoms returned early in the spring and wouldn’t allow Priester to stack productive mound sessions on top of each other.
He learned along the way that T.O.S. is not a simple diagnosis. Instead, it requires excluding other possibilities, one by one, and as Priester describes things like injections into his scalenes (muscles in the neck) and loss of proprioception overhead, he sounds like a doctor. Perhaps that’s because he has spent so much time talking through options with Pearl and Priester’s own uncle Paul, who happens to be a vascular surgeon in Philadelphia.
“We really did try to go down every avenue to try to help the team this year,” Priester said. “But at this point, we’re going to start repeating the same treatments rather than going in and getting a complete fix from this situation, and then being 100 percent next year with no reservations.
“It’s just the best decision for the organization to make sure I’m 100 percent next year, not 90-95 percent. Let alone the mental thing of, ‘Hey, this isn’t completely cleared up.'”
The mental toll has been significant. For long stretches of this season, Priester felt healthy but couldn’t get any results. In eight Minor League starts he posted video game numbers, but not in the way you want: 16 innings, 28 earned runs, 22 hits, 24 walks, four hit batters, six wild pitches. Twice, the Brewers recalled Priester from rehab assignment to reset, most recently last week after another poor outing in the Rookie-level Arizona Complex League.
His wife, Regan, gave him strength to keep going. Priester also saw a psychologist. His body just wouldn’t cooperate with the determination he felt in his mind.
“Some of those outings were rough ones, and not ones that I’m accustomed to even when I have a bad day,” Priester said. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, these are just bad games.’ They were controllable things, and it was definitely difficult to go to bed and be like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to figure it out tomorrow.’”
Now, it’s time to try surgery.
“We came to the conclusion that we’ve worked really hard at this and we’ve done everything we can,” Priester said. “Unfortunately, this is the next step.”