TORONTO -- The Blue Jays have placed starter Shane Bieber on the 15-day IL with right teres major inflammation, another significant blow to a rotation that’s spent all season weathering them.
There was no indication this news was coming Tuesday. Bieber missed around the first half of the season, dealing with some lingering elbow and forearm issues from the Blue Jays’ World Series run in 2025, but he’s appeared to be healthy ever since he returned in late June.
Bieber has looked so much sharper in recent weeks and is coming off his best outing of the season, seven innings of one-run ball against the Rays with seven strikeouts. He’s looked like his old self, which has been perfectly timed for a team making a postseason push and a pitcher nearing free agency. Now, he’s back on the IL, right alongside too many other Blue Jays starters.
“He felt a little bit of discomfort in his bullpen Sunday in New York,” John Schneider said, “so he had an MRI that night when we got back. It’s a moderate to mild teres major injury, which sucks for him and sucks for us. He’ll be down from throwing for a couple of weeks and we’ll go from there.”
A couple of weeks takes the Blue Jays nearly halfway through their remaining 30 games, and even in a best-case scenario, it’s unlikely Bieber leaps right back into the rotation without building back up a bit. At first glance, this feels like a situation where the Blue Jays are hoping to have Bieber back by the end of the season -- or, in a perfect world, for the postseason -- but the next two weeks will be crucial.
The Blue Jays have already been without José Berríos, Cody Ponce and Bowden Francis for the season, and Trey Yesavage recently joined them after undergoing surgery to repair the meniscus in his left knee. Jameson Taillon, acquired to support this rotation at the Deadline, is on the IL with a forearm injury. Bieber already spent extensive time on the IL, and Max Scherzer has seen multiple stints this season as well. Add in the fact that the Blue Jays dealt Kevin Gausman at the Trade Deadline, and this feels so far away from Spring Training, when we wondered how the Blue Jays would manage such an impressive group of starters.
Schneider is halfway to a medical degree point. Pregame Tuesday, he listed off just a handful of the strange new injuries he’s had to memorize over the season for his daily media updates. There has to be frustration, but Schneider has never shown it.
“You just can’t. You’ve got to figure out a way to figure it out,” Schneider said. “This is tough timing, for sure, with where we are and how Shane was throwing, too. We’ve dealt with it before this year and we’ll continue to do it. I haven’t said ‘Woe is me’ yet and I’m not going to do it the rest of the way. You’ve got to figure out a way to handle it.”
As it stands, the Blue Jays’ rotation is: Dylan Cease, José Soriano, Max Scherzer and Spencer Arrighetti. Even in Arrighetti’s spot, he’s still in the process of stretching back out after a recent IL stint of his own, but anyone capable of throwing more than four innings qualifies as a “starter” right now. Taillon looks like the Blue Jays’ first shot at a true replacement, and is scheduled to pitch in a rehab game with Triple-A Buffalo on Friday. If that goes well and he lands around 50 pitches, the Blue Jays could slide him right into the rotation the next time through. It’s a big ask, but the Blue Jays need all the help they can get.
This puts the Blue Jays in scramble mode once again. Chad Dallas has been recalled and can be part of the solution alongside Simeon Woods Richardson, who straddled the line between starter and “bulk reliever” but could be asked to stretch deeper. In Triple-A, the Blue Jays also have CJ Van Eyk and John Klein, but regardless of how they patch this together, it’s going to be awfully difficult to replace Bieber.