Reds righty to miss start of 2023 season with shoulder injury

Reds right-hander Justin Dunn “will be shut down for a couple of months” in order to recover from inflammation in the right subscapularis muscle of his rotator cuff, MLB.com’s Mark Sheldon writes. The shutdown comes on the recommendation of a specialist, and it doesn’t appear as though surgery will be required.

While that counts as good news for Dunn, it will mark the third straight season that he has missed considerable time due to shoulder problems. The result was only 50 1/3 innings for Dunn with the Mariners in 2021, and then 31 frames in 2022, his first season in Cincinnati. With the injuries playing a factor, Dunn posted an underwhelming 4.65 ERA, 19.7% strikeout rate and 12.9% walk rate over those 81 1/3 combined innings.

As Dunn is now entering his age-27 season and his fifth MLB campaign, he has yet to really lift off following his selection as the 19th overall pick of the 2016 draft. The Mets were Dunn’s original team, but the righty was included as part of the Robinson Cano/Edwin Diaz blockbuster trade with Seattle in December 2018, and was then part of another prominent deal last March when the Reds sent Eugenio Suarez and Jesse Winker to the Mariners.

Although cutting payroll was the most significant factor in that trade from Cincinnati’s perspective, obtaining a former top-100 prospect and a big league-ready starter in Dunn obviously helped the Reds sign off on that particular swap. More than a year after that deal, Dunn’s future as a potential member of the Reds rotation is still uncertain, which isn’t ideal for either Dunn or a team going through a rebuilding period.

While there’s some fluidity involved in Dunn’s recovery, if he doesn’t get back to baseball activities until May, he might not be fully ramped up and ready to start games until perhaps late June or even into the second half of the season. It is possible Cincinnati could bring Dunn back as a reliever in order to shorten his recovery time, just to get him into action and get some innings under his belt in 2023, before then stretching him back out as a starter next spring. More will be known when Dunn is re-examined down the road, and if there are any setbacks in his recovery, surgery might yet be an option as an answer to his ongoing shoulder injuries.