There are injuries. And then there are those injuries that stop a season cold, that make an entire city exhale at once and ask: How are we supposed to replace him?
For the 2025 Phillies, that day came Saturday. Zack Wheeler, their ace, their workhorse, their October anchor, won’t throw another pitch this season. The diagnosis: venous thoracic outlet syndrome.
It’s not just rare. It’s one of the scariest medical phrases in baseball. It means a vein in Wheeler’s throwing shoulder has been compressed, forcing dangerous blood clots to form. He already had one surgery on August 18 to remove a clot. Now comes the bigger step: thoracic outlet decompression surgery, which often requires the removal of a rib.
The timeline? Six to eight months. Which means Wheeler’s 2025 season is over. Which means Opening Day 2026 is no guarantee.
“It’s disappointing, but everybody knows it’s out of our control,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. “We’re happy he’s going to be healthy, because it’s a very serious thing that he went through.”
Think about where Wheeler was just two weeks ago. He wasn’t just pitching well, he was in the middle of another Cy Young chase. His 195 strikeouts led the National League. His 2.71 ERA ranked among the league’s best. He had thrown 149 2/3 innings, and he had once again positioned himself as one of the most durable, dependable starters in the sport.
For context, since 2021 Wheeler has twice finished as the NL Cy Young runner-up. In that four-year span, he’s racked up more innings than any starter in baseball except Sandy Alcántara. That’s how much he meant to this rotation. That’s how much he meant to this October.
And then came August 15. A start in Washington, five innings, nothing that looked alarming from the stands. But Wheeler felt it: an unusual “heaviness” in his shoulder. He flagged it to the team. The Nationals’ team doctors checked him the next day. That’s when the blood clot was discovered.
“Completely unrelated” to the shoulder soreness Wheeler had experienced earlier, Phillies head athletic trainer Paul Buchheit said. But unrelated or not, it was serious. Wheeler’s season, in a blink, was over.
“I’m glad he’s OK and the prognosis is he’ll be back relatively soon in the [2026] season,” said Dave Dombrowski, the Phillies’ president of baseball operations. “But this is not something you mess around with.”
Thoracic outlet syndrome has ended careers. It has also rebooted them.
The venous version, the kind Wheeler has, is the rarest and least common subtype. In his case, the surgery is meant to decompress the shoulder by removing part of the rib cage. The hope: allow blood flow to return to normal and prevent clots from forming. The rehab is often six to eight months, with throwing resuming after about eight weeks if all goes smoothly.
It sounds daunting, and it is. But baseball has seen pitchers come back. Merrill Kelly, now a mainstay with the Texas Rangers, had venous TOS surgery in 2020 with the Diamondbacks. He missed the rest of that season, came back in 2021 to make 27 starts, and then threw 200 innings the following year. He has since turned himself into one of the most reliable starters in the American League.
That’s the model. That’s the hope.
Now, the challenge: how do the Phillies survive the rest of this season without him?
The answer starts with Aaron Nola, who, not coincidentally, pitched Saturday night. He threw six innings against the Nationals, his fastball velocity ticking up, his curveball biting again. He earned his first win since May 3. And he’ll need a lot more of those if this team is going to navigate October without Wheeler.
But it won’t just be Nola. Cristopher Sánchez, Ranger Suárez, and Jesús Luzardo all slide up a chair at the big table now. The Phillies don’t have a choice. Wheeler’s absence means everyone else just got promoted, whether they’re ready for it or not.
In the meantime, Wheeler’s 2025 will go down as a season of cruel timing. At 35, he was putting together one of the finest years of his career. He was in line for another run at the Cy Young. He was once again proving to be one of the most complete pitchers in baseball, showing power, command, durability, and the ability to dominate lineups two and three times through.
Instead, his season ends with a medical diagnosis few fans had ever heard of. His year ends with surgery, a rib to be removed, and an uncertain clock ticking toward 2026.
“It’s a very serious thing that he went through,” Thomson said.
And that’s the lens the Phillies are trying to use. Baseball can wait. Cy Young races can wait. For now, the good news is Wheeler’s prognosis. He should be back at some point next season, healthy enough to resume what has quietly been one of the great pitching runs in franchise history.
So here’s what Saturday was: the Phillies beat the Nationals. Aaron Nola won for the first time in three months. Edmundo Sosa and Trea Turner homered. And yet, the real headline was three words Phillies fans dreaded to hear: Wheeler. Out. Season.
The Phillies don’t just lose an arm. They lose the pitcher who has defined their identity every fifth day. The pitcher who carried them into Octobers. The pitcher who was supposed to do it again.
Now they’ll have to find a way to do it without him.
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