Padres right-hander Luis Perdomo underwent Tommy John surgery last week, The Athletic’s Dennis Lin reports (via Twitter). As per the usual 12-15 month recovery timeline, Perdomo will almost certainly miss the entire 2021 season.
Perdomo spent some time on the injured list in September due to forearm inflammation, though he returned to pitch one more game for San Diego on September 16 before being sent to the team’s alternate training site for most of the remainder of the season, and he didn’t pitch during the Padres’ playoff run.
Acquired via the Rule 5 draft in December 2015, Perdomo has never pitched above the high-A ball level when he made his Major League debut in 2016, though he showed some hints of rotation-level durability and potential during his first two seasons with the Padres. Unfortunately for Perdomo, shoulder problems set him back in 2018, and he then re-emerged as more or less a full-time reliever in 2019. He didn’t quite fit the normal relief pitcher model given his knack for generating grounders (57.3% career ground ball rate) rather than strikeouts (career 6.7 K/9), but Perdomo posted a solid 4.00 ERA over 72 frames during the 2019 season. Between his forearm issue this season and being shuttled back and forth from the alternate training site, however, Perdomo became something of an afterthought for San Diego.
Perdomo will be eligible for arbitration for the second time this winter, and he already looked like a potential non-tender candidate even before his injury. MLBTR’s Matt Swartz projected (depending on how arbiters view 2020 statistics) a salary range of $1.1MM / $1.2MM / $1.0MM for Perdomo through the arb process. It isn’t out of the question that the Padres could non-tender Perdomo and then re-sign him to a minor league deal as he rehabilitates, or it’s also possible that Perdomo might have to wait until the 2021-22 offseason before landing his next contract.