Garrett Mitchell Has Been Pulled from His Rehab Assignment, This Time Due to a Shoulder Injury

It was, for a moment, highly encouraging. Garrett Mitchell stroked a clean RBI single to right field Friday night, his third hit of the night. Mitchell was well ahead of Blake Perkins in terms of the timeline on which each could finish their rehab stint and join the major-league team. Then, in a moment of confusion, things went wrong.

Having taken a hard turn around first base, Mitchell turned and dove clumsily back into the bag to avoid having the defense throw behind him. In the process, he appeared to jam and roll over his left shoulder, a joint on which he already had to have surgery, back in 2023. That time, it was because of a frantic slide on a chaotic extra-inning play in Seattle, trying to reach third base and to hold the bag with an oven mitt-style glove on his left hand. On that play, he suffered a shoulder subluxation, which sidelined him from mid-April until the tail end of that campaign.

We don't yet have any information indicating that this injury is equally serious, but Pat Murphy struck a resigned and worried tone in relaying the news of the injury (and the rescinsion of Mitchell's rehab assignment) Saturday morning in Minneapolis. Murphy confirmed that the injury was to the left shoulder, and said that Mitchell will get imaging in Milwaukee to follow up, because the MRI he underwent in Nashville was inconclusive. The reason for that inability to render a diagnosis, though, is foreboding: there was too much swelling in the area to read the scan cleanly.

Mitchell now figures to be out until at least the other side of the All-Star break, although the Brewers declined to give any timeline for the injury Saturday. It's a painful blow, both for the disruption it adds to the developmental process of the young Mitchell and for a team in need of the dynamic skill set he brings to the diamond.

Already 26 (and set to turn 27 in early September), Mitchell has suffered so many injuries that his high-variance profile has yet to be sufficiently tested in the major leagues. He'll be arbitration-eligible for the first time this winter and can become a free agent after the 2028 season. He was making his way back from an oblique strain when this interrupted things. By no means is time truly running out on him—not yet—but the health issues have held him to just 141 games and 443 plate appearances to date, spangled across four seasons. This latest setback, which feels so regrettably avoidable (not in the sense that Mitchell made a poor baserunning choice, but in that it was an ordinary baseball play that rarely results in injury), poses the latest threat to Mitchell's medium-term viability as a part of the Brewers' positional core. The results of his further testing will be important, but the news is already looking rough.