Cubs’ Ben Brown Undergoes Neck Surgery

Cubs right-hander Ben Brown underwent cervical spine surgery yesterday, reports ESPN’s Jesse Rogers. He won’t be cleared to throw until early next year. The organization hopes that he can be ready at some point in the first half of the 2027 season. Cubs GM Carter Hawkins told Marquee Sports’ Elise Menaker that the team was “likely to move forward with the surgical option” for Brown earlier this morning, but it seems the procedure had already taken place at that point.

Brown’s surgery only makes the Cubs’ rotation need more acute. Chicago saw Matthew Boyd, Kevin Gausman, Clay Holmes, David Peterson, Shota Imanaga and Colin Rea all become free agents at season’s end. Top starter Justin Steele hasn’t pitched since April 2025 due to UCL surgery and some setbacks during his 2026 recovery. Cade Horton, the 2025 NL Rookie of the Year runner-up, underwent his own UCL surgery this past April and will likely be sidelined into the ’27 campaign himself.

The Cubs will certainly hope that Steele will be ready to take the ball early next year, nearly two years out from surgery. It’s hard to know what kind of workload to expect from him, however. Edward Cabrera is slated to return to the rotation and will hope for better results than he delivered in an injury-ruined first year with Chicago in 2026. Swingman Javier Assad would be in line for rotation work right now, and the same could be true of deadline pickup Braxton Garrett. The Cubs only gave Garrett five big league innings after acquiring him from Miami, but the former No. 7 overall pick was a quality starter for the Marlins in 2022-23 before missing most of the 2024-25 seasons due to injury.

President of baseball operations Jed Hoyer has a pair of corner outfielders to replace (Ian Happ, Seiya Suzuki), but those pursuits will presumably take a back seat to refilling a rotation that’s nowhere near close to strong enough to compete — even with a quality lineup and elite defense in place. The Cubs aren’t expected to make a serious run at Tarik Skubal but will scour the remainder of the free agent and trade markets in the three weeks leading up to the likely lockout that’ll freeze all major league transactions until a new collective bargaining agreement between the league the MLB Players Association is in place.

The extent to which Hoyer succeeds in restocking the staff — and keeping said arms healthy — will determine Brown’s role whenever he’s ready to return. He’s worked as both a starter and reliever since coming over from the Phillies in the 2022 David Robertson trade. Brown had a terrific run in the bullpen to begin the 2026 season before utterly laying waste to MLB hitters upon an early-May shift to the rotation. From May 8 through June 19 (when he suffered a season-ending neck injury), Brown pitched 42 1/3 innings with a 1.70 ERA, 25% strikeout rate, 6.7% walk rate and 40.7% ground-ball rate.

Whether in the rotation, a high-leverage/late-inning role, or in a multi-inning bullpen capacity, Brown will have a place on the Cubs’ staff once healthy — likely an important one. He’s controllable for another four seasons, through 2030, and is arbitration-eligible for the first time this winter as a Super Two player. MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz projects a $1.3MM salary for Brown in his first trip through that process.