Phillies OF Johan Rojas out for 2025 season after UCL tear in right elbow

What happened

Johan Rojas will not play again in 2025. The Philadelphia Phillies revealed Wednesday that their outfielder suffered a UCL tear in his right elbow and is expected to need surgery, per Yahoo Sports. The club's stated plan — offered with an explicit "as of now" caveat — points to Rojas being ready for spring training next season.

The timing is particularly sharp. Rojas had been ramping up baseball activities in recent weeks as he approached the end of an 80-game suspension. Per Yahoo Sports, he was set to return from that ban on June 25. The UCL tear arrived during that ramp-up, ending the comeback before it could begin.

Why it matters

The suspension itself had already extracted a steep price. Rojas tested positive for the banned performance-enhancing drug Boldenone in March, per Yahoo Sports, which led to the league issuing an 80-game suspension and rendering him ineligible for the playoffs. The positive test also cost him his spot on the Dominican Republic's roster for the World Baseball Classic.

What made the June 25 return date meaningful was precisely what it could not restore: playoff eligibility. Rojas was already going to watch October from the outside regardless of how his elbow held up. The UCL tear removes even the consolation prize — a few weeks of regular-season at-bats to shake off the rust and remind the organization what they have in him heading into the offseason.

Instead, the Phillies now carry the uncertainty of a player who has not appeared in a game since before the suspension began, will undergo surgery, and whose recovery timeline points to spring training. That is a long runway, and a lot of unknowns packed into a single Wednesday announcement.

The sequence requires no embellishment: the suspension made him ineligible for the playoffs, and the injury made him ineligible for everything else. The 2025 season, for Rojas, is effectively closed in both directions at once.

The numbers

Rojas has spent his entire career with the Phillies organization since making his MLB debut with the club in 2023, per Yahoo Sports. His career line, as reported, includes a .224 batting average, one home run, and 18 RBI.

Those numbers represent a limited sample — the kind of early-career ledger that a full, healthy season could reshape substantially in either direction. The Phillies have not had the chance to find out. Between the suspension and now the elbow, Rojas has not had an uninterrupted stretch of availability since that 2023 debut. At 25 years old, per Yahoo Sports, he is a player the organization has been waiting to properly evaluate, and that wait just got longer.

Where the club stands

At 88-74 (.543), Philadelphia is a winning team that has nonetheless been eliminated from the NL East race, sitting 6 games back in the division. The wild card remains the relevant path forward, and the schedule ahead offers no soft landings. The Phillies head to Toronto on Wednesday, where Jesús Luzardo draws the start opposite Max Scherzer at Rogers Centre. From there, the club travels to Milwaukee for a pair at American Family Field: Tanner Banks goes Friday against Jacob Misiorowski, and Aaron Nola is lined up Saturday opposite Shane Drohan.

That rotation — Luzardo, Banks, Nola — will need to carry the load through a stretch where every game in the standings counts. The Phillies are riding a one-game winning streak into that run, which is either a good omen or the kind of detail that ages poorly by the weekend.

Rojas's absence does not change the immediate roster math in a dramatic way. He was not yet on the active roster and was not playoff-eligible regardless of when he returned. But it does close a door the organization had presumably been keeping open. A player returning from a lengthy ban with something to prove, even in a limited sample, is a different asset than a player heading into surgery. The Phillies now plan around the latter.

Under general league rules, a player placed on the 60-day injured list is removed from the 40-man roster count, which can create flexibility elsewhere. Whether the club makes any corresponding roster move is not addressed in the Yahoo Sports report.

What we don't know yet

Yahoo Sports does not specify a surgical timeline, a surgeon, or a more precise recovery window beyond the spring training target. The club's own "as of now" framing is worth preserving here — that is a goal, not a guarantee, and the Phillies themselves left room for the plan to shift.

It is also not reported whether Rojas will be placed on the 60-day injured list or what administrative moves, if any, accompany the announcement. The report addresses the injury and the surgery plan; the roster mechanics remain unaddressed.

The broader question — what the UCL tear means for Rojas's standing with the club going forward — is similarly open. A 25-year-old with a .224 career average and one home run is not a locked-in piece of any roster construction, but he is also not a player the organization has had a fair chance to evaluate. Surgery and a spring training return push that evaluation another full year down the road.

What to watch

The spring training target is the timeline to monitor. If Rojas is healthy and available when camp opens, the Phillies would have a full season to evaluate him in a context unencumbered by suspension or injury — the first such opportunity since his 2023 debut. If the recovery extends beyond that window, the calculus changes again, and the club's planning around the outfield position shifts accordingly.

For the immediate term, the Phillies' attention turns to the wild card chase and a road stretch that runs through Toronto and Milwaukee. Rojas is not part of that equation in 2025. Per Yahoo Sports, the next time he is expected to factor into the club's plans is spring training — and even that, the Phillies were careful to note, is the plan as of now.

The desk will be watching to see whether that qualifier ever gets removed.