Orioles' Matt Wieters to have surgery on elbow Tuesday, nine months recovery time expected

Ever since he first hit the disabled list, there has been hope that catcher Matt Wieters would be able to avoid season-ending surgery on his injured right elbow. Those hopes were finally dashed on Monday afternoon when the Orioles announced the outcome of his visit with Dr. James Andrews:

CA Matt Wieters is scheduled to have right UCL reconstruction tomorrow afternoon. Recovery time expected to be 9 months.

— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) June 16, 2014

Previously, the two sides had stated that July 1 was the deadline at which point he would just go for surgery, but he looks to have decided to move that ahead by a couple of weeks as it was apparent that things would not be getting better with rehab.

Surgery is an unfortunate outcome for the 2014 Orioles team since Wieters was having the best offensive season of his career, putting up a batting line of .300/.339/.500 in the 26 games he played before hitting the disabled list. He's been out for long enough that they've gotten used to getting by without him; now that'll last for the rest of the year.

Though Wieters was having a great year offensively, he'd only thrown out one base stealer out of 12 attempts. His career caught stealing percentage was 33%. The elbow may have been bothering him for a while before was placed on the DL.

With a nine month expected recovery time from June 17, Wieters would be getting back into game action with about two weeks left of spring training next year, barring any setbacks. Since 2015 will be his contract year, you can figure he probably would like to get a full, healthy season to put his best foot forward.