The Boston Globe had a more pessimistic take on the timeline:Weren’t the reports that 4-6 months is the average recovery time for this kind of surgery? Assuming that’s true, one would think late June/early July is realistic unless he has a setback.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/10/sports/red-sox-infielder-trevor-story-likely-miss-time-after-elbow-surgery/
The "good" news is that the general medical consensus is that there will be nothing to prevent him from playing SS once he returns to full strength, so not sure why people seem to think that he'll never play there again. Given that pitchers have successfully recovered from elbow surgery, not sure why it would be any different for shortstops.That process has yielded much faster recovery times than the typical 12-18 months for Tommy John. Lefthander Rich Hill underwent an internal brace procedure in the fall of 2019 and was ready to pitch in July 2020. Outfielder Brandon Guyer also underwent a successful internal brace procedure in 2019.
The return to games is not as simple, however, as figuring out when Story will be able to swing and throw at full strength. At that point, which might take 5-6 months, he’d still need to work to regain his game stamina and timing.
“He has to hit and he has to throw if he’s going to play in the middle infield at the major league level. That requires a good amount of throwing and force. It’s not like you play two games a week. It’s a lot,” said Dr. Jeffrey Dugas of the Andrews Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Center, who performed the first internal brace procedure on an elbow in August 2013 and estimated he performed 170-180 such repairs in 2022. “I would think it would be somewhere in the 6-9-month range. That would be a fair range.”