Cubs’ Cade Horton gets brutal season-ending update on elbow injury from Craig Counsell

Story by

Zachary Weinberger, ClutchPoints

Tue, Apr 7, 2026 ·

2 min read

Cubs’ Cade Horton gets brutal season-ending update on elbow injury from Craig Counsell appeared first on ClutchPoints . Add ClutchPoints as a Preferred Source by clicking here .

As there have been Chicago Cubs pitchers to land themselves on the injured list, like Matthew Boyd , the latest news from the team’s staff puts a damper on the situation with Cade Horton . While the Cubs pitcher in Horton was visiting special doctors to see the extent of his injury, manager Craig Counsell has announced he will miss the rest of the season.

According to Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic, Counsell said that Horton will have elbow surgery that will, unfortunately, knock him out for the season.

“Craig Counsell announces Cade Horton will miss the season and undergo elbow surgery,” Sharma wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

So far this season, Horton had started two games, recording a 2.45 ERA to go along with four strikeouts, but most of that came in the first game on March 28 against the Washington Nationals . He would be pulled after one inning last Friday against the Cleveland Guardians .

MRI from Cubs’ Cade Horton was “not good”

Horton had reportedly undergone an MRI that was “not good” and “not clean,” per Jesse Rogers on the Kap and JHood Show on ESPN radio, and that the pitcher would see a doctor known as the “Tommy John guy” to see the latest.

“The news to this point is not good,” Rogers said. “I want to make sure I report it carefully here, because no decision has been made, but the MRI, per multiple sources, ‘not good, not clean.’ And so he is going to see Dr. Keith Meister today, that’s the Tommy John guy. That’s the guy that Justin Steele saw, so we’re headed down that path. Now, Dr. Meister might look at the MRI and say ‘no surgery required, we’ll do something else, rest him up, try some other things,” but this is kind of the path the Cubs are on.”

Now, with the news of Horton officially missing the rest of the season with elbow surgery, Chicago is down an impactful pitcher through 10 games of the early season.