Jurickson Profar's Latest Setback

First, a timetable:

• In March of 2014, it was announced that Jurickson Profar would miss 10-12 weeks with a shoulder injury. Specifically, a tear in the teres major muscle in his shoulder. At the time, everyone who was anyone was quick to dismiss the idea of surgical intervention ever being necessary. I was skeptical.
   
• In late May of 2014, Profar re-injured the same muscle while on the rehab track. He was shut down for the season, to be re-evaluated at the end.
   
• Profar was expected to take part in the Dominican Winter League, but began having even more issues with the shoulder in September of 2014. Doctors recommended at this time that he have surgery to fix the muscle tear. Profar (politely?) declined, opting instead to strengthen the shoulder and surrounding muscles.
   
• Profar began a throwing program in January of 2015.
   
• Today, it has been announced that, after all this time, surgery will indeed be necessary. No timetable for his return has yet been announced.

So, if you're following at home, that's almost a full calendar year in which surgical intervention should have been an option, but for some reason wasn't. Beyond that, once it became an option, the team just allowed Profar to say, "Thanks for the advice, doc, but no thanks."

Furthermore, it's all but certain that by the end of it, the once-top prospect in all of baseball will have missed two full seasons of play because of an arm injury that should have been taken care of long ago.

I'm a huge fan of the current front office regime that is in place, but this, my friends, is an organizational failure from the top to the bottom. This shouldn't still be an issue, but it is. Profar's shoulder should have been operated on nearly a year ago, but wasn't. Even being conservative, the surgery should have been done in September when doctors said it was the best option.

And now, we very well may never know what Jurickson Profar might have been. Perhaps he'll come back and not miss a beat. I'm not seeing it. Not every player has the type of prodigious talent that allowed Josh Hamilton to excel at hitting Major League pitching without seeing anything more than about 95 plate appearances at the Double-A level 5 years prior. We can see how that lack of plate discipline is hurting him now.

Instead, we're left wondering exactly what Jurickson Profar is. I hope we're not heading toward wondering what he could have been, but my heart tells me that's where we'll end up. It's just a damn shame that no one in the organization stepped up and properly took charge of the situation.