I hate writing these ones.

Per a report from MSN, Leo De Vries, the number 2 overall prospect in baseball, needs surgery on his right shoulder, and the expected recovery is around eight months. He's 19. He's an infielder. And instead of whatever came next, he's now staring at a rehab calendar that runs into next season.

Eight months. For a teenager.

I care about the human in these stories way more than the timeline, always have. And what gets me here is the age. Nineteen years old, ranked second among every prospect in the sport, the kind of ranking that means an entire organization has decided you're the future. Every top prospect is one good stretch away from changing his whole family's life. Now the next phone call is from a surgeon instead.

And athletes do come back from this stuff now. Shoulder surgery isn't the boogeyman it used to be. The medical side of this sport has never been better, and big league rehab programs are built by people who treat recovery like a project they actually want to win. I keep reminding myself of that part.

But the mechanics are only half the story. The other half is a 19-year-old kid lying awake at night wondering if he'll still be the same player, and there's no MRI for that. That part gets lost between the injury report and the future lineup projection. It shouldn't be.

The baseball part stings too, I won't pretend otherwise. When a kid is ranked that high the whole sport is waiting on him, and now the waiting gets longer. I texted Dave Morgan when the news broke and got back a single sad face emoji, which about summed it up around here. Even the stats guys were rooting for this one.

If there's any silver lining, comebacks like this have a way of building the player you end up falling in love with later. Some of the best stories in the sport are the ones with a gap in the middle, the comeback chapter nobody expected to need. I'd rather he never needed the chapter. But he's going to write it anyway.

Get well soon, kid. The game will be waiting, and so will we.