The Athletics are shutting down Tyler Soderstrom for good. The outfielder is set to undergo surgery on his left hip, ending a 2026 season that saw him fight through pain since late June, according to MLB Trade Rumors.
This isn't a sudden development. Soderstrom first landed on the injured list with the hip impingement in late June, came back after a brief stay, and battled through it for about 5 weeks before Oakland shut him down again over the weekend. Trying to gut it out clearly took a toll behind the scenes even if the numbers didn't show it right away.
And that's what makes this one sting a little more. Soderstrom wasn't playing hurt and scuffling — he was mashing. Between his IL stints he hit.252/.322/.505 with 6 homers in 29 games, and he closed his season on an 11-game hitting streak. For the full year he put up a.245/.338/.472 line with 19 home runs across 453 plate appearances, an.810 OPS that made him one of the more productive young bats in Oakland's lineup.
Losing him is a real blow for a team still trying to figure out what it has in its young core, and it's an even bigger gut-punch for fantasy managers who rode the 24-year-old as a power bat down the stretch, especially with Sutter Health Park's hitter-friendly dimensions boosting his numbers at home. He's now unavailable for the rest of 2026, full stop.
The silver lining, such as it is: the surgery is being framed as a fix aimed at getting Soderstrom back to full health for next year, not a structural issue that threatens his career. He's coming off a breakout 2025 in which he hit 25 homers and drove in 93 RBI over 158 games, so the expectation is he returns as the middle-of-the-order threat Oakland has been building around. For now, though, the rehab clock starts and the 2026 chapter closes early.