There’s a quiet cruelty to this game, and it visited Phoenix this week. Corbin Burnes, Arizona’s prized offseason acquisition and one of the game’s true artists on the mound, will undergo Tommy John surgery. His season, and likely much of his next, is over. It’s the latest reminder that for all the analytics, scouting reports, and medical advancements, the ligament in a pitcher’s elbow remains the ultimate dealer in baseball’s high-stakes game of chance.

The Diamondbacks, to their credit, did what contenders are supposed to do. They pushed their chips to the center of the table, handing Burnes a six-year, $210 million deal to anchor a rotation that could stand toe-to-toe with the mighty Dodgers. For a time, it worked — Burnes delivered brilliance, posting a 2.66 ERA while giving Arizona a fighting chance in the brutal NL West. But as manager Torey Lovullo described with the blunt honesty that comes from too much experience: “These things happen in this game.”

Now, Arizona is left to pick up the pieces. Already burdened by injuries to Jordan Montgomery and Eduardo Rodriguez, the rotation that once inspired such hope feels precariously thin. The path forward becomes murky: do they stand pat, deal away veterans like Gallen, Kelly, and Suárez, or attempt to thread the needle and do both? This was never the plan. But as baseball teaches us, plans rarely survive first contact with a 95 mph fastball and a fragile UCL.

And then, of course, there is the larger, industry-wide question that haunts every front office: is any starting pitcher truly worth a long-term commitment anymore? Just ask the Yankees with Gerrit Cole, the Dodgers with Yamamoto, or now the Diamondbacks with Burnes. Each club has seen the rewards of elite arms — but also the staggering risk. Even as medical science can reconstruct elbows with remarkable precision, it cannot yet promise durability.

This is where executives like David Stearns zig while others zag. In an era where franchises spend hundreds of millions on aces, Stearns has opted for volume and flexibility — short-term deals, pitching labs, and depth over dominance. It’s less romantic, to be sure. There’s no Burnes-like ace captivating the back pages. But as the Mets’ current rotation success shows, it’s a strategy that spares the heartache Arizona now feels.

​​And so, Burnes becomes the latest name added to a growing ledger of elite pitchers lost to injury. The Diamondbacks remain resilient, but there’s no escaping the sobering truth: in today’s game, even the most perfectly built rotations teeter on a razor’s edge. The only certainty is uncertainty — and as Arizona is now painfully reminded, the risk is not theoretical. It’s personal.