BOSTON — Liam Hendriks is just about ready to admit that his season — and most likely, his Red Sox tenure — is over. The same can’t be said for his major league career, however.
Hendriks, who has effectively been ruled out for the rest of this season due to an occurrence of forearm tightness popping up while rehabbing a hip injury, said he still plans to try to pitch in 2026 despite losing most of 2025 to various injuries and setbacks. At 36 (37 in February), Hendriks will once again hit the free agent market in search of a deal that will allow him to prove himself.
“Very much so,” said Hendriks when asked if he planned to keep pitching. “I got a new elbow for a reason. If I wasn’t going to continue playing, I probably wouldn’t have gone through that whole process.
“There’s definitely a lot of desire left for me to get back out there because I really feel like I haven’t come back, even since the cancer journey.”
Hendriks, an All-Star in three of four years from 2019 to 2022, has been limited to just 18 ⅔ big league innings over the last three seasons. First, he battled stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma late in 2022 and returned to pitch five innings in 2023 before suffering a torn UCL that required Tommy John surgery. He signed a two-year, $10 million contract with the Red Sox and was expected to return late last season but setbacks with his arm forced him to shut things down in September. He entered spring training healthy, then missed the first three weeks of the season with a nerve issue in his elbow. Hendriks returned on Easter and struggled to a 6.59 ERA in 14 games before again being shelved in late May, this time due to a hip issue. His bumpy rehab road from that issue, which was initially misdiagnosed as a hernia, progressed to the point where he was throwing from 120 feet but Hendriks was shut down before throwing his first bullpen session because of nagging forearm tightness that hasn’t gone away.
At this point, he’s just resting and recovering.
“I’ve been a little hesitant with my lower body and pushing off,” he said. “Got a little soreness up top (in the forearm), making sure we can handle that, and now that has been that hiccup in the thing which unfortunately, most likely, puts this season out.
“We’re kind of letting it settle down for a little bit and see how it goes. We’ll tackle that next road when it comes. I’m sure that’ll be on the horizon, just to get a grasp and making sure there’s nothing more negative coming up.”
Hendriks won’t return in the regular season but is holding out hope that he could be available to pitch in late October if the Red Sox make a deep playoff run. That hope comes with the understanding that other high-leverage bullpen arms have passed him on the depth chart.
“In saying that, I don’t know how much they would want to throw someone who has been relatively untested this year back into that situation,” Hendriks said.
The Red Sox signed Hendriks in hopes that he could provide the bullpen with a late-season boost last year, then potentially take over for Kenley Jansen as the closer in 2025. Hopes even remained high for Hendriks this spring, as he entered camp in a competition with Aroldis Chapman for the ninth-inning job. The two veterans have found themselves on the opposite end of the performance spectrum this season, with Chapman reaching a late-career peak and Hendriks once again spending most of the year on a rehab plan. Barring a late-season course reversal, he’ll end his two-year deal with the Sox having thrown just 13 ⅔ innings.
“It’s definitely not someone I thought I’d be coming here,” Hendriks said. “I thought it would be, ‘I’m going to miss most of ‘24 but I’ll be good to go for, hopefully, the end of it, and then ‘25. It just hasn’t quite worked out that way. It’s definitely unfortunate.
“It’s been a very frustrating year, from my point of view, whether it be through the hip, through the arm or through anything. It’s definitely not been an ideal scenario as far as my Red Sox tenure.”
Hendriks aims to pitch for his native Australia in the World Baseball Classic in the spring. He’ll spend the months before that point getting healthy — and finding a team willing to take a chance on the upside he showed before the last few years.
“Generally, it’s just waiting for a call,” Hendriks. “We’ll reach out and see what happens and who’s there, but at the end of the day, I’ve got to prove health now. That’s the one big thing that’s going to be hanging over it.
“It’ll be proving health and proving stuff and going into it like any free agent who had some health concerns the year before. I think I’ll probably have to end up showcasing and doing all that sort of stuff.”
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