Mariners' injured ace Bryce Miller dropped an alarming hint about his elbow

Now that George Kirby is back, the Seattle Mariners only need to activate Logan Gilbert and Bryce Miller off the injured list to finally make their starting rotation whole again. And that moment is coming soon.

In what was probably the best thing that happened to the Mariners all weekend in Houston, both Gilbert and Miller threw simulated games off the mound at Daikin Park on Friday. The two ace right-handers both offered positive reports afterward.

“I feel good. I mean, I was letting it rip and whatever happened, happened,” Gilbert, who's recovering from a flexor strain, said as per Tim Booth of The Seattle Times. “I felt good, so that’s great.”

Miller, too, added that "everything felt good."

Bryce Miller is just about ready to return, but there's a real, ominous-sounding problem with his elbow

Yet while Miller, who's working back from elbow inflammation, could be the first of the two righties to rejoin Seattle's rotation, he also alluded to a bigger problem in his elbow that rest might not be able to fix.

“I know the cause, but I don't know if I should say it,” Miller said of his inflammation, according to Daniel Kramer of MLB.com. “I'll say that everything's structure was really good. There's something in there that causes inflammation and something I can't just take out without missing the rest of the year. So this ideally gets me to the end of the year, and then we can reassess and see if I need to clean it up or anything. But at the end of the day, it feels good.”

This makes something that Miller said when he first went on the injured list on May 14 (retroactive to May 12) hit a little different. Also per Kramer, he said then: "I just have a little bit of inflammation in the joint, and I'm just going to get it out, get it taken care of and hopefully feel good the rest of the year.”

At the time, you could read the "it" as referring to the inflammation and nothing more. But now that we know that there's "something in there that causes inflammation," you have to wonder if that was actually the "it" in question.

Either way, Miller's latest comments make it fair game to speculate that he's going to need some kind of surgery after the season is over. And if so, the question is whether he can make it to that point — not to mention through a potential playoff run — without having further trouble with his elbow.

The situation is such that the 26-year-old Miller and the Mariners don't have much choice but to hope for the best. To this end, there's comfort to be found in how he apparently started feeling something in his elbow in the back half of 2024, yet that didn't stop him from ripping off a 1.84 ERA over his last 14 starts as he racked up a team-leading 3.4 rWAR.

Of course, Miller couldn't keep that momentum going in his first eight starts of this year. It was clear that something was up with him even before he went on the IL, as he struggled with walks and inconsistent velocity as he ran his ERA up to 5.22.

In any case, Miller could potentially return as soon as he is eligible on Thursday against the Washington Nationals. As the rotation has gone from ranking first in ERA last year to 17th in ERA this year, the Mariners sure could use the Miller of 2024 right about now.