Dodgers rookie pitcher River Ryan will miss the rest of the season with an elbow injury, Dave Roberts announced Sunday, a day after Ryan exited his start in the Dodgers’ 4-1 win over the Pirates on Saturday with what was termed right forearm tightness.
Roberts said Ryan was still waiting on “other scans” to determine the exact diagnosis of his injury. However, a Sunday morning MRI confirmed that Ryan’s injury was significant enough to sideline him for at least the next two months.
Ryan’s next course of action is to be determined, but Roberts said surgery could be “in play.”
“Fortunately, we’ve got a lot of depth and a lot of good ball players, so we’ll just try to backfill,” Roberts said Saturday night. “But I just feel bad for River.”
In four MLB starts this season, Ryan had a 1.33 ERA and 18 strikeouts in 20 ⅓ innings. Despite his inexperience, the right-hander had been “making a case” to be part of the Dodgers’ pitching plans down the stretch, Roberts said, impressing with his high-velocity fastball and swing-and-miss slider/curveball combination.
Ryan’s injury the latest to strike the Dodgers’ short-handed pitching staff. It continued a particularly alarming pattern of injuries among young Dodgers pitchers.
Already this season, the Dodgers were without homegrown arms including Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin, Emmet Sheehan and Kyle Hurt. Walker Buehler (who will return from the injured list next week, effectively replacing Ryan in the rotation) and Bobby Miller (who remains in triple-A trying to refine his arsenal) have also missed time on the IL.
“I think that we clearly don’t have the answers to taking care of pitchers and keeping them healthy,” Roberts said of the baseball industry at-large, which has reckoned with a perceived epidemic of pitching injuries in recent years. “I think the industry is doing the best they can to manage workload, manage pitch count, but clearly we don’t have it nailed … The bottom line is injuries are way up.”