blake snell

Dodgers southpaw Blake Snell called his shot.

It wasn’t quite Babe Ruth pointing from the batter’s box. The moment won’t make its way into any movie. But Snell did tell manager Dave Roberts over text message that he was going to throw six innings in his first start back from the injured list after undergoing surgery to remove loose bodies from his elbow.

Then, en route to a 5-4 walk-off Dodgers victory in 10 innings against the Royals, Snell did just that.

“I knew that’s what the plan was coming in, and I really wanted to execute that plan,” Snell said after limiting the Royals to one run and three hits.

Despite Snell’s resume, the two-time Cy Young winner wasn’t guaranteed a smooth return. It had been three months since he’d last started a major-league game. And it was only his second start of the season, after a late buildup in spring training due to shoulder fatigue, a May season debut against the Braves, and surgery shortly after.

Eventually getting back this version of him, however, was key to the Dodgers’ postseason aspirations.

“I think the biggest thing was just being aggressive,” Snell said. “Be in the zone, attack. I know how good my stuff is, so I didn’t want to just be nibbling and then complaining like, ‘Oh that’s a strike.’ I didn’t want to do any of that again like I did versus Atlanta.”

That was a short and not so sweet season debut. He exited after three innings, having put his team in a five-run (four earned runs) hole.

The difference Tuesday was “stark,” as Roberts put it.

To clear room on the roster to activate Snell, the Dodgers (72-48) optioned left-handed pitcher Charlie Barnes to triple-A and transferred right-handed reliever Blake Treinen (right elbow inflammation) from the 15-day IL to the 60-day. Though he has not yet begun a minor-league rehab assignment, manager Dave Roberts said Treinen has not had a setback.

Snell, who had 10 strikeouts Tuesday, kept the Royals off balance all night leaning on a fastball that had a little extra life to it, a curveball that generated a 63% whiff rate, and a changeup that was especially effective against right-handed hitters.

Max Muncy and teammates celebrate after his walk-off single Tuesday.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

“I was more calm than I thought I was going to be, so that was good,” Snell said. “But the curveball’s finally coming back to how I remember it being. It was always a pitch that was a wipeout, I could throw it, but now I’m finally releasing it where I need to release it. And I’m kind of releasing everything in the same slot out in front.”

Counterintuitively, Snell pointed to his last rehab start, in high-altitude Salt Lake City, as another factor that helped lock him in for Tuesday. It’s a notoriously difficult place to pitch, with the thin mountain air affecting the way the ball moves.

“To have that start and be that frustrated pitching knowing that I can’t throw anything that I want with any shape,” Snell said, “to be able to come here and just pitch and know I can throw a curveball where I want, whenever I want, and a fastball, that felt way better.

“But Salt Lake was so difficult. Oh my God. If I played in Salt Lake growing up, I don’t know if I’d be here today.”

Roberts set expectations low in his pregame availability, saying the hope was to get Snell through five innings. Snell had other plans.

He struck out the side in the first inning and retired the first 10 hitters he faced.

When he finally gave up back-to-back singles to the Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr. and Jac Caglianone, neither was particularly well struck — a soft line drive and a grounder that found a hole on the right side of the infield.

With runners on the corners and one out, Snell gave up the only run of his start, on a sacrifice fly by Salvador Perez.

The next inning, Snell worked around a leadoff hit — a blooper into shallow right field that speedy Tyler Tolbert stretched into a double — and a stolen base, to strand Tolbert at third.

Back out for the sixth, Snell retired the side in order. He finished his outing by getting Perez to chase a changeup below the zone and pop it up behind second base.

“He was fantastic tonight,” Roberts said. “And you know we pushed him a little bit into the six and through the six, but just because he was so efficient, certainly that extra inning was huge for us.”

It was especially important once the back and forth in late innings pushed the game into extras.

Hard-throwing right-hander Seth Halvorsen tossed a scoreless tenth inning in his Dodgers debut, setting up Max Muncy for a walk-off single in the bottom half of the inning.

“That’s the Snell that we’re used to seeing,” Muncy said. “And hopefully we have him for the next two, three months — for the long run.”

Tarik Skubal made his home debut Monday, but the down-on-their-luck Dodgers still needed every bit of offense they could muster to back him up.

They held off Kansas City 6-5, salvaging the Dodger Stadium introduction of baseball’s premier trade-deadline acquisition.

Skubal, the back-to-back Cy Young Award winner, pitched five innings, giving up four hits and three runs. He struck out six.

It was a solid outing, but the Dodgers needed their slumbering bats to come alive too.

Max Muncy had a bases-loaded triple in the sixth to give the Dodgers a 5-3 advantage, their first lead of the game.

But the Royals answered in the seventh with a two-run homer by Kyle Isbel, forging a 5-5 tie.

In the bottom of the seventh, Freddie Freeman put the home team up for good, hitting a single to right that drove in Shohei Ohtani.

Impossible to know if the win marked a turnaround or simply a tourniquet for the Dodgers, who entered having lost eight of nine, including sweeps by Boston and the Chicago Cubs. They had lost seven in a row before finally winning Saturday at Arizona, then resuming the slide Sunday with a loss to the Diamondbacks.

On the flight home, manager Dave Roberts had a jarring realization.

“We’re a wild-card team right now,” he said. “We’ve got to get going and play with urgency.”

The Dodgers had 10 hits, a welcome development for a team that has had a terrible time seeing and reacting to pitches — and particularly fastballs.

The Athletic crunched the numbers and found no team in baseball has had as dramatic an increase in fastball percentage, with the Dodgers seeing that number climb steadily since May.

“It never feels good to be bullied,” Roberts said. “And to know that teams go after us with the fastball more than any team in baseball, that’s bothersome. That would bother me. … We’ve scored a lot of runs — fourth in baseball — but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The story is being the best version of ourselves, and that’s hitting the fastball and making adjustments in at-bats, situationally, all of it.

“So yeah, it’s something that I hope our guys will take that personally. We shouldn’t get bullied.”

By the fifth inning, the Dodgers were out of ABS challenges, with Miguel Rojas tapping his helmet to check on a called strike that was, well, squarely in the strike zone.

That came after an unsuccessful challenge by Andy Pages in the fourth, and his track record on those inquiries is grim. Thirteen of his 24 challenges were confirmed strikes.

Kansas City’s Jac Caglianone had 20/20 vision, with a pair of two-strike hits that gave the Royals a 3-0 advantage. The first was a low-velocity groundball threaded up the middle to drive in a run. In the third, he hit a two-run shot over the right-field wall.

It wasn’t until the fifth that Skubal finally punctuated “Jac” with a K.

By that point, the Dodgers had clawed their way back to 3-2, driving in runs with clutch hits by Ohtani and Freeman that got the crowd buzzing again.

Tuesday marks the return of Blake Snell, who underwent left elbow surgery and hasn’t pitched for the Dodgers since May 9. That’s back-to-back nights featuring multiple Cy Young Award winners.

Roberts said he would like to see Snell throw five innings, roughly 75-80 pitches, in his return.

“I feel very confident,” Roberts said when asked about Snell getting back up to speed. “I had a great conversation with him yesterday. He’s on a mission, and I like when great-talent players have that mindset.”

Likewise, Roberts said catcher Will Smith, recovering from an inflamed disc in his neck, is “pain free” and on track for an imminent return.

“He’s been throwing, the weight-room stuff each day,” he said. “It’s been better, so this is going to be a big week for Will. And my expectation is that he should be taking some pitching, some coaches’ batting practice at some point this week.”

Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman felt good enough about his trade discussions with the Detroit Tigers for two-time Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal that he gave manager Dave Roberts a positive update shortly before the team’s game against the Red Sox on Saturday.

“I heard that it was pretty much done,” Roberts recounted Sunday afternoon. “But there’s obviously things that have to go on with medical, so it wasn’t actually even finalized. I just heard that it was pretty much close.”

Friedman, however, wasn’t ready to exhale until he got final word from the Tigers during the game.

“I had no idea and was trying to emotionally hedge,” he said. “I wasn’t getting too high or too low on it until we actually found out.”

There was, it turned out, no need to stress. On Saturday, the Dodgers agreed to trade three prospects — outfielder Zyhir Hope (No. 25 on MLB Pipeline’s top 100), right-handed pitcher River Ryan (No. 68) and right-hander Brady Smith — to the Tigers for one of the best starters in baseball.

The teams officially announced the trade Sunday.

Even as the Dodgers signaled a potentially low-key trade deadline in the lead-up — “we try to do everything we can to avoid not having to do something,” Friedman said last week — many rival executives and scouts had come to see the Dodgers landing Skubal as practically inevitable.

Of course, the World Series favorites didn’t need to acquire Skubal. But if they wanted him, they’d get him.

And they did.

“Friday it started picking up a little bit,” Friedman said. “But [Saturday] it was much more aggressive back and forth and a lot of different conversations. Obviously being on our side, you didn’t really know how long the process was gonna go, whether it was gonna go into Sunday, into Monday. But obviously we were of the mind to be aggressive and try to get a deal done.

“We were of the mind to be aggressive for one player this deadline, and fortunately we were able to line up.”

Andrew Friedman, Dodgers president of baseball operations, speaks to reporters on Jan. 21.

(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

Two aspects of the trade did, however, take the industry by surprise: the timing and the return.

The Dodgers pulled off the trade without disrupting their major-league squad. Ryan, who made four major-league starts in 2024, has the stuff to compete in the majors, but health has kept him from another call-up.

“Obviously they felt good going through it,” Friedman said. “We gave up a lot of talent. Those guys are really good, and have a chance to be really good major-league players. But with where our core is, this moment in time, it was something that we felt like, erring on the side of aggressive made the most sense right now.”

Skubal joins Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani as postseason rotation options, creating an enviable surplus if all five are healthy in October.

“I think it’s arguably the best rotation of all time — as if it wasn’t before as well,” catcher Dalton Rushing said. “Hope he’s ready to win a ring.”

Said veteran utility player Miguel Rojas: “It’s a statement from this organization to the rest of the league and the world that they’re not just satisfied with what happened the last couple years. … It’s kind of like a pressed button for us to kind of continue to go and not let the rest of the league catch up to our standards.”

Of course, health is never guaranteed. Skubal and Snell have undergone surgeries to remove loose bodies from their pitching elbows. Skubal has made nine appearances since, and Snell is scheduled to make one more rehab start before being activated off the injured list.

Glasnow, on the verge of a rehab assignment, has been sidelined for nearly three months with back spasms, an injury the Dodgers initially hoped wouldn’t even need an IL stint.

Ohtani’s nagging knee problem creates the most uncertainty. Ohtani hasn’t pitched in nearly a month, despite receiving an Orthovisc injection to lubricate the joint. He could restart playing catch this week in Chicago, Roberts said.

“We’re as confident as we can be that he’s going to be back and he’s going to start throwing soon and building back up,” Friedman said. “You can never perfectly predict the future but if you said, ‘Hey, place a bet on it,’ I would be very confident placing it that he would be back pitching.”

Pitcher Tarik Skubal is congratulated by teammates after playing in his final game with the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday against the Baltimore Orioles.

(Paul Sancya / Associated Press)

With this much time off, however, Ohtani will need to build back up to a starter’s workload without the benefit of a rehab assignment, similar to what he did last season. The timing of his return to the mound will dictate how long the build-up will be.

“We have a plan to build him up slowly, methodically,” Roberts said. “And that would have happened if this trade would have happened or not.”

In the meantime, the Dodgers are filling his spot in the rotation with the best possible option. Skubal is scheduled to make his Dodgers debut Tuesday against the Cubs in Chicago.

And the Dodgers aren’t necessarily done dealing. As of Sunday afternoon, they still were engaged on “a number of different conversations on a number of different fronts,” Friedman said.

When asked if the Dodgers could still add to the major-league roster, however, Friedman said that was “less likely.”

“Never say never,” he said. “Fortunately, we don’t have that acute need that we have to do this or our team is in real danger.”

He did, however, mention the Dodgers’ lack of an acute need before acquiring Skubal too.

The Dodgers’ 9-2 loss to the Diamondbacks on Saturday wasn’t enough to prevent them from going into the All-Star break with the best record in the majors — that much is ensured. But the uninspired all-around performance sealed a series loss on the final weekend of the season’s first half.

The Dodgers (61-35) put little pressure on the Diamondbacks pitching staff. And Dodgers starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto wrapped up his first-half campaign with his highest-scoring start of the season; he surrendered six runs in six innings.

Over the All-Star break, Yamamoto (2.85 ERA) will get the week to rest. Before the game Saturday, manager Dave Roberts confirmed Yamamoto, an All-Star for the second consecutive year, will not pitch in the game.

The timing of his start Saturday, three days before the Midsummer Classic, suggested as much. Shohei Ohtani is scheduled to have his left knee drained coming out of the All-Star break and will not travel to Philadelphia. So Justin Wrobleski, who was added to the National League roster Saturday, is the only Dodger set to pitch in the All-Star Game.

Yamamoto held the Diamondbacks to one run through the first five innings. But his final inning quickly unraveled. It started with a leadoff walk and peaked with a three-run home run from James McCann.

The Dodgers finally rallied for two runs in the sixth and then fell quiet again. The Diamondbacks then scored three runs against Landon Knack in his three-inning season debut coming off the injured list.

Yamamoto’s uncharacteristic sixth inning ended his streak of quality starts at five, including two that lasted eight innings or more. He leads the team with 110⅔ innings pitched.

“His delivery is so consistent, repeatable,” Roberts said before the game. “He uses his body so efficiently. I just see how he takes care of himself, and the tax wasn’t going to be a problem for him.”

Yamamoto’s workload, along with Wrobleski’s emergence, have helped the Dodgers weather injuries to pitchers who were expected to be major contributors.

In a promising sign for closer Edwin Díaz’s recovery timeline, he started a rehab assignment with single-A Ontario on Saturday. Díaz made just seven appearances for the Dodgers before undergoing an operation to remove loose bodies from his right elbow in late April.

“He’s been throwing pretty effortlessly, free, maybe a week after he started throwing,” pitching coach Mark Prior said.

He estimated that Díaz would return in about three to four weeks if his progression goes smoothly.

Blake Snell — who also had loose bodies removed from his pitching elbow, undergoing a NanoNeedle Scope procedure on May 19 — threw two simulated innings to batters Saturday.

Snell is scheduled to begin a minor-league rehab assignment next weekend, Roberts said. Prior believes Snell will need at least four to five outings, likening it to a spring training buildup.

“The goal would be to get him fully built up to 90ish pitches before he comes back,” Prior said.

Tyler Glasnow, who had been sidelined for more than two months with a lingering back injury, threw a bullpen session Friday.

“It was like 95, 96 [mph] in his ‘pen, but he does that rolling out of bed when he’s healthy,” Prior said. “But it’s a good sign.”

Glasnow has had plenty of back and forth in his rehab, however. Twice he started playing catch only to be shut down when back spasms returned.

“The schedule is starting to move with a little bit more consistency than it had been,” Prior said. “So he’s in a good spot.”

Glasnow is scheduled for another bullpen session on Monday.

SACRAMENTO — Teoscar Hernández was back from a hamstring injury, and a little bit humble. He was about to play his first game in a month for the Dodgers.

“I don’t think they really need me in the lineup,” he said, with a hint of a smile.

Hernández hit 58 home runs over his first two seasons with the Dodgers, each of which ended in a World Series championship, so of course they need him. But, in his absence, the Dodgers had more than doubled their National League West lead.

Hernández is back, but Will Smith and Kiké Hernández still are out. So are Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell and Edwin Díaz.

No matter: The Dodgers boosted their division lead to 11 games Monday, with a 9-4 victory over the Athletics. Shohei Ohtani, Max Muncy and Andy Pages homered to highlight a 17-hit attack.

The Dodgers are on pace to win the NL West by 21 games. They boast the best record in the major leagues at 55-30, and Ohtani and the Traveling All-Stars remain baseball’s best road show.

Before the game, a guy setting up one of the merchandise stands here pointed to all the Dodgers gear for sale. He wore a Dodgers cap. He said he wished he had more Dodgers stuff to sell, because the crowd would be overwhelmingly in favor of the Dodgers.

And so it was, one day after San Diego fans complained of all the Dodgers partisans at Petco Park. In Sacramento, where the wandering home team wears a Sacramento patch on one jersey sleeve and a Las Vegas patch on the other sleeve, there were loud cheers for Ohtani and Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts, and loud chants of “Let’s go, Dodgers!”

Every Dodger in the starting lineup had two hits except for Betts, who had one.

Eric Lauer, imported to fortify a starting rotation without Glasnow and Snell, worked six innings to record the victory. He gave up three runs and four hits in the second inning, no runs and four hits over the other five.

Dodgers starting pitcher Eric Lauer worked six innings to record the victory. He gave up three runs and four hits in the second inning, no runs and four hits over the other five.

(Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)

He is 3-0 with 2.88 earned-run average in six starts for the Dodgers, the last three of them classified as quality starts.

Glasnow and Snell are weeks away from returning, and maybe more, but Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said they would not lose their job because of injury.

“Eric coming over here knew that this was the deal, right?” said Roberts, who posted his 999th career win. “Until they get back. We just don’t know when. He’s just got to stay focused on doing his job. Then when that time comes we’ll see what happens.”

In the top of the second, the Dodgers bunched four hits, all singles — the first by Hernández, beating out an infield single in his first at-bat since the hamstring injury — to take a 2-0 lead. In the bottom of the inning, the A’s also bunched four hits, including a Colby Thomas home run, to take a 3-2 lead.

The rest of the Dodgers’ scoring: a solo homer by Muncy and a two-run homer by Pages in the fourth, a three-run homer by Ohtani in the sixth, and an RBI single by Freeman in the eighth. The A’s scored the final run on a wild pitch in the ninth.

Miguel Rojas said the Dodgers have flourished in the wake of significant injuries because the organization places a priority on developing players and giving them a fair shot at playing time, citing Pages, infielder Alex Freeland and pitchers Justin Wrobleski and Emmet Sheehan, as well as wise trades for supplementary players, including infielder-outfielder Tommy Edman and outfielder Alex Call.

Shohei Ohtani tosses his bat after hitting a three-run home run for the Dodgers in the sixth inning against the Athletics on Monday night.

(Sara Nevis / Associated Press)

“It’s not living with the narrative of ‘We’re buying championships and spending money,’” Rojas said. “Yeah, we’re spending money to get good players. But we’re not really basing our success just on that.

“The front office does quality work on getting the right players and putting the puzzle together. I feel that’s the reason why we can afford losing a couple guys in the middle of the year, because we have a full team that is ready to step up.”

Still, Rojas conceded none of that would matter without Ohtani, Freeman, Betts and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. And, yes, Rojas said, the Dodgers do have an irreplaceable player.

“It’s going to be really hard if we lose Shohei,” Rojas said. “It’s going to be a little bit different than losing another player. Having Shohei at the top of the lineup every single day and doing both sides of the ball has been really helpful.”

Ohtani gave the Sacramento crowd what it wanted to see: a majestic 432-foot home run, with a supercharged, 112-mph exit velocity. On Wednesday, the last day of the Dodgers’ only scheduled visit here before the A’s move to Las Vegas in 2028, he’ll take the mound to give the people more of what they want to see.