TORONTO — There might be no greater reminder of how far the Dodgers have come than the opposing pitcher on Monday. When the World Series returns to Dodger Stadium for Game 3, the starting pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays is scheduled to be Max Scherzer.
Don’t just take my word for it. This was the word from Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez at the time: “Dodgers analytics dept really misused probably the best rotation in all of baseball. …They need to figure out a way to let starters be who they really are and let them pitch how they are used to.”
In the 2021 postseason, by choice, the Dodgers used an opener three times, a 20-game winner as a middle reliever, and a Hall of Fame starter as a closer. There would be no parade.
In the 2024 postseason, and not by choice, the Dodgers ran four bullpen games. There would be a parade.
Just sit back and enjoy the show — on Saturday, Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s second straight complete game show. This must be less stressful, at least.
“I don’t think it’s less stressful,” Dodgers pitching coach Mark Prior said to an inquiring middle-aged reporter with gray hair getting a little too noticeable. “We’ve got matching hair.”
Still, there isn’t much mystery in the Dodgers’ 10-2 postseason record. In every game in which their starting pitcher has gotten an out in the sixth inning, they have won. In every game in which their starting pitcher has not gotten an out in the sixth inning, they have lost.
To Andrew Friedman and his front office, take a bow too. Just because your ownership provided you with a $1.35-billion rotation does not guarantee that you will leave well enough alone.
In the final month of the season, remember, the Dodgers entertained a flurry of ideas about how to best combine a talented rotation and an iffy bullpen into an effective October staff.
Would they deploy Ohtani in relief? Would they use their best arms as often as possible, as the Washington Nationals did in 2019, when they used their top three starters — Scherzer, Patrick Corbin and Stephen Strasburg — as starters and relievers?
The Dodgers let their starters be starters. The conventional wisdom does not always need to be challenged.
“Clearly, Blake Snell, Yama, Glasnow, Shohei, all really good pitchers,” Prior said. “I think we can all agree that they’re all really good pitchers, and any team would probably roll them out in a playoff game.
“So I don’t think this is any master plan.”
Said catcher Will Smith: “I think that’s just this team. We have four starters now that are pitching their best. … We’re just riding those guys.”
Dodgers pitcher Tyler Glasnow is set to start Game 3 of the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays on Monday.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times )
That brings us back to 2021, when the front office decided the best way to approach the winner-take-all finale of the division series against the San Francisco Giants was to use reliever Corey Knebel as an opener, 20-game winner Julio Urías from the third through the sixth innings, closer Kenley Jansen in the eighth inning and Scherzer as the closer.
That is the kind of all-hands-on-deck approach better suited to the end of a World Series. The Dodgers won that game against the Giants, but Scherzer could not complete five innings in his first championship series start and said he could not take the ball for his next start, an elimination game.
“My arm’s been locked up the past couple of days,” Scherzer said then.
He said that he would be the one at risk if he were not honest with the Dodgers about his condition, rather than trying to push through.
“Guys, when they lie, they go out there and they take on too much, then they blow out,’’ he said. “That’s the ultimate risk here.”
That line of thought did not go over too well in some corners of the clubhouse. Urías was miffed because he believed the Dodgers did not believe in him. Walker Buehler, who started on short rest as a late replacement for Scherzer, gave up four runs in four innings. The Dodgers were eliminated.
Scherzer’s last World Series start, for the Texas Rangers in 2023, lasted three innings. He isn’t thinking about the Rangers, or for that matter the Dodgers.
“I wouldn’t be looking backwards at all for any motivation,’’ he said here Saturday. “I have plenty of motivation. I’m here to win and I’ve got a clubhouse full of guys who want to win too. So we’re a great team and that’s the only thing I need to think about.”
The only thing the Dodgers need to worry about on Monday, at least based on their postseason run: Can they get six or seven innings from Glasnow? If they can, they should be halfway to the World Series championship.
Highlights from the Dodgers’ 5-1 win over the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 2 of the World Series.
MILWAUKEE — Technically, Roki Sasaki was available to pitch in relief for the Dodgers on Tuesday night.
Realistically, he wasn’t.
“I wouldn’t say unavailable,” manager Dave Roberts said before the game. “But it is unlikely that we will use him.”
Without the most electric arm in their unreliable bullpen, how could the Dodgers record the final outs required to win Game 2 of the National League Championship Series?
Here’s how: By making their bullpen a non-factor.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto tossed a complete game, becoming the first Japanese pitcher to do so in a postseason game. The offense spared Roberts another late-inning scare by tacking on insurance runs in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings.
The result was a 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers at American Family Field that extended the Dodgers’ lead in the NLCS to two games to none.
Two more wins and the Dodgers will advance to the World Series for the third time in six seasons. Two more wins and they will be positioned to become baseball’s first repeat champions in 25 years.
Ninety-three teams have taken a two-games-to-none lead in a best-of-seven postseason series. Seventy-nine of them have advanced.
In other words, this series is over.
If the Philadelphia Phillies couldn’t overturn a 2-0 deficit against the Dodgers, these overmatched tryhards in Milwaukee certainly won’t.
With the next three games at Dodger Stadium and Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani and Blake Snell scheduled to start those games, the most pressing question about this NLCS is whether it will return to baseball’s smallest market for Game 6.
Don’t count on it.
The Brewers’ bullpen was supposed to be superior to the Dodgers’, but that advantage has been negated by the Dodgers’ superior starting pitching.
Reaching this stage of October has forced the Brewers to exhaust their relievers, so much so that by the time closer Abner Uribe entered Game 2 in a sixth-inning emergency, he might as well have been Tanner Scott.
“We’re more depleted than the Dodgers are,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said.
The workload made the Brewers’ bullpen as rickety as the Dodgers’, and that was with Sasaki just spectating.
What decided the game was that Murphy had to rely on his bullpen and Roberts didn’t.
Brewers starter Freddy Peralta pitched 5 ⅔ innings. A day after Snell faced the minimum number of batters over eight innings, Yamamoto registered every one of the 27 outs required to win a game.
Roberts said he didn’t hesitate to send back Yamamoto to the mound for the ninth inning. The night before, he called on Sasaki to close, and the decision to remove Snell nearly cost the Dodgers the game.
“Obviously,” Roberts said as diplomatically as he could, “there’s been things with the bullpen.”
Things now include Sasaki, whose ability to shoulder an October workload has come into question after he failed to complete the ninth inning in Game 1. In the game in question, Sasaki gave up a run and had to be replaced by Blake Treinen.
Sasaki’s form in Game 1 sounded alarm bells, and rightfully so. The converted starter still looked exhausted from his three-inning relief appearance against the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 4 of the NL Division Series. His fastball velocity has gradually declined over the postseason, and he’s not the type of pitcher who can be as effective throwing 96 mph as he is when he’s throwing 100 mph.
Sasaki has never pitched as a reliever in the United States or Japan. He spent 4 ½ months on the injured list this year with a shoulder impingement. Just as the Dodgers didn’t know what they could expect from him when they first deployed him out of the bullpen, they don’t know what they can expect from him now moving forward.
“It’s one of those things that we’re still in sort of uncharted territory with him,” Roberts said.
At various stages of the season, the Dodgers have asked themselves the same questions about their downtrodden bullpen: How could they survive when their firemen on their roster were also arsonists? How could they win a World Series with such an untrustworthy group of late-inning options?
In this NLCS, the Dodgers have shown how. They will use them as infrequently as possible.
All the Dodgers needed to do was slot Snell in for Game 1 on Monday, making him an option to pitch again on four days’ rest in Game 5. Then, they could have Ohtani go in Game 2 on Tuesday, allowing him to pitch before Wednesday’s scheduled off-day (which has been the team’s preference for the two-way star) and be available for another start if the series returns to Milwaukee for Games 6 and 7.
On Sunday, however, manager Dave Roberts announced a different plan.
Snell will indeed go in Game 1, trying to build upon the 1.38 ERA he posted in his first two outings this postseason.
But instead of Ohtani in Game 2, it will be Yamamoto who gets the ball — pushing Ohtani’s next pitching appearance to sometime later this series, Roberts said.
“We just don’t know which day,” Roberts said of when Ohtani will get the ball. “But he’ll pitch at some point.”
That alignment came as a surprise, but also had benefits from the Dodgers’ perspective.
Unlike Ohtani, who has gotten at least six days off between every one of his pitching outings since the start of July, Yamamoto has routinely pitched on five days’ rest this season. By starting him in Game 2, he can stay on that same schedule to pitch a potential Game 6 — something the Dodgers would have been less comfortable having Ohtani do.
By pushing Ohtani back to at least Game 3, of course, the Dodgers will sacrifice their ability to get him two starts in this series. However, even if he pitches in one of the Dodgers’ home games later this week, Ohtani could come out of the bullpen in a potential Game 7 — the kind of relief opportunity the team had hinted at for weeks down the stretch this season.
Because Ohtani will make just one pitching start in the NLCS, Roberts said it’s not as imperative that it come before an off-day, either.
“You have two other guys that potentially can pitch on regular rest,” Roberts said. “So [it’s about] how do you get your best pitchers the most innings in a potential seven-game series?”
Outside of pitching considerations, however, there’s another reason delaying Ohtani’s next pitching outing could also make sense.
In the NLDS, Ohtani went one for 18 at the plate with nine strikeouts. He looked particularly out of sorts in Game 1, when he struck out four times in what was his first career playoff game both hitting and pitching.
Coming out of the series, Roberts emphasized the need for Ohtani to “recalibrate” at the plate, noting that the team was “not gonna win the World Series with that sort of performance” from its biggest star.
And while Roberts insisted on Sunday that Ohtani’s offensive slump had “no bearing” on the team shuffling its rotation, giving Ohtani two games at the start of the NLCS to focus soley on hitting certainly won’t hurt his efforts to straighten out his swing.
“I expect a different output from Shohei on the offensive side this series,” Roberts said.
For at the least the next couple days, that will be his only objective.
PHILADELPHIA — The Dodgers spent more than $125 million on their bullpen last winter. But when they needed relief late in Game 1 of the National League Division Series on Saturday, they turned to a couple of starters who spent much of the season on the injury list.
And it worked out — though just barely — with Tyler Glasnow and Roki Sasaki combining for eight of the final nine outs in a 5-3 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies.
Alex Vesia got the other out, retiring pinch-hitter Edmundo Sosa on a fly ball to center with the bases loaded to end the eighth. Sasaki then came on to close it out in the ninth, getting Bryson Stott, representing the tying run, to pop up in foul territory behind third base to end the game.
“What Glas did tonight, it’s not easy to do. And so for him to give us the innings he gave us tonight was huge,” third baseman Max Muncy said.
The four pitchers the Dodgers used all spent time away from the mound this season.
Starter Shohei Ohtani, who didn’t pitch at all last season, didn’t pitch until June and hadn’t thrown past the fifth inning until his final regular-season start. He went six innings against the Phillies, giving up three runs and three hits and striking out nine.
Glasnow missed more than two months with shoulder inflammation and other issues. Sasaki went to the sideline in early May with a right shoulder impingement and wasn’t reactivated until the final week of the season — as a reliever. Even Vesia missed a couple of weeks with an oblique strain.
But they were all ready for the start of the NDLS. Well, kind of — Glasnow said he was in the bathroom when the call came down for him to start warming up.
“The phone rang and they yelled my name,” he said. “Here we go. It definitely felt weird, but fun. [With the] adrenaline, there’s not as much effort to get the same stuff and [get] warmed up.”
When Glasnow first began throwing the Dodgers trailed 3-2. But by the time he entered the game they were front 5-3 on Teoscar Hernández’s three-run homer. So his assignment changed from keeping his team close to protecting a lead.
“For them to trust me to go out there and throw some big innings, it was awesome,” Glasnow said.
His first inning, the seventh, went pretty well, with Glasnow setting down the side in order. The first batter, J.T. Realmuto, reached on an error, but he was erased on a double play.
The eighth didn’t go as well. Trea Turner walked with one out, and although manager Dave Roberts had Vesia, a left-hander, in the bullpen, the right-handed Glasnow was allowed to face lefty sluggers Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper.
He struck out Schwarber on three pitches, but Harper singled to right. So when Alec Bohm walked to load the bases, Roberts finally called in Vesia, who got Sosa to pop out, ending the threat.
“The coaches put the trust in him and he just kept telling me, ‘You’re driving me. Just tell me what to do’,” catcher Will Smith said of guiding Glasnow through his first relief appearance since 2018. “He’s put trust in me and I put trust in him. And it worked out tonight.”
Dodgers pitcher Roki Sasaki celebrates after the final out of a 5-3 win over the Phillies on Saturday.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
It worked out because Sasaki came out of the bullpen throwing gas, topping 99 mph on seven of his 11 pitches, including the final one, which hit 100. Sasaki, who earned the save, also pitched the final inning of the wild-card series against the Cincinnati Reds and has thrown two scoreless innings, striking out three.
In fact, three pitchers who spent most of the season as starters — Emmet Sheehan, Glasnow and Sasaki — have combined to throw more innings out of the bullpen in the playoffs than the Dodgers’ regular relievers. That wasn’t the way the front office drew it up when they spent wildly on the bullpen over the winter. But it’s working.
“One real strength of this roster is our starting pitching,” Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, said before the game. “It speaks to that depth. Those guys are really talented.
So what if an unforeseen hurdle appeared in front of their October path? The Dodgers are on the verge of turning that hurdle into an unexpected but well-planned advantage on their quest to become baseball’s first back-to-back champions in 25 years.
Conventional wisdom says the odds favor a team with a bye, because that team can set up its pitching rotation for the division series just the way it wants while its opponent burns through its best arms in the wild-card series. The Dodgers are one win away from storming through the wild-card series and setting up their pitching rotation for the division series just fine, thank you very much.
That, it turns out, is what you can do when your star-studded starting rotation is healthy and effective for the first time all season, at precisely the right time.
The Dodgers thoroughly outclassed the Cincinnati Reds, 10-5, in Tuesday’s opener of the best-of-three wild-card series. If the Dodgers win Wednesday, or if they win Thursday, they would advance to what would be the premier matchup in all the National League playoffs: the Dodgers vs. the Philadelphia Phillies.
“I think the biggest downside of playing in a wild-card series, obviously, if you’re able to advance, is what your pitching looks like after that,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. “That’s the cost.
“And I think, with our depth, that’s really mitigated.”
It ain’t over ‘til it’s over. If the Angels could go 6-0 against the Dodgers this season, the Reds could win the next two games.
However, the Reds used their best pitcher, Hunter Greene, in Game 1. The Dodgers have their best pitcher, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, ready to deploy in Game 2.
And, since the best-of-three wild card format was introduced in 2022, all 12 teams that have won Game 1 have gone on to win the series.
So let’s plan this out. If the Dodgers win Wednesday, Shohei Ohtani could start Game 1 of the division series Saturday. If the Reds force a decisive third game Thursday, Ohtani is the scheduled starter — and, if the Dodgers win, Tyler Glasnow, Emmet Sheehan and Clayton Kershaw all could be options for Game 1 of the division series.
Kershaw would be available for sure, as he is not on the wild-card roster and he would be pitching on regular rest.
Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw would be available to pitch Game 1 of the NLDS if the Dodgers advance.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
“To have Clayton Kershaw standing there ready, no matter how we deploy our pitching this week, gets at the cost (of playing in the wild-card round) not being as great,” Friedman said.
And the division series includes an off day after each of the first two games, which would enable the Dodgers to use Snell on five days’ rest for Game 2 and Yamamoto on six days’ rest for Game 3.
The Dodgers have so much flexibility, in fact, that manager Dave Roberts declined to say that Ohtani would start Game 1 of the division series if the Dodgers close out the wild-card series Wednesday.
“You’re getting ahead,” Roberts said, “but one of the first two games, probably.”
It is important that Snell held the Reds to two runs in Tuesday’s victory, but it is more important that he pitched seven innings. The Dodgers asked their relievers to cover two innings with an eight-run lead, and it took four of them to do it.
The Dodgers’ road to success is clear: more of the starters, less of the erratic relievers, and less need to lean on Glasnow and Sheehan in an unfamiliar role.
“The deeper that the starters go in the game — one, it means that we’re pitching good; but, two, you’re giving the bullpen a break and a breather, and they get to be 100% every time they come out,” Snell said.
“That makes for a different game that favors us.”
The Dodgers improvised their way to a title last October, with three starting pitchers and four bullpen games. That was not conventional wisdom, either.
This time of year, however, most postseason teams have three or four reliable starters. The Dodgers have six. If they have to play in an extra round, well, what doesn’t kill them makes them stronger.
Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy.
While a joint partnership between Brazilian aerospace company Embraer and L3Harris Technologies to outfit Embraer’s KC-390 Millennium tanker-transport with U.S. systems and a custom refueling boom was formally declared dead late last year, the company is advancing a fresh effort to sell the Millennium to the Air Force.
You can read all about the compelling case for a boom-equipped KC-390 that fits within the Air Force’s emerging battle concept in this past feature.
KC-390 with aerial refueling boom concept art. (Embraer)
At the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber conference this week, Embraer displayed a model of the twin jet medium-lift aircraft in full Air Force livery and touted its American-made parts. With more than half the components built in the U.S., including a flight data recorder from L3Harris, and much of the guts, like its V2500-E5 engine’s avionics made by RTX-owned companies, the aircraft is Buy American Act compliant and capable of serving as as a tactical transport or a tanker in the austere environments where the Air Force expects to concentrate significant aspects of its future combat operations. The KC-390 has loosely similar lifting capabilities as the C-130J Super Hercules.
The KC-390 model in USAF markings at Air, Space & Cyber ’25 (Author Photo) The KC-390 model in USAF markings at Air, Space & Cyber ’25 (Author Photo)
Embraer is also evaluating site locations in the U.S. for a KC-390 manufacturing facility, the company said. It now operates out of nine U.S. locations, including Jacksonville, Florida, where it conducts final assembly for the A-29 Super Tucano.
The KC-390 marks a decade since its first flight this year and now serves 11 international customers, many of them within NATO, Frederico Lemos, chief commercial officer for Defense and Security, told The War Zone. While Embraer has made public overtures to sell a variant of the aircraft to the U.S. Air Force for several years, it’s now touting an additional selling point: a U.S. demonstration tour completed earlier this year, in which the Millennium participated in a spectrum of defense, disaster response, and space-focused events.
“The aircraft showcased its unmatched versatility and readiness to support the U.S. Department of Defense in addressing critical air refueling challenges,” Embraer said in a release distributed at the tradeshow. “Its performance and cargo capacity also make it ideal for rescue missions, space logistics, and special operations.”
Lemos cited one successful test last July in which U.S. and Portuguese airmen at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, conducted a cold-load training – meaning a loading exercise with the engines off – on a KC-390 using a U.S. Army M142 HIMARS launcher. Embraer saw this as not only a validation of the load capacity of the aircraft but also a mission proof-of-concept.
Portuguese Air Force 506th Squadron service members talk after cold load training at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, July 15, 2024. During the training, U.S. and Portuguese service members tested the cargo capabilities of a Portuguese KC-390 Millennium aircraft using an M142 HIMARS. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Dylan Myers) Airman Dylan Myers
“They’re able to prepare the airfields, deploy the HIMARS, come back to the airplane and move away as fast as possible,” Lemos said.
Lemos said the KC-390 is capable of taking off on a strip as short as 1,000 meters (3,280 feet). The company also claims the aircraft can be reconfigured for all nine missions it offers – from aerial resupply and aerial assault to special operations, search-and-rescue, and medevac – within three hours.
It’s not clear if the recent mission demonstration tour has made the Air Force any more interested in investing in the aircraft. For the tanking mission, the service this year reaffirmed its commitment to keeping its KC-135 in service until at least the 2050s, though Air Mobility Command Commander Gen. John Lamontagne said in a Defense One interview that doing so may require a recapitalization program. The yet-to-be-selected Next-Gen Air Refueling System, or NGAS, is ultimately expected to replace the KC-135.
Still Embraer sees daylight to make its case.
“We see that the tanking needs of the U.S. Air Force are there. There’s an aging fleet that is coming to the end of its service life, and the challenges [of] the mission that we see for the future is different from the past. So you need the combination of capabilities. You need strategic tanking, but you also need tactical tanking, and more than that, you need to have assets that can do multiple missions from areas that you don’t have,” he said. “All the logistics and preparedness in terms of airfields that you used to have. You need to operate from remote locations, small islands, small airfields. And the KC-390 fits in that role …So more missions with less assets that are more affordable and with a lower life-cycle cost throughout its life.”
Embraer also touts KC-390’s readiness for the Air Force with its full operational capability status and its contemporary design, with high customizability and open-architecture construction to meet customers needs.
“You can select the mission mode, so the behavior of the aircraft depends on the type of mission,” Lemos said. “You have a lot of connectivity, compatible with the latest generation of fighters … we have ISR that can be used for reconnaissance but also for laser designation and target identification, to be combined with kinetic effects … or to send information to other fighters or other assets in the zone.”
Embraer is now pitching armed variants of the KC-390. (Embraer)
Lemos wouldn’t describe any feedback he’s getting from the Air Force on its Millennium pitch, but he acknowledged modifications would need to be made.
“What we need to do is to listen, from the Air Force, what specific connectivity they would like to add on top of the 390 to make it more interoperable,” he said.
The boom may also make a return. While current product imagery of the KC-390 show drogues, Lemos said earlier this year, according to a Breaking Defense report, that it would be willing to self-fund a refueling boom for an Air Force tanker variant – effectively a necessity, given the number of Air Force planes requiring one – if the service NGAS assessments made space for the possibility of Millennium adoption.
It was all so familiar. It was all so infuriating. It was the 2025 season boiled down into three hours of roars, then screams, then sighs.
The gasping, grappling Dodgers needed a three-game sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies this week to have any chance at a first-round bye in the upcoming playoffs.
Dodgers pitcher Anthony Banda (43) reacts during the first inning of a loss to Philadelphia Phillies at Dodger Stadium on Monday.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
One game down, and their bullpen has already suffocated them.
They’re not going to get the bye. They couldn’t survive Philly’s first punch. It was the same old story. The Dodgers’ continually vexing relief pitchers gave back a two-run lead, ruined two ensuing comebacks and then were burned for a 10th inning double steal that led to the winning run in the Phillies’ 6-5 victory.
In a scene reminiscent of past October failures, a mournful Dodger Stadium crowd witnessed the Phillies dancing out of their dugout and squeezing into souvenir T-shirts and loudly celebrating on the field after clinching the National League East title.
In a scene also reminiscent of past October failures, just a few steps from the party, the Dodgers clubhouse was deathly quiet.
Max Muncy was asked about the bullpen, which allowed all six Phillies’ runs Monday, including three homers.
“That’s a tough question,” he said.
He attempted to answer it anyway, saying, “It’s frustrating from a team perspective, but they’ve done a great job for us all year and they’ll continue to do a great job.”
Sorry, but there is no spinning out of this mess. This is not a championship bullpen. This is not even a pennant-winning bullpen. This bullpen has been overworked and outmatched and simply outplayed all season, and when the Dodger front office had a chance to fix it at the trade deadline, they did virtually nothing.
It’s everyone’s fault. It’s an organizational failure. This bullpen is going to be the death of them. The slow expiration officially started Monday.
Fueled by fat pitches from Anthony Banda and Jack Dreyer and Alex Vesia and Blake Treinen, the Dodgers suffered a loss that may well have ended their hopes of defending their title.
Now trailing the Phillies by 5 ½ games with a dozen games to play, there’s virtually no way the Dodgers can pass them and finish with the National League’s second-best record, which means instead of getting a week off they are headed for a dangerous three-game wild card series.
If they win the West over the San Diego Padres — no guarantee — they will play those three games at home. If they finish second in the West, they will play those three games on the road.
Either way, a team with a cooked bullpen and a sore-handed star catcher and all kinds of uncertainty surrounding their rotation won’t get the advantage of a much-needed rest.
“We want the bye, obviously,” Freddie Freeman told reporters last weekend.
It’s strangely not so obvious to everyone. Throughout the next two weeks there will undoubtedly be experts who will make the argument that the Dodgers don’t really want or need a bye week because it robs the team of its routine and rhythm.
Don’t be a dummy.
Dodgers pitcher Anthony Banda throws from the mound during a loss to the Phillies at Dodger Stadium on Monday.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
The Dodgers were desperate for that bye. The Dodgers knew they needed that bye. They knew they needed to rest the relievers, set up a Shohei Ohtani-led rotation, and give Will Smith’s right hand time to heal.
Yes, the bye week bewitched them in 2022 and 2023, when the offense lost its swagger and the Dodgers were beaten in two stunning division series upsets by the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks.
But, then again, they earned the bye last year and you know how that ended up.
They needed to pass the Phillies. And they needed to start that process this week, as the Phillies’ remaining schedule includes a closing six-game stretch against the Miami Marlins and Minnesota Twins.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts is understandably steering clear of the bye-no bye debate, telling the media, “We’re gonna try to win as many games as we can. … Where it falls out is where is falls out. … I don’t think it matters for me to say how important it is. … I kind of just want to win games and see where it all plays out.”
Here’s how it — ugh — played out Monday:
Banda starts the game as an opener and allows a shot into the right-center field stands by Kyle Schwarber.
Dreyer enters the game with a two-run lead in the seventh and allows a two-run homer to somebody named Weston Wilson.
Vesia allows a go-ahead homer by Bryce Harper in the eighth.
Dodgers pitcher Alex Vesia tosses a rosin bag in frustration after Phillies first baseman Bryce Harper homered at the top of the eighth inning at Dodger Stadium on Monday.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
Treinen doesn’t hold the runners on base in the 10th, allows a double steal, and JT Realmuto hits the eventual game-winning fly ball.
“I had the guys that I wanted, and that doesn’t always work out,” said Roberts.
It feels like it’s too late to work out.
“Trying to see which guys step up,” said Roberts. “Just gonna try to figure out who’s going to seize the opportunity.”
On Monday night, the opportunity seized them, dragging them into a three-game series that could cost them everything.
Tough to beat a wild card opponent with a bullpen that folds.
In almost any other season, Dave Roberts might have made a different choice.
Even though Tyler Glasnow was pitching a no-hitter, Roberts would have at least considered removing the right-hander after six innings on Monday night.
Glasnow’s pitch count was already at 91.
This season is unlike any other, however. Up is down, down is up, and the Dodgers can’t rely on their bullpen.
The uncharacteristic problem required an uncharacteristic solution from Roberts, who kept Glasnow in the game.
What was most important about the series-opening 3-1 win over the Colorado Rockies wasn’t that Glasnow kept a no-hitter intact for another inning or that human propane tank Tanner Scott blew it by giving up a double to Ryan Ritter in the ninth.
Rather, the most promising development of the night was that Glasnow completed seven innings and threw 105 pitches.
Starts like this will be necessary for the Dodgers to overcome their most obvious weakness. Starts like this will be indispensable in their quest to repeat as champions.
For the Dodgers to have a chance to win another World Series, they will have to lean more than usual on their starting pitching.
“I do think that there’s certain times, if [the starters] give me the opportunity as far as efficiency and how their stuff is playing, to push them a little more,” Roberts said.
Roberts is already pushing them.
Two days earlier in Baltimore, Roberts granted Yoshinobu Yamamoto a chance to complete a no-hitter. Yamamoto came up short by an out.
Glasnow has completed seven innings in each of his last two starts.
“Those things are going to be good going forward,” Roberts said.
As much as Roberts continues to champion his relievers — “I believe in them,” he insisted — the reality is that the Dodgers’ bullpen ranks 19th in the majors in earned-run average entering play Tuesday. The less Roberts has to call on that group, the better.
Scott, the team’s $72-million closer, has a 4.47 ERA. Kirby Yates, another questionable offseason acquisition, is even worse at 4.71.
Blake Treinen was a postseason hero last year but he was sidelined for more than three months with a forearm sprain and has struggled with consistency since his return.
The only addition made to the bullpen at the trade deadline was Brock Stewart, who is on the injured list.
The situation could force the Dodgers to move away from the kind of bullpen-heavy game plans they have used in recent years and turn back the clock to the days when their starters accounted for an overwhelming majority of their innings.
Since the start of August, the Dodgers are second in the majors in innings pitched by their starters. Their starters have a combined ERA of 3.31 in that period, also second-best in the majors.
The Dodgers are expected to have four pitchers in their playoff rotation, and they have five legitimate candidates for those positions in Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Shohei Ohtani, Glasnow and Clayton Kershaw.
But pitching deep into a postseason game isn’t the same as pitching deep into a regular-season game. Snell and Glasnow have each started 10 playoff games. Snell didn’t complete six innings in any of them. Glasnow did it only twice.
Yamamoto crossed the sixth-inning threshold once in four postseason starts last year, as he pitched into the seventh inning against the New York Yankees in Game 2 of the World Series.
Kershaw’s last six-inning start in the playoffs was in 2020. Ohtani has never pitched in the playoffs, and the most he has pitched this season is five innings.
The pitching staff’s composition could lead to hard decisions for Roberts in October.
Yamamoto, Snell and Glasnow have each averaged 4 ⅔ innings in their postseason starts. If, say, Snell runs into trouble in the fifth inning of a playoff game, what should Roberts do? Could he trust this particular group of relievers to cover the last four-plus innings of a game? Would Snell be the more reliable option to record the final outs of the inning? Or would either choice lead to disaster?
There’s potential for irony. The manager previously second-guessed for removing starting pitchers too early could now come under scrutiny for leaving them in too long.
PITTSBURGH — The Dodgers have had an illness running through their clubhouse lately.
And on Wednesday, it forced an alteration in their pitching plans.
While Shohei Ohtani was in the Dodgers’ lineup as designated hitter for their game against the Pittsburgh Pirates, the two-way star was scratched from his scheduled pitching start at PNC Park after feeling “under the weather” the past few days, according to manager Dave Roberts.
“When you’re sick and potentially dehydrated, the tax of pitching in a game wasn’t worth it,” Roberts said.
Instead, Emmet Sheehan will take the mound for Wednesday’s game, while Ohtani’s next pitching appearance will be pushed to “sometime this weekend” against the Baltimore Orioles.
“Just to give him a few more days to recover,” Roberts said.
Ohtani’s sickness certainly didn’t seem to hamper him at the plate Tuesday, when he had two doubles and a career-high 120 mph exit velocity on a solo home run –– his 46th of the season and 100th as a Dodger.
However, Roberts said Ohtani’s pregame catch play on Tuesday was cut short, and that the risk of overexerting the reigning National League MVP by having him make a full-length start Wednesday wasn’t worth it.
“The toll of taking four or five at-bats versus pitching five innings, there’s no comparison,” Roberts said.
Ohtani’s symptoms have included chest and sinus “stuff” as well as “a deep cough,” Roberts added.
Several other Dodgers players have dealt with similar issues recently. Max Muncy was so sick last week, the team sent him home to rest and delayed the start of his minor-league rehab assignment to this week.
“We’re trying to manage it,” Roberts said. “But there are guys that are just not feeling great right now.”
Only one player in the last 110 years has tried to do what the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani is doing this season, which is to pitch and hit successfully at the big-league level.
Babe Ruth twice won more than 20 games and led the American League in ERA and starts before the Red Sox, then the Yankees, decided pitching was distracting from Ruth’s hitting and put him out to pasture in right field.
Over the next three seasons, Ruth broke the major league record for home runs three times.
The Dodgers and Ohtani insist he’ll remain a two-way player for the time being, but recent performances suggests both the Red Sox and Yankees may have been on to something when they took Ruth off the mound.
Ohtani made his eighth start of the year Wednesday and it was his best as a Dodger, with the right-hander giving up just a tainted run on two hits and striking out a season-high eight in four innings. Perhaps more important, he also slugged his first home run in 10 games in the third inning of a 5-3 matinee loss to the St. Louis Cardinals.
It was the first truly Ruthian two-way performances for Ohtani since he joined the Dodgers but it was one the team’s defense and bullpen wasted, with three relievers combining to yield four runs on 10 hits over the final five innings.
The two most important ones came in the eighth, when the Cardinals turned a one-run deficit into a one-run lead, greeting Alex Vesia with a pair of singles before a two-out hit from Jordan Walker drove in the tying run and the winning one scored on a throwing error by third baseman Alex Freeland.
“It never feels good,” manager Dave Roberts said of the loss, his team’s 17th in 30 games since July 1. “Is there a level of frustration the way the second half has started off? Yeah. We just haven’t synced up. We just can’t get on track offensively. We’re not playing great.”
That can’t be said of Ohtani, although the effort he gave at the plate Wednesday equaled what he’s been doing on the mound recently. He has posted a 2.37 ERA and struck out 25 in 19 innings in his eight starts, yet in the same eight games he’s batted .219. In his last six starts on the mound, he’s gone just three for 24 at the plate.
That’s part of a slump that began in mid-June, when Ohtani made his pitching debut for the Dodgers. At the time he led the majors in runs and led the National League in homers and slugging percentage. Since then, his strikeout rate has risen, his average has plummeted more than 20 points and he’s clubbed just 14 homers, one fewer than he had in May alone as a designated hitter.
Ohtani said he can’t explain the difference.
“I don’t really try to think too differently on days that I pitch and hit and on days that I only hit,” he said through a translator. “I’m thinking of adjusting how I work out and do my work in between my outings. Especially now that I’m going to be throwing more innings.”
Ohtani both pitched and hit on his way to two MVP awards with the Angels. But last season, the first in five years in which he didn’t pitch while recovering from a second elbow surgery, Ohtani sent career highs in virtually every offensive category and led the NL in runs (134), homers (54) and RBIs (130) while becoming the first player in history to hit 50 homers and steal 50 bases in a single season.
That won him a third MVP award and a World Series ring, replicas of which were handed out Wednesday to the 44,621 sun-splashed fans who came to see Ohtani pitch. But in 2021, when he topped 10 starts for the first time with the Angels, he hit a full-season career-low .257 and struck out a career-high 189 times.
For Ohtani, the manager said, the challenge now is finding comfort in the crowed new routine.
“It’s not the norm,” he said. “It’s been over two years since he’s done this, so he’s still sort of getting adjusted to this lifestyle, as far as kind of the day to day.”
“I don’t think he’s there yet. It’s only going to get better as he gets more time doing it.”
Ohtani breezed through his longest start as a Dodger, topping 100 mph multiple times and retiring the first six Cardinals in order. It would have been seven but shortstop Mookie Betts and second baseman Miguel Rojas lost Walker’s popout in a high sky leading off the third. That went for a hit and Walker came around to score on a stolen base, a ground out and Brendan Donovan’s infield single.
Ohtani struck out the next four hitters he faced while giving his team the lead in the third, following Alex Call’s leadoff double — his first hit as a Dodger — with a two-run homer to center. The hit was the 1,000th in the majors for Ohtani while the homer was his 39th of the season.
The Dodgers added another run in the fourth when Andy Pages led off with a single, moved to second on a wild pitch, stole third and continued home when the throw from catcher Pedro Pagés hit the bat of Miguel Rojas and ricocheted toward the Dodger dugout.
Then came the daily bullpen meltdown, with the Cardinals pushing a run across against Justin Wrobleski in the sixth, setting the stage for their eighth-inning rally against Vesia. Brock Stewart gave up the final run in the ninth.
“If you look at the last couple weeks, I think our bullpen has been good,” Roberts said of a relief corps that has failed to covert a third of its 52 save opportunities. “We didn’t finish it off today. But I think in general, the bullpen in the last couple weeks has been pretty stable.”
The softball team from Westchester Del Rey Little League won the West Regional in San Bernardino on Friday, beating Tucson 12-2 in a five-inning mercy rule to advance to the Little League World Series in Greenville, N.C.
Pitcher Gabriela Uribe started the game with three scoreless innings and ended up finishing.
Gabriela Uribe pitched Westchester’s softball team to the Little League World Series with a win in the West Regional.
(Craig Weston)
After an early 2-2 tie, Westchester broke the game open. Westchester’s pitching has been very good behind Uribe and Kaylee Braunlich.
Keith Meister is worried. The 63-year-old orthopedic surgeon feels as if he’s screaming into a void, his expert opinion falling on deaf ears.
Meister, whose slight Southern twang sweeps into conversation through his 20-plus-year career in the Lone Star State as the Texas Rangers’ team physician, is a leading voice in baseball’s pitching-injury epidemic. Meister wants the sport to err on the side of caution and create change to save pitchers’ arms. The trend, Meister says, stems from the industry-wide push to increase speed, spin and break at all costs.
While MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. bicker about what’s causing the problem and how to solve it, the doctor provides his perspective. He just wants the 17-year-old high schooler, the 23-year-old college pitcher, and the 32-year-old MLB veteran to stop showing up at his office.
“It’s not going to change at the lower levels until it changes at the highest level,” Meister said in a phone interview. “I don’t see a motivation within Major League Baseball to change anything that would enhance the level of safety.”
MLB asked Meister to sit on a committee examining the growth in pitcher injuries about 18 months ago, he said. Meister says the committee never met. (MLB did not respond to a request for comment about the committee.)
Injury is among the biggest risks for youth pitchers looking for the all-too-sought-after faster fastball. Their quest to emulate their heroes, such as hard-throwing veteran starters and stars Justin Verlander and Jacob deGrom, has caused them to need the same surgeries as the pros.
Trickling down, it’s the teenager, the budding pitching prospect desperate to land his Division I scholarship, who is hurt the most. MLB teams wave around multimillion-dollar signing bonuses for the MLB Draft. Those same pitchers hurt their elbows after pushing their abilities to the extreme, calling into action surgeons such as Meister.
“It’s an even bigger problem than it appears,” said David Vaught, a baseball historian, author and history professor at Texas A&M. “This goes back into high school or before that, this notion that you throw as hard as possible. … It’s so embedded, embedded in the baseball society.”
Tommy John surgery saves careers. But as pitchers across baseball push for higher velocity, more hurlers are going under the knife — for a first time, a second time and in some instances, a third or fourth procedure.
MLB pitching velocity steadily rose from 2008 to 2023, with average fastball velocity going from 91.9 mph to 94.2. According to Meister, the total number of elbow ligament surgeries in professional baseball in 2023 was greater than in the 1990s altogether. A 2015 study revealed 56.8% of Tommy John surgeries are for athletes in the 15- to 19-year-old age range.
“It’s like the soldiers on the front lines — they come into the tent with bullet wounds,” Meister said. “You take the bullets out, you patch them back up and you send them back out there to get shot up again.”
“It’s like the soldiers on the front lines — they come into the tent with bullet wounds,” Orthopedic surgeon Keith Meister said about performing Tommy John surgeries. “You take the bullets out, you patch them back up and you send them back out there to get shot up again.”
(Tom Fox / The Dallas Morning News)
MLB released a report on pitcher injuries in December 2024. The much-anticipated study concluded that increased pitching velocity, “optimizing stuff” — which MLB defines as movement characteristics of pitches (spin, vertical movement and horizontal movement) — and pitchers using maximum effort were the “most significant” causes of the increase in arm injuries.
Meister was interviewed for the report. He knew all that years ago. He was yelling from the proverbial rooftop as MLB took more than a year (the league commissioned the study in 2023) to conclude what the doctor considered basic knowledge.
“Nothing there that hadn’t been talked about before, and no suggestion for what needs to be changed,” Meister said to The Times Wednesday.
Although pitching development labs such as Driveline Baseball and Tread Athletics provide fresh ideas, Meister said he does not entirely blame them for the epidemic.
It’s basic economics. There’s a demand for throwing harder and the industry is filling the void.
However, Meister sees the dramatic increase in velocity for youth pitchers, such as a 10-mph boost in velocity within six months, as dangerous.
“That’s called child abuse,” Meister said. “The body can’t accommodate. It just can’t. It’s like taking a Corolla and dropping a Ferrari engine in it and saying, ‘Go ahead and drive that car, take it on the track, put the gas pedal to the metal and ask for that car to hold itself together.’ It’s impossible.”
On the other end of the arm-injury epidemic is the player lying on his back, humming along to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” as an air-cast-like device engulfs his arm, pressurizing the forearm and elbow.
The noise of the giant arm sleeve fills the room of Beimel Elite Athletics, a baseball training lab based in Torrance — owned by former MLB pitcher Joe Beimel. It generates Darth Vader-like noises, compressing up and down with a Krissshhhh Hhhwoooo… Krissshhhh Hhhwoooo.
Greg Dukeman, a Beimel Elite Athletics pitching coach whose 6-foot-8 frame towers over everyone in the facility, quipped that the elbow of the pitcher undergoing treatment was “barking.”
For professional and youth players alike, this technology, along with red-light therapy — a non-intrusive light treatment that increases cellular processes to heal tissue — and periodic ice baths, is just one example of how Beimel attempts to treat athletes as they tax their bodies, hoping to heal micro-tears in the arm without surgical intervention.
With little to no research publicly available on how high-velocity-and-movement training methods are hurting or — albeit highly unlikely — helping pitchers’ elbows and shoulders, Meister said, it’s often free rein with little — if any — guardrails.
Josh Mitchell, director of player development at Beimel’s Torrance lab, said that’s not exactly the case in their baseball performance program. Beimel will only work with youth athletes who are ready to take the next step, he said.
“You got the 9- and 10-year-olds, they’re not ready yet,” Mitchell said. “The 13- and 14-year-olds, before they graduate out of the youth and into our elite program, we’ll introduce the [velocity] training because they’re going to get it way more in that next phase.”
Beimel uses motion capture to provide pitching feedback, and uses health technology that coincides with its athletes having to self-report daily to track overexertion and determine how best to use their bodies.
Their goal is to provide as much support to their athletes as possible, using their facilities as a gym, baseball lab and pseudo health clinic.
Joe Beimel pitched for eight teams, including the Dodgers, over the course of a 13-year career.
(Ted S. Warren / Associated Press)
Mitchell knows the pleasure and pain of modern-day pitching development. The Ridgway, Pa., native’s professional career was waning at the Single-A level before the Minnesota Twins acquired him in the minor league portion of the Rule 5 Draft.
The Twins, Mitchell said, embraced the cutting-edge technique of pitching velocity, seeing improvements across the board as he reached the Double-A level for the first time in his career in 2021. But Mitchell, whose bushy beard and joking personality complement a perpetually smiling visage, turned serious when explaining the end of his career.
“I’m gonna do what I know is gonna help me get bigger, stronger, faster,” said Mitchell, who jumped from throwing around 90 miles per hour to reaching as high as 98 mph on the radar gun. “And I did — to my arm’s expense, though.”
Mitchell underwent two Tommy John surgeries in less than a year and a half.
Mitchell became the wounded soldier that Meister so passionately recounted. Now, partially because of advanced training methods, youth athletes are more likely to visit that proverbial medic’s tent.
“There’s a saying around [young] baseball players that if you’re not throwing like, over 80 miles per hour and you’re not risking Tommy John, you’re not throwing hard enough,” said Daniel Acevedo, an orthopedic surgeon based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., who mostly sees youth-level athletes.
In MLB’s report, an independent pitching development coach, who was unnamed, blamed “baseball society” for creating a velocity obsession. That velocity obsession has become a career route, an industry, a success story for baseball development companies across the country.
Driveline focuses on the never-ending “how” of baseball development. How can the pitcher throw harder, with more break, or spin? And it’s not just the pitchers. How can the hitter change his swing pattern to hit the ball farther and faster? Since then, baseball players from across levels have flocked to Driveline’s facilities and those like it to learn how to improve and level up.
“Maybe five or six years ago, if you throw 90-plus, you have a shot to play beyond college,” said Dylan Gargas, Arizona pitching coordinator for Driveline Baseball. “Now that barrier to entry just keeps getting higher and higher because guys throw harder.”
MLB players have even ditched their clubs midseason in hopes to unlock something to improve their pitching repertoire. Boston Red Sox right-handed pitcher Walker Buehler left the Dodgers last season to test himself at the Cressey Sports Performance training center near Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., before returning to eventually pitch the final out of the 2024 World Series.
Driveline is not alone.
Ben Brewster, co-founder of Tread Athletics, another baseball development company based in North Carolina, said high-school-aged players have been attracted to his performance facility because they see the results that MLB players and teammates achieve after continued training sessions.
Tread Athletics claims to have a role in more than 250 combined MLB draft picks or free agent signings, and says it has helped more than 1,000 high school players earn college opportunities.
Kansas City Royals left-hander Cole Ragans achieved a 4.4-mph increase from 2022 to 2023, the largest in MLB that year. With the velocity increase after his work at Tread Athletics, Ragans went from a league-average relief pitcher to a postseason ace in less than a year.
Kansas City Royals left-hander Cole Ragans achieved a 4.4-mph increase from 2022 to 2023, the largest in MLB that year, after his work with Tread Athletics.
(Charlie Riedel / Associated Press)
So what makes Ragans’ development different from that of a teenage prospect reaching out to Tread Athletics?
“Ragans still could go from 92-94 miles per hour to 96 to 101,” Brewster said. “He still has room, but relatively speaking, he was a lot closer to his potential than, like, a random 15-year-old kid throwing 73 miles per hour.”
Meister knows Ragans well. When the southpaw was a member of the Rangers’ organization, the orthopedic surgeon performed Tommy John surgery on Ragans twice. (Ragans has also battled a rotator cuff strain this season and has been out since early June.)
“These velocities and these spin rates are very worrisome,” Meister said. “And we see that in, in and of itself, just in looking at how long these Tommy John procedures last.”
Throwing hard is not an overnight experience. Brewster shared a stern warning for the pitching development process, using weightlifting as an example. He said weightlifters can try to squat 500 pounds daily without days off, or attempt to squat 500 pounds with their knees caving in and buckling because of terrible form. There’s no 100% safe way to lift 500 pounds, just like there is no fail-safe way of throwing 100 mph. There’s always risk. It’s all in the form. Lifting is a science, and so is pitching — finding the safest way to train to increase velocity without injury.
“The responsible way to squat 500 pounds would be going up in weight over time, having great form and monitoring to make sure you’re not going too heavy, too soon,” Brewster said. “When it comes to pitching, you can manage workload. You can make sure that mechanically, they don’t have any glaring red flags.”
Brewster added that Tread, as of July, is actively creating its own data sets to explore how UCLs are affected by training methods, and how to use load management to skirt potential injuries.
MLB admitted to a “lack [of] comprehensive data to examine injury trends for amateur players” in its December report. It points to a lack of college data as well, where most Division I programs use such technology.
The Andrews Sports Medicine & Orthopedic Center based in Birmingham, Ala. — founded by James Andrews, the former orthopedic surgeon to the stars — provided in-house data within MLB’s report, showing that the amount of UCL surgeries conducted for high school pitchers in their clinic has risen to as high as 60% of the total since 2015, while remaining above 40% overall through 2023.
Meister said baseball development companies may look great on the periphery — sending youth players to top colleges and the professional ranks — but it’s worth noting what they aren’t sharing publicly.
“What they don’t show you is that [youth athletes] are walking into our offices, three or six months or nine months later.”
Tommy John surgery was never supposed to go this far.
It was once a cross-your-fingers-and-pray fix for a career-ending injury. Now, MLB teams cycle through as many as 40-plus pitchers a year, knowing that surgery is a phone call away.
Just ask John himself, a left-hander who never threw all that hard, only reaching the mid-80s on his sinking fastball. The soft-throwing lefty was having his best year as a Dodgers starting pitcher in 1974.
He didn’t have the strikeout acumen of teammate Andy Messersmith, or the ace makeup of future Hall of Famer Don Sutton. But what John did have was consistency. John consistently pitched late into games, and sent opposing hitters back to the dugout without reaching first base.
“The game of baseball is 27 outs,” said John, now 82. “It wasn’t about throwing hard. It’s, how do I get you out?”
He was the first to go under the knife. The first to lead pitchers through a dangerous cycle of throwing as hard as possible, knowing the safeguard is surgery.
“I threw one pitch and boom, the ligament exploded,” John said.
John’s arm injury left a sensation akin to what an amputee feels after losing a limb. In 1978, he told Sports Illustrated, “It felt as if I had left my arm someplace else.” He didn’t feel pain. He felt loss. His left arm was his career. It was the direct cause for his toeing the Dodger Stadium mound in the first place. Then, John went on to pitch another 15 years in MLB.
It’s the same loss that Hall of Fame Dodgers left-hander Sandy Koufax felt when he retired at age 30 after numerous arm injuries, which could have likely been fixed if current elbow and shoulder surgeries had existed in 1966.
It’s the same loss that Texas Rangers team physician Keith Meister sees walking daily into his office.
Today, Meister can view MRI scans of elbow tears and can tell pitchers where and how they hold the baseball. The tear patterns are emblematic of the pitches being thrown in the first place. The solution — Tommy John surgery, a once-revolutionary elbow operation — replaces a torn or partially damaged ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow with a tendon from somewhere else in the body. The operation is no quick fix. It requires a 13- to 14-month recovery period, although Meister said some pitchers may require just 12 months — and some up to 18.
Meister, who is currently tallying data and researching the issue, wants to be part of the change. Midway through an October phone interview, he bluntly stopped in his tracks and asked a question.
“What is the average length of a major-league career for a major-league pitcher?” he said.
Meister explained that the average career for an MLB pitcher is just 2.6 years. Along with numerous other interviewees, he compared the epidemic to another sport’s longevity problem: the National Football League running back.
“People say to me, ‘Well, that sounds like a running back in football,’” Meister said. “Think about potentially the money that gets saved with not having to even get to arbitration, as long as organizations feel like they can just recycle and, you know, next man up, right?”
Orthopedic surgeon Keith Meister, in his TMI Sports Medicine & Orthopedic Surgery office in Arlington, Texas, in 2024, has advocated for changes to mitigate pitching injuries.
(Tom Fox / The Dallas Morning News)
Financial ramifications play close to home between pitchers and running backs as well. Lower durability and impact have led to decreasing running-back salaries. If pitchers continue to have shorter careers, as Meister puts it, MLB franchises might be happy to cycle through minimum-salary pitchers instead of shelling out large salaries for players who remain on the injured list rather than in the bullpen.
The Dodgers and the Tampa Bay Rays have shuffled through pitchers at league extremes over the last five years. In the modern era — since 1901 — only the Rays and Dodgers have used more than 38 pitchers in a season three times each. Tampa used 40-plus pitchers each year from 2021 to 2023.
Last year, the Dodgers used 40 pitchers. Only the Miami Marlins tasked more with 45.
The Dodgers have already used 35 pitchers this season, second-most in baseball. The Rays tallied just 30 in 2024 and have dispatched just 23 on the mound so far this season. What gives?
Meister says the Rays may have changed their pitcher philosophy. Early proponents of sweepers and other high-movement pitches, the Rays now rank near the bottom of the league (29th with just 284 thrown) in sweeper usage entering Saturday’s action, according to Baseball Savant. Two years ago, the Rays threw the seventh most.
Tampa is rising to the top of MLB in two-seam fastball usage, Meister said, a pitch he says creates potentially much less stress on the elbow. Their starting pitchers are second in baseball in the number of innings, and they’ve used just six starting pitchers all season.
“It’s equated to endurance for their pitchers, because you know why? They’re healthy, they’re able to pitch, they’re able to post and they’re able to go deeper into games,” Meister said. “Maybe teams will see this and they’ll be like, ‘Wait a minute, look what these guys won with. Look how they won. We don’t need to do all this crap anymore.’”
The Dodgers, on the other hand, rank ninth in sweeper usage (1,280 thrown through Friday) and have used 16 starting pitchers (14 in traditional starting roles). Meanwhile, their starting pitchers have compiled the fewest innings in MLB. Rob Hill, the Dodgers’ director of pitching, began his career at Driveline Baseball. The Dodgers hired him in 2020. Since then, the franchise has churned out top pitching prospect after top pitching prospect, many of whom throw devastating sweepers and change-ups.
As of Saturday, the Dodgers have 10 pitchers on the injured list, six of whom underwent an elbow or shoulder operation — and since 2021, the team leads MLB in injury list stints for pitchers.
“There are only probably two teams in baseball that can just sit there and say, ‘Well, if I get 15 to 20 starts out of my starting pitchers, it doesn’t matter, because I’ll replace them with somebody else I can buy,’” Meister said. “That’s the Yankees and the Dodgers.”
He continued: “Everybody else, they’ve got to figure out, wait a minute, this isn’t working, and we need to preserve our commodity, our pitchers.”
Outside of organizational strategy changes, like the Rays have made, Meister has expressed rule changes to MLB. He’s suggested rethinking how the foul ball works or toying with the pitch clock to give a slightly longer break to pitchers. He said pitchers don’t get a break on the field the same way hitters do in the batter’s box.
“Part of the problem here is that a hitter has an ability to step out of the box and take a timeout,” Meister said. “He has to go cover a foul ball and run over to first base and run back to the mound. He should have an opportunity take a break and take a blow.”
Meister hopes to discuss reintroducing “tack” — a banned sticky substance that helps a pitcher’s grip on the ball — to the rulebook, something that pitchers such as Max Scherzer and Tyler Glasnow have called a factor in injuries. Meister has fellow leading experts on his side too.
“Myself and Dr. [Neal] ElAttrache are very good friends, and we talk at length about this,” said Meister.
Meister explained that the lack of stickiness on the baseball causes pitchers to squeeze the ball as hard as possible. The “death grip on the ball,” Meister said, causes the muscles on the inner side of the elbow to contract in the arm and then extend when the ball is released. The extension of the inner elbow muscles is called an eccentric load, which can create injury patterns.
The harder the grip, the more violent the eccentric load becomes when a sweeper pitch, for example, is thrown, he said.
“Just let guys use a little bit of pine tar on their fingertips,” Meister said, adding that the pitchers already have to adjust to an inconsistent baseball, one that changes from season to season. “Not, put it on the baseball, not glob the baseball with it, but put a little pine tar on their fingertips and give them a little better adherence to the baseball.”
According to the New Yorker, MLB is exploring heavier or larger baseballs to slow pitchers’ arm movements, potentially reducing strain on the UCL during maximum-effort pitches.
Meister, however, said there does not seem to be a sense of urgency to fix the game, with a years-long process to make any fixes.
In short, Meister is ready to try anything.
For a man who has made a career off baseball players nervously sitting in his office waiting room, awaiting news that could alter their careers forever, Meister wants MLB to help him stop players from ever scheduling that first appointment.
“To me, it’s not about the surgery any more as much as it is, what can we do to prevent, and what can we do to alter, the approach that the game now takes?” Meister said.
MILWAUKEE — His breaths were heavy. His answers were interrupted by deep inhales. And beads of sweat were dripping from his forehead.
Tired? Perhaps.
But personally invigorated? There seemed little doubt.
For the newly turned 31-year-old Shohei Ohtani, the deep breaths and sweat drips were just a sign of another day’s work in his return to full-time two-way duties, coming as he spoke to reporters following his latest game as both starting pitcher and designated hitter for the Dodgers on Saturday.
“As long as I can play the way I want to play,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton as he celebrated his birthday, “I usually spend my birthday just like any other day.”
The way Ohtani wants to play, of course, is exactly how he’s been doing it for the last month. After being unable to pitch for the first year and a half of his Dodgers tenure — limited only to hitting while recovering from a second career Tommy John surgery — he is finally back to being a fully healthy two-way star, taking the mound once per week in addition to leading off the lineup every day.
Four weeks into his return to pitching, the results have been (mostly) positive for the reigning National League MVP.
In six innings as a pitcher, he has given up just one run, four hits and four walks while striking out six batters (a quality start by any definition of the term, if considered as one pitching outing).
And as a hitter, he is still posting MVP-caliber numbers, entering Monday leading the National League with 30 home runs and a .610 slugging percentage, while ranking second in OPS (.990, behind only teammate Will Smith), 13th in RBIs (56) and 23rd in batting average (.278).
“He’s just handling it the right way,” manager Dave Roberts said a few weeks ago, personally amazed at watching Ohtani’s two-way talents up close for the first time. “He’s just unflappable.”
The most encouraging signs over the last month have been with Ohtani’s progression on the mound.
Even after a second major elbow surgery, he is still routinely eclipsing 100 mph with his fastball, while commanding it in different parts of the strike zone. He has quickly rediscovered the feel for his breaking stuff, generating whiffs with his sweeper and traditional slider. He’s also doing it with a new, slightly lowered arm angle, one that Roberts said he didn’t develop by accident.
“He understands his delivery and what he’s trying to do,” Roberts said. “So obviously coming off the second Tommy John, I think this probably puts his arm in the best position, [where he] feels best. I like where he’s at.”
The only missing piece to Ohtani’s pitching remains the length of his outings.
So far, he has yet to pitch past the second inning. And while Roberts called it “feasible” for him to get stretched out to five or six innings, the team still doesn’t “know what that’s going to be,” he said.
“In a rehab progression, it’s really important to just take one step at a time,” Ohtani echoed. “There are times when I may be able to go another inning, but it’s really important not to take unnecessary risks and make sure that I can progress consistently. It’s always been this way in terms of my rehab progression. So I’m following what the team is also asking me as well.”
The big question, to this point, is how much Ohtani’s return to pitching has impacted his potency with the bat.
At various points since June 10, when Ohtani ramped up to three innings in his final simulated live session before returning to game action as a pitcher, Roberts has noted some normal instances of fatigue that Ohtani has felt.
The slugger’s hitting numbers have ticked down in that span as well, with Ohtani batting only .239 since that day — albeit with seven home runs in 24 games and a robust .919 OPS.
On days he pitches, Ohtani has still gone 5 for 16 with a double, triple and home run. On the days immediately after a pitching outing, however, he is 0 for 12 with less hard contact than his thunderous swing usually produces.
There have also been incremental drops in some of Ohtani’s underlying numbers, including exit velocity (95.5 mph average before May 10; 93.3 mph average since) and swing speed (76.3 mph before; 75.8 mph since) according to data from Baseball Savant.
The decline hasn’t been lost on Ohtani.
On Saturday, he said he doesn’t “feel too bad at the plate” physically, but acknowledged he hasn’t punished mistakes as well as he typically does.
“Usually, it’s a matter of just a little bit of a difference in the way that I’m swinging,” he said. “So just have to find it in the cage work, and hopefully be able to apply that on the field.”
Roberts also downplayed the notion as the product of a small sample size, insisting he hasn’t seen “much of a difference” in Ohtani at the plate since he resumed his two-way duties.
“I think he’s still taking good at-bats,” Roberts said. “I still don’t mind where he’s at right now.”
It will, nonetheless, be a dynamic the Dodgers closely monitor as Ohtani continues to try and maximize his dual talents. The longer his offensive numbers drag down, the more caution the club could exercise in his long-term pitching plan.
His bat, after all, remains the single most valuable tool on the team’s entire roster — with the Dodgers wanting to ensure, above all else, he can be a force at the plate as they try to defend their World Series title.
But, on the whole, his pitching progress has been stark during his first month back as a two-way player, and his overall production is still among the best in baseball; with his 4.4 total wins above replacement, according to Fangraphs, trailing only breakout Cubs star Pete Crow-Armstrong for the best mark in the NL.
“[I’ve been] really, really impressed,” Roberts said Saturday, after getting his latest look at two-way Ohtani, “how he’s continuing to get better and better each time out.”
Muncy is expected to be sidelined for six weeks with a bone bruise in his left knee but that won’t push them into the market for another third baseman between now and the July 31 trade deadline.
“I don’t think that changes much, knowing the certainty of Max coming back at some point,” manager Dave Roberts said.
The faith in Muncy is justified by his track record, the former All-Star missing three months last year but setting an all-time playoff record by reaching base in 12 consecutive plate appearances on the team’s World Series run.
This doesn’t mean the Dodgers shouldn’t be looking to strike a major deal over the next three-plus weeks.
They still have to address their greatest obstacle to become their sport’s repeat champions in 25 years. They still have to address their starting pitching.
Every sign points to the Dodgers taking a passive approach in dealing with the issue, as they continue to point to the anticipated returns of Tyler Glasnow and Blake Snell.
Glasnow pitched 4 ⅓ innings for triple-A Oklahoma City on Thursday and Roberts said he expected the 6-foot-8 right-hander to rejoin the rotation on the Dodgers’ upcoming trip to Milwaukee and San Francisco.
Dodgers pitcher Tyler Glasnow throws in the outfield before a game against the New York Mets at Dodger Stadium on June 4.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Snell pitched to hitters in live batting practice on Wednesday and is scheduled to do so again on Saturday. The left-hander could be on a minor-league rehabilitation assignment by next week.
Glasnow and Snell are former All-Stars, but how much can the Dodgers rely on them?
Unironically nicknamed “Glass,” Glasnow hasn’t pitched since April. The $136.5-million man has never pitched more than the 134 innings he pitched last year, and even then, he wasn’t unavailable for the playoffs.
Snell made just 20 starts last year with the San Francisco Giants but was signed by the Dodgers to a five-year, $182-million contract over the winter. He made only two starts for them before he was placed on the injured list with shoulder inflammation.
Dodgers pitcher Blake Snell throws the ball against the Atlanta Braves at Dodger Stadium on April 2.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Ideally, the Dodgers’ postseason rotation would consist of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Snell, Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani. There’s no guarantee that will materialize, considering that Yamamoto and Ohtani have their own complicated medical histories.
Yamamoto pitched heroically in the playoffs last year but only after missing three months in the regular season. Ohtani returned from his second elbow reconstruction last month but has been used as an opener so far. Ohtani is expected to pitch two innings on Saturday against the Houston Astros, and the team doesn’t envision using him for more than four or five innings at a time in the playoffs.
Every pitcher is an injury risk, and the Dodgers know that. But just because they won the World Series last year with three starting pitchers — they resorted to bullpen games when Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty and Walker Buehler couldn’t pitch — doesn’t mean they can lean as heavily on their relievers and expect the same results. The approach has resulted in more postseason disappointments than championships, so much so that when Ohtani was being recruited by the Dodgers before last season, Mark Walter told him he considered his previous 12 years of ownership to be a failure.
Ohtani will celebrate his 31st birthday on Saturday. He might not be showing his age yet, but Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts have. Freeman will be 36 in September and Betts 33 in October. The window in which the Dodgers have three MVP-caliber players in the lineup is closing, which should inspire a sense of urgency.
The front office’s reluctance to shop in a seller’s market is understandable, considering the most attractive possibilities are by no means sure things. Chris Sale of the Atlanta Braves is on the 60-day injured list with a fractured rib. Sandy Alcantara of the Miami Marlins has been up and down in his return from Tommy John surgery. Then again, the Dodgers made a smart buy in Flaherty last year and the gamble resulted in a World Series.
At this point, it’s up to Glasnow and Snell to perform well enough to convince the Dodgers they don’t need any more pitching. Until Glasnow and Snell do that, the team should operate as if it has to do something.
When, after a second career Tommy John surgery, would he finally get back on the mound? When, after a year and a half of exclusively hitting, would he be able to resume two-way duties?
Both times, he left his teammates and coaches in astonished amazement, giving them their first up-close glimpse of his dual-role skill set.
“I’ve seen [him throw] bullpens and lives and simulated games, or whatever,” manager Dave Roberts said Sunday. “But to kind of watch it in real time, to go from the mound to the on-deck circle and then go to the batter’s box, it’s pretty remarkable. And he’s just handling it the right way. He’s just unflappable.”
What comes next, however, remains shrouded in some uncertainty.
Now that Ohtani is again pitching in live-game action, new questions are lingering about where his buildup will go from here.
“It’s going to be a gradual process,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton on Sunday. “I want to see improvements with the quality of the pitches that I’m throwing, and then also increasing the amount of pitches. So it’s going to be gradual.”
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ANGELS
Zach Neto hit a leadoff homer and rookie Christian Moore had a tiebreaking sacrifice fly in a four-run eighth inning that sent the Angels to a 9-5 win over the Boston Red Sox on Monday night.
LaMonte Wade Jr. opened the eighth with a single off reliever Garret Whitlock (5-1). Wade stole second and went to third when catcher Connor Wong’s throw bounced into center field for an error.
Luis Rengifo walked, and Moore hit a sacrifice fly for a 6-5 lead. A single by Neto, who had three hits, and an intentional walk to Mike Trout loaded the bases with two outs. Taylor Ward walked to force in a run, and Travis d’Arnaud’s two-run single made it 9-5.
From Thuc Nhi Nguyen: Darrell Doucette didn’t mean any disrespect. All the U.S. flag football star wanted to do in an interview that went more viral than any of his numerous highlights was to fight for his sport.
So when he told TMZ in 2024 that he is “better than Patrick Mahomes” at flag football for his IQ of the sport, the generally soft-spoken Doucette wasn’t trying to issue any challenges. Watch the two-time world champion throw touchdowns, catch them, snap the ball and play defense all in the same game and it’s clear he prefers to let his game speak.
“It wasn’t about me vs. them,” said Doucette, who is known in the flag football world by his nickname “Housh.” “It was about flag football, putting eyes on this game.”
With preparations ramping up for the 2028 Olympics, flag football just wants its respect.
From Anthony De Leon: Well before fans stream into Crypto.com Arena for the Sparks’ rematch against the Phoenix Mercury, Sarah Ashlee Barker is on the court two and a half hours early. The first out of the tunnel, as she’s been all season, she fires off jump shots with a stone-faced expression.
Thrown unexpectedly into a starting role as a rookie, Barker’s rise in the WNBA has outpaced even her own expectations. Amid a season riddled with injuries, the Sparks have leaned on their first-round pick.
On this day, Barker was trying to adjust to a new role coming off the bench after forcing some plays that hindered the team’s success.
Life for a rookie in the WNBA demands adaptability.
An uncommon sight across the league, the Sparks kept all three of their recent draft picks on the roster. They are former college standouts who earned conference honors, with one winning a national championship. But they face far greater physicality, speed and overall grit in the WNBA.
From Jad El Reda: Raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have sparked fear, protests and the cancellation of several public events throughout the Los Angeles area. Amid the tense climate, more than 100 people recently gathered at the Maywood Boxing Club to watch Julio César Chávez Jr. train as he prepares to face Jake Paul on June 28 at the Honda Center in Anaheim.
Chávez, visibly surprised by the turnout, confessed that he did not expect to see so many people given the circumstances.
“I thought there wouldn’t be people here, because of everything happening, but I’m glad they made the time to come,” the Mexican boxing star told L.A. Times en Español moments before beginning his training session.
While they were drawn to the chance to watch a boxing star train, the event also united a community and showed its resilience in the face of adversity.
The last few weeks have been particularly difficult in Los Angeles. Testimonials and videos on social media have documented arrests of immigrants in the middle of public streets, generating a generalized state of fear. Chávez, who has lived in the city for more than a decade, reflected on the impact of the raids.
“It even scared me, to tell you the truth, it is very ugly,” he said. “I don’t understand the situation, why so much violence. There are many good people and you are setting an example of violence to the community.”
From John Cherwa: D. Wayne Lukas, 89, who has been a staple in horse racing since 1968 when he was training quarter horses at Los Alamitos, is leaving the game after contracting a potentially life-ending illness.
In a note to owners and friends on Sunday, Lukas Enterprises announced: “We regret to inform you that D. Wayne Lukas will not be returning to racing. A severe MRSA blood infection has caused significant damage to his heart, digestive system, and worsened pre-existing chronic conditions. The doctors proposed an aggressive treatment plan, involving multiple surgeries and procedures over several months. Even with the best-case scenario, Wayne would require 24/7 assistance to manage daily activities.”
The note goes on to say that Lukas declined the aggressive treatment plan and would “return home to spend his remaining time with his wife, Laurie, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
The Ducks traded Trevor Zegras to the Philadelphia Flyers on Monday, ending the exciting forward’s inconsistent half-decade in Orange County.
The Ducks get forward Ryan Poehling and the 45th overall pick in the upcoming draft that initially belonged to Columbus, along with a fourth-round pick next season.
Ducks general manager Pat Verbeek said he dealt away the Ducks’ charismatic former leading scorer in part because Zegras no longer fit the Ducks’ roster as they attempt to end their seven-year playoff drought.
1910 — James Braid wins his fifth British Open with a four-stroke victory over Sandy Herd.
1911 — John McDermott becomes the first American-born winner of the U.S. Open when he beats Michael Brady and George Simpson in a playoff. McDermott finishes two strokes better than Brady and five strokes better than Simpson.
1913 — John Henry Taylor wins his fifth and final British Open Championship at Royal Liverpool Golf Club at Hoylake, England.
1922 — American Professional Football Association renamed the National Football League.
1922 — Charter NFL club Chicago Staleys renamed Chicago Bears by team founder, owner and head coach George Halas.
1928 — John Farrell beats Bobby Jones by one stroke in a 36-hole playoff to win the U.S. Open.
1947 — Jim Ferrier wins the PGA championship by defeating Chick Harbert 2 and 1 in the final round.
1958 — Brazil, led by 17-year-old Pele, beats France 5-2 in a semifinal of the World Cup. With Brazil up 2-1 in the second half, Pele scores three consecutive goals.
1968 — Joe Frazier stops Mexican challenger Manuel Ramos in 2nd round TKO at NYC’s Madison Square Garden in his first heavyweight boxing title defense.
1968 — Canada’s Sandra Post beats Kathy Whitworth by seven strokes in a playoff to become the first non-U.S. player and rookie to win the LPGA championship.
1980 — The Atlanta Flames relocate to Calgary, Alberta. The NHL team keeps the name “Flames.”
1990 — Criminal Type becomes the first horse to win consecutive $1 million races after capturing the Hollywood Gold Cup. He had previously won the $1 million Pimlico Special on May 12.
1991 — The NHL’s Board of Governors adopts instant replay.
1992 — NBA Draft: LSU center Shaquille O’Neal first pick by Orlando Magic.
1995 — Stanley Cup Final, Meadowlands Arena, East Rutherford, NJ: New Jersey Devils beat Detroit Red Wings, 5-2 for a 4-0 series sweep; Devils’ first Stanley Cup finals appearance.
1998 — NBA Draft: Pacific center Michael Olowokandi first pick by the Clippers.
2000 — Rick DiPietro is the first goalie drafted No. 1 when the New York Islanders select the 18-year-old star from Boston University at the NHL Draft.
2001 — Karrie Webb, 26, captures the LPGA Championship by two strokes to become the youngest woman to complete the Grand Slam.
2004 — NBA Draft: Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy power forward Dwight Howard first pick by Orlando Magic.
2010 — John Isner outlasts Nicolas Mahut in the longest match in tennis history. Isner hits a backhand winner to win the last of the match’s 980 points, and takes the fifth set against Mahut 70-68. The first-round match took 11 hours, 5 minutes over three days, lasting so long it was suspended because of darkness — two nights in a row. Play resumed at 59-all and continued for more than an hour before Isner won 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (7), 7-6 (3), 70-68.
2010 — John Wall is selected as the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft by the Washington Wizards, and a record number of Kentucky teammates follow him. Four more Wildcats are among the top 30 selections, making them the first school ever to put five players in the first round.
2011 — NHL Draft: Red Deer Rebels (WHL) center Ryan Nugent-Hopkins first pick by Edmonton Oilers.
2013 — Bryan Bickell and Dave Bolland score 17 seconds apart in the final 1:16 of the third period and the Chicago Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup with a stunning 3-2 comeback victory in Game 6 over the Boston Bruins.
2016 — NHL Draft: ZSC Lions (NLA) center Auston Matthews first pick by Toronto Maple Leafs.
2018 — Harry Kane scores a hat trick to propel England to its most emphatic World Cup victory and into the knockout stage. With John Stones heading in twice and Jesse Lingard curling in a shot, England beats Panama 6-1 and scores its most goals ever in a World Cup game.
2022 — American Katie Ledecky wins the 800m gold medal in 8:08.04 at the World Swimming Championships in Budapest; completes 400/800/1500m treble for unprecedented 4th time at a single worlds.
2024 — The Florida Panthers win their first title in franchise history defeating the Edmonton Oilers 2-1 in Game 7. MVP: Connor McDavid (Oilers C).
THIS DAY IN BASEBALL HISTORY
1936 — Rookie Joe DiMaggio hit two homers in the fifth inning and added two doubles in the New York Yankees’ 18-4 victory over the St. Louis Browns.
1950 — Wes Westrum of the New York Giants hit three home runs and a triple in a 12-2 victory over the Cincinnati Reds.
1955 — Harmon Killebrew hit his first major league homer, off Billy Hoeft at Griffith Stadium, but the Detroit Tigers beat the Washington Senators 18-7.
1962 — Jack Reed, a substitute outfielder, hit a homer off Phil Regan in the 22nd inning to give the New York Yankees a 9-7 win over the Detroit Tigers in a game that lasted 7 hours, 22 minutes. It was the only homer Reed hit in the majors.
1968 — Jim Northrup tied a major league record by hitting two grand slams in one game as the Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Indians 14-3.
1983 — Don Sutton of the Milwaukee Brewers became the eighth pitcher in major league history to strike out 3,000 batters. Sutton’s 3,000th victim was Cleveland’s Alan Bannister in a 3-2 win over the Indians.
1984 — Oakland’s Joe Morgan hit his 265th home run as a second baseman, breaking Roger Hornsby’s career home run record for that position. Morgan’s homer off Frank Tanana was the 267th of his career and led the A’s to a 4-2 win over Texas.
1993 — Carlton Fisk of the White Sox, plays his 2,226th and final major league game, surpassing Bob Boone’s record of 2,225 for most games caught.
1993 — The Marlins obtain OF Gary Sheffield and P Rich Rodriguez from the Padres for P Trevor Hoffman, Andres Berumen and Jose Martinez. The Fish will give Sheffield a four-year contract extension in September.
1994 — Jeff Bagwell hit three homers, two in one inning to tie a major league record, as the Houston Astros beat the Dodgers 16-4.
1997 — Randy Johnson of the Seattle Mariners struck out 19 batters — one short of Roger Clemens’ major league record for a nine-inning game. He became the first AL left-hander to fan 19, but the Oakland Athletics won 4-1.
2002 — Both starters in the first game of the Angels-Texas doubleheader — Joaquin Benoit and Aaron Sele — threw 96 pitches, 53 strikes and 43 balls. Benoit and the Rangers won 8-5.
2003 — Brad Wilkerson hit for the cycle, going 4-for-4 with four RBIs, in Montreal’s 6-4 win over Pittsburgh. It was the first cycle in the majors this season and was performed in sequence — single, double, triple and homer.
2014 — Brothers B.J. and Justin Upton tied the major league record for brothers homering in the same game as teammates, accomplishing the feat for the fourth time, in Atlanta’s 3-2 win over Houston. Other brothers who had homered in the same game four times were Jeremy and Jason Giambi for the Oakland A’s and Vladimir and Wilton Guerrero for the Montreal Expos.
2015 — Pavin Smith homered and drove in three runs and Brandon Waddell turned in another strong College World Series pitching performance, leading Virginia over Vanderbilt 4-2 for the school’s first baseball national championship.
2017 — Three Oakland A’s players, Matt Olson, Jaycob Brugmand and Franklin Baretto, hit their first career home run in a 10-2 win over the White Sox.
2019 — The Yankees tie a record belonging to the 2002 Rangers by homering in their 27th straight game on their way to defeating the Blue Jays.
2018 — The Dodgers set a National League record with seven solo home runs in an 8-7 win over the Mets.
2021 — The Chicago Cubs throw the first combined no-hitter in franchise history beating the Dodgers 4-0. It was the seventh no-hitter of the season.
Compiled by the Associated Press
Until next time…
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For so long, the biggest question surrounding Shohei Ohtani’s future as a pitcher was simple.
When, after a second career Tommy John surgery, would he finally get back on the mound? When, after a year and a half of exclusively hitting, would he be able to resume two-way duties?
Both times, he left his teammates and coaches in astonished amazement, giving them their first up-close glimpse of his dual-role skillset.
“I’ve seen [him throw] bullpens and lives and simulated games, or whatever,” manager Dave Roberts said Sunday. “But to kind of watch it in real time, to go from the mound to the on-deck circle and then go to the batter’s box, it’s pretty remarkable. And he’s just handling it the right way. He’s just unflappable.”
What comes next, however, remains shrouded in some uncertainty.
Now that Ohtani is again pitching in live-game action, new questions are lingering about where his build-up will go from here.
“It’s going to be a gradual process,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton on Sunday. “I want to see improvements with the quality of the pitches that I’m throwing, and then also increasing the amount of pitches. So it’s going to be gradual.”
It was no surprise that, in Ohtani’s return to pitching on June 16, he was limited to only one inning. It was a trade-off he and the team made to get him back into a real game sooner, agreeing to give him a live start even if they knew it wouldn’t extend past one frame.
Entering Ohtani’s second start on Sunday afternoon, however, the thinking was that the right-hander could be ready to push into the second — that, to eventually get stretched out for full-length starts, he would begin building up his workload by adding another inning each time out.
The way Ohtani pitched Sunday certainly warranted a second frame.
After giving up two hits and one run over a 28-pitch outing against the San Diego Padres six days prior, he collected two strikeouts in a scoreless 18-pitch frame against the Washington Nationals, his only baserunner reaching on a dropped pop fly by shortstop Mookie Betts.
“Overall, I was able to relax much better compared to my last outing,” Ohtani said. “The way my body moves when I pitch, it’s something that I worked on with the pitching coaches and I felt a lot better this time.”
However, in the top of the second, Ohtani was once again replaced on the rubber. Despite his improved execution and efficiency, it turned out he and the team had made a predetermined decision not to push him for a second inning quite yet.
“That was the original plan,” Ohtani said of being removed after the first.
“Going into today’s game,” Roberts added, “we felt really comfortable with one.”
It hammered home the reality of what lies ahead for Ohtani; the cautious, methodical and, as Roberts also described it, “gradual” pace with which the team will handle his pitching workload for the time being.
“I think that it’s more of just trying to get the foundation, the building blocks as he’s [pitching and] taking at-bats,” Roberts said. “[We are] erring on the side of caution … There’s no sense in rushing it right now.”
As Ohtani returns to pitching, there are new factors the Dodgers will have to monitor in his all-around performance.
Already, the reigning MVP has cut down on his base-stealing while ramping up as a pitcher: After swiping 11 bags in his first 50 games, he hasn’t even attempted a steal since throwing his first live batting practice session on May 25.
His place in the leadoff spot could be altered on days he pitches as well, with Roberts leaving open the possibility of moving him down in the batting order to give him more time to transition from pitcher to hitter (at least in the first inning of home games, when he currently has to hustle from the mound to the plate after the top half of the frame).
Then, there is perhaps the biggest question: Whether the burden of pitching will affect Ohtani’s all-important production with the bat?
That dynamic came under scrutiny this week, after Ohtani went just two-for-19 in the five games following his first pitching start.
“I don’t think that’s a fatigue thing,” Roberts insisted Sunday morning. “But we’ll manage it. I can only take him at his word, and the swing speed and all the stuff we sort of track is still in line.”
Ohtani did snap that slump after his inning on the mound Sunday, finishing the day with a three-run triple in the seventh and two-run home run in the eighth.
“I do feel like I do have to work on some things,” Ohtani said. “But at the same time, I do feel like I can perform better, even better than I used to be able to perform at.”
All of this is to say, while Ohtani has mastered his two-way role before (twice winning American League MVP while doing it with the Angels), the Dodgers are taking nothing for granted about his pitching comeback right now.
Before they begin adding to his pitching workload, they want to make sure they’ve accounted for any unintended side effects.
“All these conversations we have with him, obviously,” Roberts said. “He’s understanding of where he’s at, where we’re at, and appreciating the fact that as time goes on, we’ll get to a certain point.”
Before Sunday’s game, Roberts didn’t even commit to fully stretching out Ohtani like a traditional starter by the second half of the season.
“That’s kind of TBD,” he said when asked when Ohtani might be fully built-up for normal-length starts. “I think we’re always gonna be cautious. So I don’t even know what that’s going to look like, to be ‘fully built-up.’ I don’t think anyone knows what that looks like. Because it’s not a normal starting pitcher. So to say six [innings] and 90 [pitches], I don’t even know if we’ll get to that point.”
Could that mean using Ohtani as only a glorified opener for the rest of this season? Or stretching him out only if a currently shorthanded rotation doesn’t eventually get healthy?
Time will have to tell on those questions, with neither the Dodgers nor Ohtani ready to commit to any answers until they see how he continues to respond to his return to two-way duties.
“As we build more of a foundation, there will be some latitude,” Roberts said. “I think that we’re still gathering [information]. But again, once we ramp up more, it might be a different conversation.”
The Japanese player will pitch for his MLB side for the first time since his signing a $700m contract with them in 2024.
Shohei Ohtani is set to return to the mound as the starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the opener of a four-game series against the visiting San Diego Padres, the Major League Baseball (MLB) team has announced.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts originally told reporters on Sunday that Ohtani was set to pitch a simulated game in the coming days, but the team decided to give him the nod against the rival Padres on Monday.
“He’s getting very eager, very excited,” Roberts said. “I think the thought is that given where we’re at right now, anything he can give us is additive, even if it’s an inning or two innings on the front end.”
This will mark Ohtani’s first big league pitching appearance since August 23, 2023, and his first with the Dodgers. The two-way player had Tommy John surgery on his elbow in September 2023, three months before signing a 10-year, $700m contract with the Dodgers.
Ohtani has been ramping up for a return to the mound in June. On Tuesday, the right-hander threw 44 pitches over three simulated innings against minor leaguers from the Dodgers’ Arizona spring complex.
Ohtani’s return could not come at a better time for Los Angeles. Starters Roki Sasaki (right shoulder), Blake Snell (left shoulder) and Tyler Glasnow (right shoulder) are all on the injured list. Sasaki was recently forced to shut down his throwing programme after feeling discomfort this week. There is no timetable for his return this season.
In total, the Dodgers have 14 pitchers on the injured list – the most in the MLB.
Over his career in the majors, Ohtani is 38-19, with a 3.01 ERA in 86 career starts, all with the Los Angeles Angels. In 481 2/3 innings, he has compiled 608 strikeouts and 173 walks.
A three-time MVP, Ohtani is hitting 0.297 with 41 RBIs in 70 games this season, leading the National League with 25 home runs and a 1.035 OPS.
The long-anticipated wait is over — Shohei Ohtani is ready to pitch.
The Dodgers announced after Sunday’s 5-4 win over the Giants that Ohtani will make his Dodgers pitching debut Monday against the San Diego Padres. He will start, but there’s a chance he will be an opener, only pitching one inning.
For Ohtani, it’s been a long road back to pitching. He signed with the Dodgers on a 10-year, $700-million contract before the 2024 season — a value representing not just his MVP-level bat, but his potential Cy Young Award-level pitching.
He underwent Tommy John surgery in September 2023, only hitting in his first season with the Dodgers. He tallied unprecedented numbers at the plate (.310 batting average, league-high 54 home runs, 130 RBI and 59 stolen bases). In recent weeks, Ohtani ramped up his throwing program, facing live hitters a handful of times.
Ohtani had been brilliant for the Angels, going 38-19 with a 3.01 earned-run average over 86 starts since coming over from Japan before the 2018 season. In 2022, Ohtani posted his best pitching numbers in the majors, with a 15-9 record, a 2.33 earned-run average and 219 strikeouts over 166 innings en route to placing fourth in AL Cy Young Award voting.
It’ll likely be an incremental start for Ohtani as he looks to add more pitches and innings in the weeks ahead.
“He’s getting very eager, getting very excited,” Roberts said before Sunday’s game. “I think that there’s a point where, in hearing from Shohei, that the effort that it takes to throw lives and things like that, [rather] than to play a game, then let’s use those bullets in a game. He’s getting very excited.”
Now those proverbial “bullets” will be used Monday night at Dodger Stadium.
From Kevin Baxter: The Dodgers made history when they opened the season with eight straight wins, something no reigning World Series champion had ever done. But they’ve been just a shade above mediocre since then.
“I wouldn’t say [I’m] worried. It’s kind of where we’re at right now,” manager Dave Roberts said.
“It’s been hard to gain traction.”
If anything, the Dodgers have been spinning their wheels. Because with Wednesday’s 6-1 loss to the New York Mets, the team’s third loss in four games, the Dodgers fell to .500 over the last month and their lead in the National League West remained at just a game over the San Diego Padres heading into Thursday’s get-away day matinee with the Mets.
Since their historic start, the Dodgers have had just three winning streaks of more than two games, but three losing streaks of more than two games. For every three steps forward, the team has taken 2 ½ steps back.
And while the Dodgers entered Thursday with the fourth-best record in the league, over the last two months they have a lower winning percentage than the Milwaukee Brewers, the third-best team in the Central Division. The reason why, Roberts said, is pitching.
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NBA PLAYOFFS RESULTS
All Times Pacific
NBA FINALS
Oklahoma City vs. Indiana
Thursday at Oklahoma City, 5:30 p.m., ABC Sunday at Oklahoma City, 5 p.m., ABC Wednesday at Indiana, 5:30 p.m., ABC Friday, June 13 at Indiana, 5:30 p.m., ABC Monday, June 16 at Oklahoma City, 5:30 p.m., ABC* Thursday, June 19 at Indiana, 5:30 p.m., ABC* Sunday, June 22 at Oklahoma City, 5 p.m., ABC*
*if necessary
ANGELS
Ceddanne Rafaela curled a home run around the Pesky Pole in the bottom of the ninth inning on Wednesday and the Boston Red Sox rallied after trailing four different times to beat the Angels 11-9.
The Angels blew 4-0, 7-5, 8-7 and 9-8 leads, with Rafael Devers bouncing a chopper between the gloves of second baseman Chris Taylor and shortstop Zach Neto behind second base to tie it 9-9 in the eighth.
Each of the first three times the Red Sox scored, the Angels answered with runs of its own. But after walking Mike Trout to lead off the ninth, Cooper Criswell (1-0) got the next three batters out to give Boston a chance to walk it off.
The former Florida State teammates were drafted in the first and second rounds, respectively, and lived up to their billing as individuals and as a collective force.
Verse, an edge rusher, became the NFL defensive rookie of the year. Fiske, a defensive lineman, was a finalist for the award.
“I think we did good, but I think we became more focused on helping the team than trying to do our own little thing and having a good little duo going on,” Verse said, adding, “So now we finally took another step — having another year together to figure out, ‘Hey, this is how I work, this is how he works.’
“So, I feel like this year is going to be a good one for us to play together.”
As they prepare for their second seasons, the two young stars are part of a front that could rank as one of the NFL’s most dynamic.
From Benjamin Royer: Alexander Straus was fewer than two weeks from his first training session as Angel City FC coach. Yet, Angel City CEO and co-founder Julie Uhrman wanted to see her new manager at work.
She flew to Portugal, where Straus was completing his three-season stint as FC Bayern Munich coach — a club the 49-year-old Norwegian led to three consecutive Frauen-Bundesliga titles and a 57-7-2 league record.
As Uhrman watched Straus coach Bayern Munich at the inaugural World Sevens Football tournament, she already was familiar with his technical acumen that was on display en route to a championship victory over Manchester United. That was not a surprise.
But what caught Uhrman’s attention was Straus’ relationships with his players.
Edmonton vs. Florida at Edmonton 4, Florida 3 (OT) (summary, story) Friday at Edmonton, 5 p.m., TNT Monday at Florida, 5 p.m., TNT Thursday, June 12 at Florida, 5 p.m., TNT Saturday, June 14 at Edmonton, 5 p.m., TNT* Tuesday, June 17 at Florida, 5 p.m., TNT* Friday, June 20 at Edmonton, 5 p.m., TNT*
* If necessary
THIS DAY IN SPORTS HISTORY
1884 — James McLaughlin becomes the first jockey to win three straight Belmont Stakes when he rides Panique to victory. He won with George Kinney (1883) and Forester (1882). McLaughlin repeats his feat in 1886-88. McLaughlin’s triple is matched by jockey Laffit Pincay Jr. in 1984.
1925 — Willie McFarlane beats Bobby Jones by one stroke in the second round of a playoff to capture the U.S. Open. Macfarlane shoots a 291 at Worcester (Mass.) Country Club.
1937 — War Admiral, ridden by Charles Kurtsinger, wins the Triple Crown with a three-length victory over Sceneshifter in the Belmont Stakes.
1943 — Count Fleet, ridden by Johnny Longden, wins the Triple Crown by 25 lengths in the Belmont Stakes. Count Fleet goes at off at 1-20 odds in a race with no place or show betting.
1952 — Jersey Joe Walcott scores a 15-round unanimous decision over Ezzard Charles in Philadelphia to retain the world heavyweight title.
1961 — The newly formed American Basketball League adopts the 3-point field goal.
1977 — The Portland Trail Blazers hold off the Philadelphia 76ers 109-107 to win the NBA championship in six games. Portland becomes the first team in the 31-year history of the league to win four straight after losing the first two games.
1985 — Steve Cauthen wins the Epsom Derby aboard Slip Anchor and became the only American jockey to win the English Derby and Kentucky Derby. Cauthen had ridden Affirmed to victory in the 1978 Kentucky Derby.
1993 — Julie Krone guides Colonial Affair to victory in the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first female jockey to win a Triple Crown race.
1994 — Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and Sergi Bruguera produce the best day of tennis in Spanish history. Sanchez Vicario beats Mary Pierce 6-4, 6-4 in the French Open final and Bruguera retains his title by defeating another Spaniard, Alberto Berasategui, 6-3, 7-5, 2-6, 6-1.
1999 — Steffi Graf wins her sixth French Open title and her first Grand Slam championship in almost three years, beating top-ranked Martina Hingis 4-6, 7-5, 6-2.
1999 — Charismatic loses his bid to become the 12th Triple Crown winner when he fractures his left front cannon bone and sesamoid while finishing third to Lemon Drop Kid in the Belmont Stakes.
2004 — Smarty Jones loses his Triple Crown bid and his perfect record when Birdstone runs him down near the finish of a thrilling Belmont Stakes. Birdstone, a 36-1 long shot ridden by Edgar Prado, returns $74, $14 and $8.60.
2005 — Spanish teenager Rafael Nadal beats unseeded Mariano Puerta of Argentina in four sets to win the French Open men’s singles title. The No. 4-seeded Nadal becomes the youngest men’s Grand Slam champion since Pete Sampras won the U.S. Open at 19 in 1990.
2011 — Rafael Nadal wins his record-equaling sixth French Open title, beating Roger Federer 7-5, 7-6 (3), 5-7, 6-1 in the final.
2016 — Novak Djokovic becomes the first man in nearly a half-century to win four consecutive major championships and finally earned elusive French Open title to complete a career Grand Slam, beating Andy Murray 3-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-4.
2021 — Luis Saez rides Essential Quality to wins the 153rd Belmont Stakes.
THIS DAY IN BASEBALL HISTORY
1915 — Philadelphia’s Grover Cleveland Alexander lost his no-hitter when Artie Butler punched a single with two outs in the ninth. Alexander struck out Bob Bescher for the final out to beat St. Louis 3-0. Alexander went on to pitch three more one-hitters during the season.
1929 — The Cincinnati Reds scored nine runs in the sixth inning en route to a 21-4 romp over the Chicago Cubs.
1935 — Chicago White Sox rookie John Whitehead loses to St. Louis 2-0. It was his first loss after winning his first eight starts, an AL record for the start of a career.
1949 — Commissioner Happy Chandler lifted the ban on all players who had jumped to a league in Mexico.
1955 — Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees hit a home run off Chicago’s Billy Pierce that traveled about 550 feet. The ball cleared the left-field upper deck at Comiskey Park.
1959 — Pittsburgh’s Dick Stuart hit the longest home run at Forbes Field. Stuart smashed a shot over the center-field wall off Chicago pitcher Glenn Hobbie.
1966 — Leo Cardenas of the Reds hit four home runs in a doubleheader against the Chicago Cubs. Cardenas hit two home runs in each game as Cincinnati won the opener 8-3 but dropped the second game 9-5.
1986 — San Diego’s Steve Garvey was ejected for the first time in his career when he argued a play at home plate. Garvey, the on-deck hitter, protested the last out of a triple play by the Atlanta Braves. Television replays showed that Bip Roberts was indeed safe. The Padres lost 4-2.
1989 — The Blue Jays lost their debut in the SkyDome as Glenn Braggs hit a two-run homer to lead the Milwaukee Brewers past Toronto 5-3. The $375-million complex featured a $100-million, four-section, retractable roof.
1997 — Alex Rodriguez of the Mariners became the first Seattle player to hit for the cycle in a nine-inning game. He completed the cycle with a double in the ninth of a 14-6 win at Detroit.
2001 — Colorado pitcher Mike Hampton had two homers, three RBIs and recorded his eighth win as Colorado defeated Houston 9-4.
2008 — Atlanta’s Chipper Jones became the third switch-hitter in major league history to hit 400 home runs. Jones’ homer off Ricky Nolasco was one of his four hits in the 7-5 comeback win over Florida. Mickey Mantle and Eddie Murray were the first two reach the milestone.
2013 — The Chicago White Sox and Seattle Mariners played the first game in major league history when each team scored five or more runs in the game when it was scoreless through the ninth. Alejandro De Aza and Alex Rios each had an RBI single in the 16th inning, and Chicago won 7-5.
2015 — Oakland’s Pat Venditte became the first pitcher in 20 years to throw with both arms in the same game, but the Boston Red Sox beat the Athletics 4-2 on a night a fan sustained life-threatening injuries when she was struck by a broken bat.
2021 — Team USA secured a spot in the Tokyo Olympics by winning the Americas Olympic Qualifier.
Compiled by the Associated Press
Until next time…
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