Will Dodgers’ pitching ever get healthy? Why team remains confident
The Dodgers’ biggest question this season is an eerily familiar one.
Will their pitching ever get back to full (or at least, significantly improved) health? And will it be as productive as expected if or when that happens?
To this point, the team remains confident on both fronts.
Injured starters Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell and Roki Sasaki are all in throwing progressions. Two-way star Shohei Ohtani is continuing to build up his arm through weekly live batting practices, and Emmet Sheehan is on a rehab assignment with triple-A Oklahoma City. And a whole litany of relievers are also expected back at some point, with Kirby Yates and Michael Kopech likely to return this weekend, and Blake Treinen and Brusdar Graterol possibilities over the coming couple of months.
Still, as this last week has epitomized, there is an ever-present lack of certainty hanging over the state of the staff as well, with the recovery of any injured pitcher seemingly liable to shift at any moment.
“I’m very confident we’re going to get them all back,” manager Dave Roberts said Wednesday. “I just don’t know when.”
This week, Glasnow became the latest example of that unpredictable dynamic.
On Monday, Roberts offered a seemingly troublesome update on the oft-injured right-hander. After Glasnow had thrown one bullpen session a week and a half earlier, a bout of back tightness had kept him from throwing off a mound again since.
“There was one ‘pen and, then [his] body didn’t respond,” Roberts said. “So we’re trying to figure out when we can ramp him back up.”
On Tuesday, however, Glasnow presented a more optimistic version of events. Yes, his back became “a little tight” after his initial bullpen session, he said. But he described the resulting pause in his throwing progression as nothing more than a “precaution,” adding that he plans to resume throwing bullpens in the coming week.
“I feel totally fine, totally normal,” said Glasnow, who initially went on the injured list in April because of shoulder inflammation. “My shoulder’s totally fine. That issue, I haven’t felt since I started throwing. It was fine. [The back tightness] really was just, I think, a precaution. I felt totally fine. I’m good to go.”
During his time on the IL, Glasnow believes he found a middle ground between the pitching mechanics he had last year (when his season ended early with elbow tendinitis) and the changes he made over the winter (which he felt contributed to his more recent shoulder issue).
Dodgers pitcher Roki Sasaki watches a game against the Arizona Diamondbacks from the dugout at Dodger Stadium on May 21.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
“Trying to meld a best-of-both worlds situation,” he said. “But right now, I feel really, really good mechanics-wise, to just be athletic and throw. It’s enabled me to just be myself more now.”
And though he is still weeks, if not a month or more, away from being activated, Glasnow said he’s confident about having enough time over the second half of the season to rediscover a rhythm ahead of the playoffs.
“I’m trying to get back as soon as I can,” Glasnow said. “But we’re on the same wavelength of, ‘Let’s get you back out as healthy as possible as soon as possible, in a healthy way.’”
Snell, who has also been out since early April because of shoulder trouble, has endured his own stop-and-start recovery process.
After first going on the injured list two starts into the season — because of shoulder pain that he later said had been bothering him since spring training — Snell started to ramp up a few weeks later, progressing to a bullpen session on April 19.
His shoulder, however, didn’t respond well in the days following that step. Thus, he was shut down from throwing again, and received an injection to help alleviate his lingering discomfort.
Since then, Snell has been on a more methodical throwing plan. Recently, his shoulder has finally started to feel normal. And, like Glasnow, he is hoping to begin throwing bullpens once more over the next week.
“I can’t wait [to get back],” Snell told AM 570 last weekend. “Having to wait, it sucks. It’s a long process. But I’m gonna go slow. I’m gonna make sure I’m ready. So when I start pitching, I can get going and do my thing.”
This remains the Dodgers’ company line with most of their injured arms — the team wanting to purposely take their progressions slowly in the short term, to ensure they are available in the long run later this year.
“As far as return to play, there’s certainly a cautiousness to it,” Roberts said. “Because as you start getting into the middle of the year, then any setback could be detrimental for the rest of the season.”
In the meantime, uncertainty on the mound — where the Dodgers currently rank 22nd in the majors with a 4.10 team ERA — will continue to loom.
There is always the threat of setbacks; like what happened with Evan Phillips, who underwent season-ending Tommy John surgery Wednesday for an injury that was initially expected to sideline him for only two weeks.
And even once pitchers do come back, their levels of performance are subject to variance. That’s been the case recently with Kopech, who struggled so much during a rehab stint in Oklahoma City (where he gave up 11 runs and 11 walks in 6 ⅓ innings) that the Dodgers had him throw a live batting practice session in front of their big league coaching staff Wednesday to help him work through some mechanical adjustments.
“The stuff was good,” Roberts said of Kopech, out since the start of the year because of a shoulder impingement. “Just curious to see what the pitching guys and the training staff feel, and what he thinks of how he felt today. And we’ll kind of move forward after that.”
Yates, who has not required a rehab stint recovering from a hamstring strain, also threw live BP on Wednesday.
“We’ll see how they feel tomorrow,” Roberts said. “And then I think we’ll have a much better decision on this weekend for both guys.”
The good news for the Dodgers is that they do have depth. They don’t need every one of their injured pitchers to return to health and previous form. Even if only half of the arms currently on the IL get back to where they were before, they could still have a pitching staff capable of contending for another World Series title.
Because of that, it seems unlikely they’ll make overly aggressive moves on the trade market leading up to the July 31 deadline. They could use another right-handed reliever to replace Phillips but might be wary of a high-cost splash for a front-line starter (especially after doling out more than half a billion dollars the last two winters to Glasnow, Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto).
For now, they continue to trust that pitchers such as Snell, Glasnow and Ohtani will be impact contributors for the stretch run of the season. They are confident that Sasaki (who has continued regular catch play while battling his own shoulder issue), Sheehan and Graterol will give them more pitching coverage as well.
But until then, they will nonetheless face a precariously familiar situation: hoping enough injured pitchers are able to regain health over the course of the season, and that more unforeseen setbacks won’t continue to leave them shorthanded on the mound.
“I think we’re very confident that we’re going to get the guys we’re talking about back,” Roberts said. “Then once we get them back, we got to make sure we keep them back too.”
