But for their most intriguing recent draft pick, it’s also the opening day of a different kind of season.
In the 17th round of last month’s MLB draft, the Dodgers took a flier on University of Missouri pitcher Sam Horn, a 6-foot-4 right-hander with a big fastball, a promising slider and an athletic, projectable build.
Like most late-round prospects hoping to become a diamond in the rough, Horn came with questions. He pitched just 15 innings in his college career after undergoing Tommy John surgery as a sophomore. His limited body of work led to a wide range of scouting opinions.
In Horn’s case, however, the biggest unknowns had nothing to do with his potential as a pitcher.
Because, starting Thursday night, he will also be under center as quarterback for Missouri’s football team.
Horn is not only a two-sport athlete, but someone still undecided on whether his future will be on a mound or the gridiron. As a quarterback, he was a four-star recruit in Missouri’s 2022 signing class. And this fall, he has been locked in a battle with Penn State transfer Beau Pribula, jockeying for first-string signal-caller duties at an SEC program coming off a 10-win season.
When Missouri opens its 2025 football schedule Thursday night against Central Arkansas, Pribula will play the first half, and Horn will play the second half. As for the rest of the season, Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz has yet to hand either player all the keys to the offense.
“I think both quarterbacks have done an excellent job of doing the things that we’ve asked them to do, and there wasn’t enough separation that I felt like there was a clear-cut starter,” Drinkwitz told reporters this week. “And so the next-best evaluation is in a live football game to see how guys respond, not only to preparation and a game plan, but also respond to a crowd, also respond to being tackled and being hit.”
It’s a QB battle that Dodgers officials have followed with fascination throughout Missouri’s fall camp.
Already, the club has signed Horn to a baseball contract with an almost $500,000 signing bonus (well above the norm for the 525th overall pick).
The question now is whether he ever ends up playing for them.
“We’re pleasantly hoping he does,” Dodgers vice president of baseball operations Billy Gasparino said this week. “We think there’s a whole window of opportunity to get him much better, and quickly.”
Once upon a time, the Dodgers viewed Horn as one of college baseball’s better pitching prospects. Even in a limited sample size as a freshman in 2023, Gasparino said the team evaluated him as having potential future first-round talent.
“He’s a tremendous athlete,” said Gasparino, the longtime point man for the Dodgers’ draft operations. “He has really good arm action. I think that part was very elite.”
By the time Horn actually became draft-eligible this summer, though, uncertainties about his future made his scouting process unique.
All along, Horn signaled to MLB teams that he wanted to play football this fall. As a redshirt junior, he will have another season of eligibility in football next year as well. Gasparino said the narrative around Horn, who is originally from Lawrenceville, Ga., is that “baseball is his first love.”
“But,” Gasparino added, “he definitely seemed split on what he wanted to do going forward.”
This is not the first recent example of the Dodgers drafting a power-conference college quarterback.
Two years ago, they used their final 20th-round selection in the 2023 draft on then-Oregon State quarterback DJ Uiagalelei, a former two-sport star at St. John Bosco. Uiagalelei, however, never signed with the team. As a highly-touted five-star talent with NFL aspirations, he never made the switch to baseball either, his draft rights with the Dodgers lapsing after he transferred to Florida State for the 2024 football season.
Horn’s situation appears to be different. Unlike Uiagalelei (who never actually pitched collegiately), he spent the last three years on Missouri’s baseball team. And if he doesn’t win the starting quarterback job with the Tigers football squad this fall, his odds of reporting to the Dodgers next spring figure to be much more realistic.
That’s why, as Missouri’s QB battle has unfolded this preseason, Gasparino scoured Missouri recruiting site message boards and local news outlets, looking for any indication of which way the program was leaning.
“The coach is going to give nothing,” Gasparino said jokingly. “So you kind of have to go on the message boards, and to the local writers, to figure out, ‘Alright, who is winning? What is going on?’ It’s been kind of a hard read.”
Leading up to the draft, Horn’s situation also required extra scouting legwork. The Dodgers dusted off his old freshman year and high school evaluations, after he pitched just 10 ⅔ innings in Missouri’s spring baseball season coming off his Tommy John procedure. They also reached out to NFL scouting departments and college football recruiters, “just to figure out how talented he was at football,” Gasparino said.
The Dodgers do have downside protection if Horn ultimately decides to stick with the football, with Gasparino noting that “to actually get his signing bonus, he has to come to us.”
But in the meantime, they’ll be keeping a close eye on Missouri’s football season — starting with Thursday night’s opener in which Horn is slated to see the field.
“Definitely gonna be watching,” Gasparino said. “I mean, I guess first, it’s like, don’t get hurt. But also just hoping that the right answer becomes very clear on what he should do sport-wise … Of course, we’d be disappointed if it’s not baseball. But would hate another year of in-between.”
Stephenson, 32, had been on the IL since May 31 because of right biceps inflammation. He has pitched one scoreless inning over two appearances with the Angels this season.
Stephenson agreed to a $33-million, three-year contract in January 2024. He missed all of last year after having Tommy John surgery.
Right-hander Chase Silseth was optioned to triple-A Salt Lake before the opener of a weekend series against the Chicago Cubs.
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.”
All eyes are on Shohei Ohtani, as he made his long-awaited return to the pitching mound and delivered his first pitches as a member of the Dodgers on Monday night in a 6-3 win over the San Diego Padres at Dodger Stadium. Ohtani last pitched on Aug. 23, 2023, while with the Angels. He underwent his second Tommy John surgery the following month.
Ohtani is 38-19 with 3.01 earned-run average over 86 starts in his MLB career entering Monday’s game and finished fourth in the AL Cy Young Award voting in 2022, when he went 15-9 with a 2.33 ERA. He is expected to help bolster a depleted Dodgers starting rotation that has been missing Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow, among others, for extended stretches this season.
Shohei Ohtani pitches for the Dodgers against the San Diego Padres at Dodger Stadium on Monday.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Shohei Ohtani delivers against the San Diego Padres at Dodger Stadium on Monday.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Shohei Ohtani pitches against the San Diego Padres on Monday.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Dodgers pitcher Shohei Ohtani in Phoenix in February.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Dodgers pitcher Shohei Ohtani throws during spring training in Phoenix in February.
(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani enters the field at the Tokyo Dome for a workout ahead of the Tokyo Series against the Chicago Cubs in March.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani warms up during a baseball spring training workout in Phoenix.
(Matt York / Associated Press)
Fans head up some stairs wearing Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto jerseys before the game between the Dodgers and the Detroit Tigers at Dodger Stadium on March 27.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Dodgers two-way player Shohei Ohtani runs onto the field during introductions during the Dodgers’ home opener in March.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
The Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani throws a live batting practice before a game against the New York Mets on May 25.
(Adam Hunger/AP)
The Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani throws in the outfield before a game against the New York Mets at Dodger Stadium on June 4.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Dodgers coaches keep a watchful eye as Shohei Ohtani throws in the bullpen before the game against the New York Mets at Dodger Stadium on June 4.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Dodgers fans watch as Shohei Ohtani throws in the outfield before the game against the New York Mets at Dodger Stadium on June 4.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
The Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani plays catch before the Dodgers take on the New York Mets at Dodger Stadium on June 2.
(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)
Shohei Ohtani walks past a throng of journalists before the Dodgers play an exhibition game against the Yomiuri Giants at the Tokyo Dome in March.
CINCINNATI — All-Star right-hander Corbin Burnes of the Arizona Diamondbacks is set to undergo Tommy John elbow surgery, ending his season early in the first year of a $210 million, six-year contract.
Manager Torey Lovullo said Friday the decision was made with “a lot of people weighing in.” Lovullo said the surgery probably would be scheduled for next week.
The announcement came three days after the Diamondbacks put Burnes on the 15-day injured list with right elbow inflammation.
The 30-year-old left his most recent start with Arizona leading 3-0 in the top of the fifth inning Sunday. After Burnes allowed a single by CJ Abrams with two outs, he gestured toward the dugout with his glove and yelled in frustration.
Burnes allowed a run and four hits in 4 2/3 innings. He is 3-2 with a 2.66 ERA in 11 starts this season.
Burnes signed with the Diamondbacks after earning his fourth consecutive All-Star nod in his only season with Baltimore last year. He spent his first six years with Milwaukee before an offseason trade to the Orioles in early 2024.
“This is a tough day to get this news,” Lovullo said. “But we’ll find a way to rally around him, play hard for him all year long.”
