The Los Angeles Dodgers are well known for targeting high-risk, high-reward pitchers. Those with extensive injury histories or a high-variance delivery. And sure enough, those pitchers often get hurt.
In 2024 however, Dodger pitcher injuries reached a whole new level. They started the season with a rotation of Tyler Glasnow, Bobby Miller, James Paxton, Gavin Stone and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, with Clayton Kershaw expected back in the middle of the season.
Glasnow missed months with injuries, Miller missed time with an injury, then was sent down, Paxton was released, Stone had season-ending surgery, and Kershaw came back briefly, only to see his season end early as well. By October, Yamamoto was the only one of the original rotation healthy, though he too missed several months with an arm injury.
They won the World Series anyway. But during the season, team executive Andrew Friedman revealed that he’d tasked his baseball operations department with trying to study whether there was an explanation for the increased injuries across the sport. And more specifically, with the Dodgers roster.
Asked about the progress of the investigation this year, Friedman said he thinks they’ve made some progress.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 03: Blake Snell and Andrew Friedman react during a press conference introducing Snell as a Los Angeles Dodger at Dodger Stadium on December 03, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
Have The Dodgers Solved Pitcher Injuries?
Friedman, per Dodgers Nation, spoke about their progress in the investigation, saying they’ve “spent a lot of time” on it.
“We’ve spent a lot of time and we’re going to spend a lot more time on it,” Friedman said. “It wasn’t something that we set out to say, ‘OK, we got the answer!’
“It was more to take a critical look at everything and separate out amateur baseball and things that happen before they get into our system or to a system in Major League Baseball, and then what things look like when we acquire a player.
“We had a lot of different conversations and we’re going to continue to. I don’t know that we’re going to publish anything, but we feel better today than we did six months ago. And we’ll all be really disappointed if we don’t feel way better about it six months from now.
“So obviously, the most important thing is for results. We’re in a results business, and we understand that. So for us, it’s about continuing to get better, hopefully with seismic leaps. We’ve spent a lot of time and we’ll continue to.”
What’s interesting here is that Friedman said they do feel better about their understanding of pitcher injuries and what they look at when acquiring a player. But their biggest offseason addition, starting pitcher Blake Snell, made all of two starts before he got hurt. And was just shut down again, after feeling discomfort during a bullpen.
Blake Treinen, another key pitcher who was retained after his heroic performance in the 2024 postseason, is also out with forearm tightness, a terrifying diagnosis for a pitcher to hear. Michael Kopech has yet to make his season debut, and Shohei Ohtani’s rehab has also been extremely slow.
They might have made some progress, but they clearly haven’t found the answers. It’s unlikely anyone ever will, given the complicated, multi-faceted nature of the problem. At least they’re trying.
