Under The Knife 8/19/24

The Dodgers Latest Dilemma

I’ll keep this short because I’m still thinking this through, but instead of six inning rule going into effect with all the carveouts, I think I have a better way to get to the intended effect. Make it so a pitcher has to be removed from the game if he has more than 25 pitches in an inning or at the point he’s given up five earned runs. If the intent is for starters to go deeper in games, efficiency should be the force point, not an innings count that can be circumvented by inefficiency. I didn’t have time to pull all the data, but if someone has ideas on why this would or wouldn’t work, the comments are right down there. For now, let’s get to so many injuries:

TYLER GLASNOW, SP LAD (inflamed elbow)
YOSHINOBU YAMAMOTO, SP LAD (strained cuff)
SHOHEI OHTANI, SP/DH LAD (sprained elbow/rehab)

The Dodgers have been on the razor’s edge with pitching all season. Now, it might just be cutting them as losing Tyler Glasnow, the one constant they’ve had this season could put them in a position where they simply don’t have enough starting pitching to make it through the season, let alone into October.

Glasnow was placed on the IL with elbow tendinitis. A trusted source tells me there’s no tearing of the flexor tendon, but it was inflamed and problematic, so the hope is they caught it before it strained. There’s also a question of whether the bracing inside his elbow helped. That’s an unknown right now, but there’s some suggestion that it was taking some of the load that would normally go to the flexor/forearm. How much time Glasnow misses depends on how he responds to treatment. It’s likely modalities and anti-inflammatories, but there’s no detail on that and it could change as they figure out what he responds to. Thus, there’s no timeline for his return, but the team does seem to feel he will return this season.

Behind him, the hope is that Yoshinobu Yamamoto is close. While he only went 17 pitches in his first live session, it was the heat not his arm that ended it early. I’m told the goal was 30 and they feel he’s physically there even if he didn’t actually do it. They’re past the cuff and arm issues that put him here, per tests. That puts him in place to go out on a rehab, but the short rotation might force the team to use him more quickly than they normally would. A lot of that will come down to whether Walker Buehler finds himself or at least can take more than the three innings he did in his first start back. The same is true of Bobby Miller, who showed no command in his return.

If you think it’s coincidence that we’ve seen more of Shohei Ohtani’s rehab lately, doing some of it in full view of the press and fans, you’re nuts. One of the things that’s tough is that Ohtani really couldn’t go out on a rehab assignment, but if he’s used as a reliever, he wouldn’t need to. Let’s say he could and the schedule and traffic made it possible to get him over to Rancho Cucamonga for a day game when the Dodgers are at night. Do the rules make it so Ohtani (P) can rehab while Ohtani (H) is on the active lineup? My guess is that the tough talk about “he’s not pitching this year” will shift, but that they’ll make him a one inning guy, though the DH spot gets really interesting if he does anything other than the ninth.

Glasnow will be replaced by Justin Wrobleski, who the team sent down to protect him. Instead, River Ryan went down, followed by Glasnow and here we are after two starts at OKC that should keep his workload at his normal level. Wrobleski doesn’t go deep into games (#sixinningrule would knock that out for protecting young pitchers, oops) so the pen becomes even more important (and tougher to manage.) With two starters that no one, including themselves, seems to have confidence in and no one who can go six or seven guaranteed, the pen could get weird. Michael Kopech has been a starter and while he’s not built up, could he become a multi-inning guy? Could they use a four-man tandem to get through the next few weeks while controlling innings? Who knows!

With almost any other team, even with coaches I know and respect, I’d think this was untenable. With Dave Roberts and Mark Prior, maybe. Do the Padres surge in their Seidler-honoring season? Do the D-Backs do what they did last year and make a super late heater? Can the Dodgers hang on, go into the playoffs healthy, and win another hunk of metal? Anything is possible in baseball, dude. Anything.

HUNTER GREENE, SP CIN (inflamed elbow)

Hunter Greene is a great young pitcher and the clear ace of an exciting young Reds team. It hurts even more to see him hit the IL with an elbow injury and an impending MRI. (That MRI is likely already done and read, but it’s not publicly known yet.) David Bell didn’t give anything away on Sunday, if he knew, saying that he hoped Greene had avoided something major. The hope is to hear it’s a strain of some sort rather than another sprain.

Greene is a Tommy John survivor and really lost nothing aside from a year (and even that, I’d argue, didn’t slow his development.) There’s no indication yet that this is that again, but he’s just outside the “honeymoon” with his surgery in April 2019. At some point, we’re going to have to start publishing when someone is clearing that five year period that we still don’t understand, though a surprising number of pitchers have had revisions in the last year inside that period. Again, this needs so much more research and MLB has done almost nothing.

The Reds will need someone on Monday in Toronto. Mark Sheldon speculated that Julian Aguiar might be the replacement, with the Reds short on starting due to all the injuries they’ve had. We’ll wait to see what the diagnosis is and hope that if nothing else, Greene is back leading this rotation in 2025. For now, do we see Rhett Lowder, or do the Reds just grind through the rest of the season?

Believe it or not, there’s more pitching injuries. For just five bucks a month, you could read about all of them. I mean, what could you get for five bucks on Amazon? You don’t want a five dollar hoodie, believe me.